Customer Reviews

Designing Gestural Interfaces

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If you have been a designer for the past five years and have some experience with touchscreen or interactive surfaces of one kind or another, then Designing Gestural Interfaces is not for you. This book is best for the beginner as its content is very basic and superficial. There is no deep thinking or insights here. Unfortunately, the occassional good topic is glossed over and your left with only the beginning of an idea.

It's true that designing for gestural interfaces is a relatively new area, but the author presents the reader with general and basic design information that has been known and practiced for many years and not nearly enough useful information about gesture design. For example, in the chapter on Prototyping Interactive Gestures, the author talks about the purpose and value of low-fidelity prototyping, but offers nothing related to gestural UI design; no hints, tips, tricks, pitfalls, solutions, etc. In this regard, I found myself getting frustrated many times throughout the whole book.

In general, the book reads like an introductory design book, a primer of sorts, updated to include gestures. I suspect that within the next year or so, updated versions of this book or even other books / articles will come out that offer much deeper insights. If you're a veteran designer, save your money and spend your time wisely reading other more insightful books.

There is not one line of code in this book. This text is about how gestures in the air and on surfaces can replace or augment the commands given by mice, keypads, and stylii. It is a broad overview, and contains few concrete details about how you would actually implement such systems in detail. For example, there is no "start to finish" design that is so common in O'Reilly books of this type. The author mainly just goes through what it takes to get your thoughts organized in such a way to design such systems. Each chapter has some very good "further reading" recommendations. You'll come away from this book knowing the issues involved in designing gestural interfaces, but not much more. I guess I was just expecting something meatier. For something meatier but a bit older I would recommend Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. The table of contents for this book is not yet included in the product description, so I do that next:

Chapter 1. Introducing Interactive Gestures
Section 1.1. TAP IS THE NEW CLICK
Section 1.2. DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT MANIPULATION
Section 1.3. A BRIEF HISTORY OF GESTURAL INTERFACES
Section 1.4. THE MECHANICS OF TOUCHSCREENS AND GESTURAL CONTROLLERS
Section 1.5. DESIGNING INTERACTIVE GESTURES: THE BASICS
Section 1.6. DETERMINING THE APPROPRIATE GESTURE
Section 1.7. FOR FURTHER READING
Chapter 2. Designing for the Human Body
Section 2.1. BASIC KINESIOLOGY
Section 2.2. THE ERGONOMICS OF INTERACTIVE GESTURES
Section 2.3. THE ERGONOMICS OF MOTION
Section 2.4. DESIGNING TOUCH TARGETS
Section 2.5. FOR FURTHER READING
Chapter 3. Patterns for Touchscreens and Interactive Surfaces
Section 3.1. HOW TO USE PATTERNS
Section 3.2. TAP TO OPEN/ACTIVATE
Section 3.3. TAP TO SELECT
Section 3.4. DRAG TO MOVE OBJECT
Section 3.5. SLIDE TO SCROLL
Section 3.6. SPIN TO SCROLL
Section 3.7. SLIDE AND HOLD FOR CONTINUOUS SCROLL
Section 3.8. FLICK TO NUDGE
Section 3.9. FLING TO SCROLL
Section 3.10. TAP TO STOP
Section 3.11. PINCH TO SHRINK AND SPREAD TO ENLARGE
Section 3.12. TWO FINGERS TO SCROLL
Section 3.13. GHOST FINGERS
Chapter 4. Patterns for Free-Form Interactive Gestures
Section 4.1. PROXIMITY ACTIVATES/DEACTIVATES
Section 4.2. MOVE BODY TO ACTIVATE
Section 4.3. POINT TO SELECT/ACTIVATE
Section 4.4. WAVE TO ACTIVATE
Section 4.5. PLACE HANDS INSIDE TO ACTIVATE
Section 4.6. ROTATE TO CHANGE STATE
Section 4.7. STEP TO ACTIVATE
Section 4.8. SHAKE TO CHANGE
Section 4.9. TILT TO MOVE
Chapter 5. Documenting Interactive Gestures
Section 5.1. WHY DOCUMENT ANYTHING?
Section 5.2. EXISTING MOVEMENT NOTATION SYSTEMS
Section 5.3. DOCUMENTING GESTURES IN INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS
Section 5.4. FOR FURTHER READING
Chapter 6. Prototyping Interactive Gestures
Section 6.1. FAKING IT: LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES
Section 6.2. HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES
Section 6.3. TESTING PROTOTYPES
Section 6.4. PROTOTYPING RESOURCES
Section 6.5. FOR FURTHER READING
Chapter 7. Communicating Interactive Gestures
Section 7.1. THREE ZONES OF ENGAGEMENT
Section 7.2. METHODS OF COMMUNICATING INTERACTIVE GESTURES
Section 7.3. FOR FURTHER READING
Chapter 8. THE FUTURE OF INTERACTIVE GESTURES
Section 8.1. FUTURE TRENDS
Section 8.2. TOWARD STANDARDS
Section 8.3. THE ETHICS OF GESTURES
Section 8.4. FOR FURTHER READING
Appendix A. A Palette of Human Gestures and Movements
Section A.1. GESTURES FOR TOUCHSCREENS
Section A.2. GESTURES FOR FREE-FORM SYSTEMS
Section A.3. FOR FURTHER READING

