Enough with the Touch Screens, Already!

While touch screens are all the rage these days, there are plenty of reasons not to use a touch screen interface at all. Ryan Jones says "Enough With The Touch Screens" in his blog and makes a lot of good points. The most important seems to be speed of input. His sentiments on the subject resonate to some degree with my own experiences. I remember 20+ years ago working in the stock room of a retail store. I had this "electric" adding machine with which I could add columns of numbers at a blinding speed - something I could not do with a soft keyboard on a touch screen.

The ability to quickly input data depends on the fact that you can do it by feel, without looking. A touch screen makes that nearly impossible. The keyboard I use has big buttons and is fairly loud. I like that. I tried the new Apple keyboard which is thin and flat and quiet and I hated it. When it comes to typing and power tools, give me big buttons and lots of noise.

Although I don't text a lot I think the same is true for people who do a lot of thumbing on their cell phones. In Asia it’s not unusual for a person to send and receive hundreds of text messages a day. I don't think you could do that as fast with a touch screen as you can with those little phone buttons.

The point is that while touch screens and multi-touch screens in particular are just plain cool, they are not a silver bullet. In fact, there are times when a touch screen is the worst possible solution. As multi-touch designers and developers its important that we are aware of the limitations of touch screens and the benefits of plain-old-buttons.