Touch-Enabled Interfaces: New Possibilities for Users and Help Authors
|
Ken Schatzke (Webmaster) 13 February 2009 |
Categories: | • Tools of the Trade • Trends |
| Comments: | 1 |
James Bond movies are showcases for cutting edge devices—from the seemingly plausible to the slightly absurd.
In the latest movie, Quantum of Solace, an MI6 agent shows 007 and M the links between a group of bad guys on a digital table simply by touching its surface. This particular device is much closer to reality than you might think. Touch-enabled devices are becoming increasingly commonplace in schools and places of business. As our users are introduced to this new technology we, as tech writers, need to become familiar with it and how it impacts the help and others deliverables that we create.
What are Touch-Enabled Devices?
Touch-enabled devices are electronic devices with touch-sensitive displays. You interact with these devices by touching the display with your finger or a stylus, rather than using a keyboard, mouse or trackball.
While the most common touch-enabled devices today are PDAs and smart phones (particularly Apple’s iPhone), a variety of high tech companies are integrating touch-sensitive displays into desktop computers and similarly sized consoles, boards, tables, and walls. As an example, the company I work for, SMART Technologies, produces interactive whiteboards, public displays, tables, and other devices. Its flagship product, the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, is used in schools and businesses around the world.
Different touch-enabled devices use different technologies to detect touch. Some can detect your finger, a pen, or any other object, while others require a special stylus. Some devices include software that can recognize handwriting, allowing users to write notes and then capture them digitally.
While most touch-enabled devices can only detect a single touch at a time, newer devices can detect multiple touches. As a result, these newer devices can interpret gestures and, in some cases, allow input from multiple users.
Possibilities for Users
From a technical perspective, touch-enabled devices represent a simple evolution of the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that we’ve become accustomed to over the past 20 years. Instead of typing with a keyboard or clicking with a mouse, we can now touch a screen to interact with our computers and other electronic devices.
However, touch-enabled devices also represent a significant change in how we interact with the digital world. Educators are using touch-enabled devices, such as the SMART Board interactive whiteboard, to teach to all learning types—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Businesses are using similar technologies to improve employee communication and collaboration. As an example, employees can now record notes on an electronic whiteboard and then save them to a file for later reference rather than having to write them on a traditional whiteboard with the obligatory “PLO” while searching for a scratchpad or laptop computer to capture them.
Multi-touch technology expands on these possibilities further by allowing multiple users to interact with a single device at the same time. Computing no longer has to be a solitary activity.
As the software for touch-enabled devices evolves, interactions in the digital world will begin to resemble those of the real world. Imagine shuffling through the photos on your computer like the ones in your shoebox, or laying out a page on a digital table like tech writers of a certain vintage used to do on drafting tables.
Possibilities for Help Authors
So what does this mean for help authors? Do touch-enabled devices radically change our job descriptions, or is it business as usual?
Currently, the help authors most affected by touch-enabled devices are those working for the companies producing the devices. We’ve needed to expand the traditional software documentation vocabulary to include terms like “press” or “touch” (versus “click”) and show users how to interact with our company’s products. In addition, we’ve had to incorporate more graphical, touch-friendly elements into our help.
Companies that produce touch-enabled devices are creating third-party developer communities with the ultimate goal of fostering broad bases of content and applications for their devices. In addition, the next version of the Windows operating system—Windows 7—will include multi-touch functionality, vastly expanding the software ecosystem for touch-enabled devices. New content and application will require documentation. You may be one of the tech writers that produce this documentation.
In the next few years, we may see more sessions at the Technical Communication Summit and other conferences, more articles in Intercom and Technical Communication, and more discussion on tech writing email lists about documentation for touch-enabled devices. A set of conventions and a body of knowledge will emerge as a result.
In the longer term, help authoring tools and platforms may offer unique features for touch-enabled devices. For example:
- Gestures for invoking help
- New navigation paradigms
- Search boxes that can recognize handwriting
- Help topics that can be shuffled, pinned to windows, and annotated in the user’s handwriting like index cards
What does this mean for lone writers?
It’s not uncommon for changes in technical communication to leave behind lone writers and other writers with limited resources. Content management systems and XML are not always practical solutions for lone writers and small teams, and video and other multimedia are often outside of our budgets.
I don’t believe this has to be true for touch-enabled devices. Using a help authoring tool or HTML editor with an open-source or freeware graphics program such as Paint.NET or Inkscape, you can create simple, effective help for touch-enabled devices. I’ve found a combination of image maps and popup windows is highly effective and can be created with most help authoring tools.
In addition, most of the best practices that we’ve been following for GUI help also apply to touch-based help:
- Make your help a mile wide and 30 seconds deep (to quote Mike Hughes)
- Make help easy to invoke but not obtrusive
- Use a simple and logical information architecture (IA)
So, although touch-enabled devices may be Bond-inspired tech, we don’t need the resources of a secret agent to create help and other documentation for them.
Comments
I'm looking for a conference on using smart boards in education in the palm springs area - maybe in aprilPosted by karen cottenie on 08 February 2010 at 09:43 AM
Submit a comment: