I think I want touch screen monitors for my work and home desktops. I might be one of the few who still uses a desktop, but my quirky thoughts on the coming obsolescence of laptops as a form factor can be saved for another time.
The appeal of touch monitors is not to replace my mouse or keyboard, but rather to do the things they arenât terribly great at. For example when I want to re position my cursor from my browser on one monitor to a specific location in my text editor on another, neither the mouse nor the keyboard are able to do this with the level of efficiency that a touch screen enables.Â
To illustrate what I mean it helps to detail the steps a bit.
- With the mouse I first have to find the cursor. This is normally not so difficult and there are even tools to help, but it is a task none-the-less. It gets a little worse if the window currently in focus doesnât have the mouse within its space. Usually what happens is I wiggle my mouse or finger on the track pad and find the movement with my eye. With dual monitor setups this is yet less trivial.
- Step two involves navigating the pointer to the next location.
- Step three is clicking to place the cursor.
- Step four is placing my hands back on the keyboard to start typing. With a keyboard there are so many options for keyboard shortcuts and paths to accomplish the task that whatever steps I chose someone could just say, âwell my [secret hidden] way is much simplerâ and probably be right, but a typical person like myself in a typical scenario as I often find myself in might use alt+tab to select a new window to focus from the list of open windows, and either press that multiple times until they land on the one they want or use arrow keys. In Ubuntu this method uses icons and I have to remember which icon belongs to the program window I want to focus on (text editor).
- Add two more little steps if I happen to have two text editor windows open so that I pick the right one. Once I get the right window in focus. I hunt down the blinking cursor with my eye and move the cursor with the arrow keys (or in my case nimble well trained fingers with lots of keyboard keys in combination that are faster than using only arrow keys.) to the desired location. With a touchscreen I could simply reach up and touch the place on the screen I want the cursor to now be at, put my hand back on the keyboard and start typing. And there are probably infinite combinations of using all three interaction avenues to accomplish the task depending on if it involves multiple windows of the same application, minimized or hidden windows, scrolling to window content that is out of view, tabs within the application, windows on other virtual desktops, etc.
Anyway long boring bit about HCI, but point of it is that I think touch is here to stay because it is a intuitive and useful way of interacting with computers. It has been overplayed so much that I kinda hate bringing up how effortlessly my kids use a tablet, but seriously, they do, and observing them on it is part of why I am thinking about this. Personally I donât think touch interaction will replace keyboard, mice, or track pads on platforms where those already dominate. Touch screens will merely compliment them very nicely. And as cool as other interaction methods such as eye tracking, voice recognition, or body gesture readers are conceptually, for the near future at least, I see those as only being practically applicable for niche cases whereas touch seems beneficial in many more scenarios.
My take away from all these thoughts is probably nothing all that revelatory or novel. It is simply that it doesnât matter what sort of device you are designing your application GUI for anymore, you need to consider if, where, and how to make it touch friendly because, even if your particular platform doesnât have touch capabilities now, I guess the odds that it will in the future are increasing rapidly.
2020 update
Most laptops have touch screens and I rarely use it, but find it handy at times. maybe I would use it more if my laptop was a true convertible that could be used in tent or tablet mode?