Comment Re:Tradition & Intuition (Score 1) 254
Well, I thought I understood it.
Norman & Nielsen say gestures lack intuition because they lack consistency, discoverability, visibility, and feedback. They say they suck for other reasons too (scalability, et al). Compared to the successes of the traditional menu interface, OS vendors should: disallow inconsistent gestures. Develop gestures that can be reliable and not prone to error. Only release gestures in the wild before perfecting them in the lab. Add a button to universally pop up applicable menus in all situations. And like the old GUI standards, impose gesture standards from OS vendor down to developer and not the other way around.
I think they've nailed it that the discoverability is poor, but I don't find inconsistency a problem (except as a duplicate of the discoverability argument). I prefer that the app developers are taking the lead in making new gestures to fit their interfaces, once discovered (and yes, that is a problem) they "stick" much better in my fingers than the menu interface. The ability to experiment and fit the gesture to the interface is a good thing. Some gestures stink, and those developments & products will disappear. Remember the gesture (shown at WWDC) to rotate a photo on the iPad originally? It practically took two hands to do. That's something that was worked on in the lab and imposed from on high, and it stunk. The current gesture Apple adopted was (I think) copied from third party software. Since there isn't a fully vetted and evolved interface like GUI menus to impose on developers, falling back on menus or imposing consistency at this point is counter-productive.
Though I may not have expressed it well, I agree discovery is a problem, yet I find there are major wins for gestures in my usage despite the inconsistent, unreliable, poorly visible, and questionable feedback attributed to gestures. Telling OS vendors and developers to follow menu interface traditions and virtues may not be the best thing in the evolving gestural "wild west rules" right now.