Touchscreen UIs (was: A marketing angle)

Michael Lauer mickey at vanille-media.de
Wed Nov 22 23:36:44 CET 2006


Hi guys, please remember to change the topic
when the thread drifts off into something
slightly or completely different ;)

> Well there's the benq Blackbox concept out there which is essentially a phone
> that has a touchscreen all over that does show context sensitive buttons.

> However, I'm not entirely sure if the average user would even WANT to deal
> with touchscreens over a real keypad. Many even complain over the Razr style
> touchpads... In Asia that's not much of an issue but I imagine in the West
> ist might very well be. For one thing, my parents never cared for the
> touchscreen in my P900 PDA phone...

Really? All the time I've watch elder people operating devices
I found they were completely puzzled (or at least slightly
annoyed) by the conceptional (and physical) gap between
an unlabelled physical button (a.k.a softkey) and a label on
a screen describing its current function.

In my opinion it's a matter of a coherent UI. It's certainly
more challenging to get to a good touchscreen UI, but if you
have one, I believe that usability can be more efficient than
one a hardkey/non-ts UI.

Also, I'm not buying the redundancy argument. In my opinion
more ways to achieve the same (i.e. by accessing functions
through hard buttons, through soft-buttons, and through
browsing menus) is more confusing than having just one way
to trigger each and every function.


Regards,

:M:
-- 
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | IT-Freelancer | http://www.vanille-media.de





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