Productivity Gains from using Multi-Touch User Interfaces

Question

Given a typical developer usage, I am wondering how much gains/utility can one derive out of a multi-touch Win7 Laptop or a Surface device.

If people have experiences to share or if there were some studies on this please share

Answer 1

You ask specifically about developers, so the results would differ markedly from a general user base. One key thing to remember is that whenever an experienced person has to take his hands off the keyboard (for whatever reason), it slows him/her down and takes far more time than a corresponding keystroke.

This is true for a mouse, trackball or whatever. A programmer who is typing into a code window can generally use a keyboard accelerator much faster than taking his hand over to the mouse to right click; the same should hold true for a touchscreen.

Servers in a restaurant have a much different environment. Rarely, if ever, are they typing extended amounts of "text" into an editor. They are hunting and pecking at big buttons on a touchscreen while standing up.

The one type of developer who I believe could absolutely benefit from a multi-touch screen would be a UI/UX designer building rich user interfaces.

Answer 2

It depends highly on what you are doing. For anything related to programming, it is basically useless. Where multi-touch really shines is with drawing and information manipulation. It makes certain operations such as dragging things around or resizing images much more intuitive, but, other than that, it is not much more useful than a normal touch screen. And normal touch screens are not that much more useful than a mouse except for drawing.

99% of the time, multi-touch will not increase your productivity.

Answer 3

We are in the early days of multitouch technologies. Without the correct software tools, there is no advantage to multitouch. Having said that, there is currently no advantage to using multitouch displays.

In the days of coding on console, vi and emacs were popular. When graphical environments and computer mice became popular, they were incorporated into the next generation of programming environments. If multitouch displays catch on, there is every reason to think that developer tools will be outfitted with touch controls and gestures.

There are some things for which I can imagine multitouch being used in an IDE. In all probability, these features will never come to fruition.

• Context-sensitive touch buttons. While "clicking" (first finger touch) on code you've selected, a number of buttons appear on the left or right edge of the screen. While holding the first finger down, press one of these buttons with a finger from the other hand.

  • This reduces the fatigue of mouse-selecting a block of code and moving all the way up to the toolbar to click a tiny button—all on the left or right hand. The buttons that appear should be big enough for easy tapping, and only those that are common and applicable to selected code should appear.

  • Suppose I press the "change indent" button. Now I use a single finger to drag the code left and right to choose its indentation level.

• Simultaneous manipulation of multiple controls. Have two files to merge after a major refactor and built-in diff is bamboozled? Scroll the two versions of the file independently with one finger on each hand.

• Gestures. Scroll with two fingers on the screen. Perhaps undo by drawing a three-quarter circle counterclockwise starting at the three o'clock position with six fingers. This stuff isn't going to be perfect at first, but scrolling is promising. Having a way to avoid aiming for the little scroll bar and not giving your middle finger arthritis from major scrolling operations on the little wheel is a good thing.

Make no mistake: this will take some time to catch on. Also, as with every technology, most developers will start off trying to exploit the technology to the point where usability suffers. Finally, when it does stabilize and become useful, you may not actually want to use it. People who use vim like vim more than Visual Studio, but some vim users do like using vim as a GUI. People who like Visual Studio will probably use Visual Studio more than whatever touch-based development environment comes along, but eventually Visual Studio will start adding touch features.

Answer 4

Speaking to the developer inside of us all... I'm waiting for the day of multi-touch Starcraft/Warcraft/C&C. Seriously, RTS games were built for multi-touch!