A very pressing issue

We consider the practical and emotional experience of using touch screens vs. traditional input devices

As a product design engineer, I feel uneasy when I see someone struggling to operate a product properly, whether it’s a stranger looking for the correct slot of a car park meter to insert their ticket (and the correct orientation,) or my two-year-old getting increasingly frustrated with a tablet computer, jabbing at the screen more forcefully each time she fails to achieve the result she wanted.

It’s been over ten years since I started using my first touchscreen device, but it’s only recently that I started to think about how many ways there are to touch the ‘play’ button on a streaming service unsuccessfully; you can simply miss the button, or you can press it while sliding your finger slightly, or you can press it while a different part of your hand is touching a different part of the screen, or you can produce some very strange outcomes by making these mistakes together, in various combinations. My two-year-old has now learnt that the most reliable way to press the ‘play’ button is to place the tablet securely on the floor and extend a single finger towards the screen slowly, at a perpendicular angle, then say ‘boop’ when the pad of her finger makes contact. Even with this level of caution, she often doesn’t succeed on her first try, and has to do a few ‘boop’s.

BUT look at a typical TV remote and you’ll see thirty or more buttons on it, each with a different function. There needs to be that number of buttons because it needs to serve many different functions in different situations and context. The interface remains rigidly immutable, without any regard for context. For example, when the TV is on stand-by, none of the buttons will do anything except the on/off button, but they’re still there and you can still press them until you’re blue in the face.

The elegance of a screen as in its ability to look like anything. It can show one button or one hundred, as required by the context. When you’re watching a cartoon on a tablet, you only need about five buttons available (pause/play toggle, forwards, backwards, settings, and full-screen mode toggle, for example,) you certainly don’t need the entire alphabet to be available at that moment.

And a screen can do more than just buttons. It can make a dial, a slider, or a drop-down menu, and it can display instructions for how to use the interface at key moments. In technical terms, a touchscreen is both an input and an output device, and its strength is combining those two functions to create infinite versatility.