TUI Limitations

As an intern at a company that is attempting to revolutionize gesture control with interfaces, it’s important to assess the current most common interfaces, the touch user interfaces (TUI) and its limitations to further back up why Gesture controlled UI is the future.

Touch interfaces are great because they’re intuitive and offer tactile responses. They’re powerful because they afford gestures that people are used to and have “acclimated” to over the years, such as drag, pinch, double-click, zoom, etcetera. But with the importance of hand hygiene on the rise because of the covid-19 pandemic, anxious users meticulous about hygiene are more hesitant on utilizing public touch interfaces due to the uncertainty of whether they’re hygienic or not. That’s why gestural control is slowly starting to be in demand on the market, seeing as mobile / touchless ways of paying has already revolutionized the market.

Other disadvantages of TUIs include it not being as “accurate” as a traditional mouse & analogue buttons. In addition to that, they don’t exactly replicate these traditional methods (e.g touchscreen keyboards have small buttons and often have a lack of tactile response compared to mechanical keyboards). Tapping the screen also involves obscuring the screen itself, which is a problem for applications that display complex and real-time information, and this can potentially be avoided with gesture control.

While TUI has its limitations, it’s also important to not be too ambitious with gesture control. Some development obstacles of gesture control is that, if applications require too many gestures, it may be difficult for developers to write routines for mobile touch screens. If interaction isn’t smooth like any other sort of HCI, the user won’t continue usage. And if program keeps for example, misunderstand a user’s intentions, the user may quickly get bored or even annoyed.

It’s important to assess all these pointers, what TUIs are better or worse at doing, and also what development obstacles gesture control can encounter. This helps me stay grounded during this research process.