With all the work that is happening in the world of mobile and gaming consoles around the area of gesture and touch I was looking for a book that was interesting and engaging and helped define the rules of engagement for the technologies used.

The book is well written and gives a good overview of touch and gesture design and techniques but does fall a short on the detail I was looking for. The book works well in defining the different types of gestures and their possible uses. Photographs and illustrations back this up and it is a good starting point for those wishing to be informed and learn about these technologies. It would also be a helpful book for starting out designing a touch or gesture application, but I would have liked seen more time spent on exploring how to implement solutions using these techniques.

Overall a good book but would be really suitable for someone at beginner level, it serves well as an introduction but does not go into enough detail for an experienced developer or designer.

Quite good reference book, but not necessary for experienced (with touch and gestures) designers.
Interesting recommended readings and web sites in several sections of the book

My Full review:
[...]

If you have ever seen an iphone, played the wii, or gone to the bathroom and used an automatic flushing toilet then you probably have pretty much the same amount of insight into "gestural interactions" the author has.

If you are looking for any new insights into gesture recognition or touch interfaces, you will not be pleased with this book. If you are looking for any guidance on how to implement any of these systems you will be disappointed.

Basically the one interesting point that he brings up, all though not new, is the fact that you need to have some way to tell people about these invisible interfaces. However even here the author fails to really come up with any good solutions or patterns for doing this. But still its nice to have people thinking about it.

However if you need an overview of what is out there today, and some buzzwords, or want to break into this area maybe it might be helpful.

In the end I think this book is 4 or 5 years too late to be interesting without explaining how to do any of it other than simple paper/video prototyping suggestions.

This new guide by Dan Saffer of Kicker Studio is the first book of its kind that addresses the issues of designing interfaces which involve physical interaction, and it borders on Industrial Design, Physical Computing and Software Interaction Design. It contains several useful methods and heuristics for designing interfaces for these systems. The title, which might imply that this approach is limited to interaction involving physical gestures, or systems with touch screens, is too limiting for this excellent design guide. Many new kinds of Physical Computing Platforms, Consumer Electronic Devices, Games, Cars and Instruments are offering new paradigms for how the user communicates with an Intelligent Device. None of the existing design guides goes through the methods of designing for a physical system which interacts with the user in a new way, whether that method involves touch, facial action, dancing or drawing in the air. While all of these interaction techniques are now available on the palette of the Interaction Designer, Product Developer, and Electronic Systems/Physical Computing Engineer, until now no book addressed how to approach these intriguing but complicated design opportunities. No single volume can answer all the questions in this emerging field, but this is the first and best book to date which has addressed the physical, software, electronic design, and interaction paradigm issues which must be confronted in designing these new systems. I recommend this book for anyone who needs to know how to approach designing intelligent tangible systems, from the Wii, to ATM's to Arduino Physical Computing projects, to facial expression recognition systems.

--Ira Laefsky