We all know sighted people who prefer buttons, or at least say they prefer buttons. However, study after study, in extremely diverse fields are demonstrating that sighted people overwhelmingly prefer well-designed, consumer-friendly touchscreen interfaces over hard-wired, tactile control interfaces which remain static.
In addition, across every industry studied, when touchscreen interface systems replace button interfaces, error entry rates very significantly decrease while the speed and retention of accurately utilising well-designed touchscreen interfaces significantly increases.
Finally, the length of product working life significantly increases because touchscreen interface has almost no moving parts.
On accessible mobile device lists for smart phones such as the iPhone, the biggest physical device complaint, once the user has learned the gesture-based touchscreen command system, is that one or another of the few physical buttons is not working properly. This would suggest that the third point above is accurate.
As to the first two points, I have not yet located a rigorous scientific study of the general market consumer which shows that button interfaces are preferred, and I have been intensely researching the field for one and a half years now. If you know of any studies which contradict this, please forward the citation information so I can utilise them. Until then, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that only blind people, a group which is less than 0.5% of the population, prefer hard-wired physical buttons.
Note: the one exception to the above is the desktop QWERTY keyboard for long-term data entry. Researchers have not yet found a visual-haptics replacement on the touchscreen for the QWERTY keyboard for data entry. Remember, this finding is exclusively for desktop systems, and air-gesture control interfaces, the newest interface system to be studied, appears to be making in-roads on this last hold-out.
In the mobile market, the text data entry speed record was set in 2011 by a person using a touchscreen smartphone.
David Chittenden, MSc, MRCAA
Email: [log in to unmask]
Mobile: +64 21 2288 288
Sent from my iPhone
On 21/08/2013, at 9:06, Bill Pasco <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> And as usual, who is asking our opinions. I mean everyone's opinions not
> just blind folks. Blind people aren't the only group unhappy about the
> removal of anything resembling a button.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
> Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 1:47 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [VICUG-L] NPR.org Text-Only : The End Of Buttons: The New
> Gesture-Control Era
>
> Hi to all.
>
> While the story below is for a general audience, its implications for blind
> accessibility aren't hard to miss. In a nutshell, if you're like me and use
> a desktop system with a QWERTY keyboard, you're ancient history. If you use
> a Blackberry with lots of buttons, you're passé (I'm not sure how to do that
> accented e). But if you're an Apple user using hand gestures or if you use
> DragonSpeak with voice commands, welcome to the future!
>
> And yes, an audio version of this story is available at the link below.
> --
> Ted Chittenden
>
> Every story has at least two sides if not more.
> ----
> http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=213469564&rId=2&x=1
>
> By Elise Hu
>
> All Things Considered, August 19, 2013 · Last week, BlackBerry put up a
> for-sale sign after many years of decline. The once revolutionary BlackBerry
> was the first smartphone addiction for so many Americans — you were
> connected all the time! — and even when iPhone ushered in a slimmer,
> sleeker, faster era, a few holdouts (many on Capitol Hill) continued to
> stubbornly keep a BlackBerry in their pockets.
>
> But looking back, it's clear BlackBerry devices began to lose consumers more
> than half a decade ago. That's when the iPhone's touch screen became the
> user interface de rigueur and the Blackberry, with its keyboard and buttons,
> became almost instantly outdated. Hemispheres Magazine takes note:
>
>
>
>
> "Computers, which started as banks of switches, sprouted keyboards (banks of
> buttons with letters on them). We used buttons to select television shows to
> watch and pushed buttons to order soft drinks from vending machines. Then
> came the BlackBerry, which bristled with buttons.
>
> "And then, with the iPhone, everything changed. As a descendant of both the
> computer and the phone, Apple's superproduct had a big button at the bottom,
> plus a switch at the top and some tiny little controls. You could even argue
> that the entire screen is a button of sorts. The point, though, is that we
> didn't need to rely on just buttons anymore; we could tap, drag and pinch to
> operate the phone. The moment Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld 2007 and
> brandished his nifty little device, the button was on notice. Fingers, with
> touchscreens, became the new buttons."
>
>
>
> So it goes with technology. The switch gave way to the button, the button
> gave way to a touch screen, and soon, touching screens may seem old-school:
> Gesture and voice control are the "waves" of the future.
>
> The newest smartphones are abandoning both physical and on-screen buttons in
> favor of gestures. "[S]crolling, swiping, tapping, pinching, flicking — are
> becoming the dominant form of the smartphone user interface," writes Rani
> Molla for technology site GigaOM.
>
> As with so much behavior change ushered in by technology, the change happens
> before we take wider notice. But in cars, those physical buttons have been
> disappearing; gaming turned to wave commands with Xbox Kinect years ago; and
> button-cluttered remote controls are giving way to smartphone controls.
> Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 8, is flat and without button
> icons to click. Google Glass, the revolutionary spectacle-computer, is
> largely controlled with voice commands. And with each new phone, like the
> Moto X, the range of gesture commands to interface with it is increasing.
>
> This creates challenges for user interface designers, who still have a ways
> to go to understand which gesture commands are likely to be both precise and
> natural enough for wide user adoption. Reviews for Leap Motion, a new device
> that turns gestures into digital commands, have been mixed. But the
> technological shift is afoot. Already, buttons seem passé
>
>
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>
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