"I will never give up my keyboard"

We are quite addicted to keyboards these days. They are a really good mechanical way to input text into a system. Same goes for the mouse; they give feedback, they almost never fail you.

There is a catch which the world seems to forget: mice and keyboards still have quite noticeable learning curves. A curve almost everybody has already taken. Seniors are the only ones who consciously have to choose to learn to use a computer and we are closing in on the mark the first computer user generation is becoming senior. It seems like a ridiculous idea to throw the collectively learned interaction with our computers away.

I think I agree with that one, but I want to make a slightly stylised comparison to alpine sports at this moment. Until late in the 20th century, skiing was the way to go if you wanted to go down hill. It was fast, fun and once you got used to it, you did not want to do it any different. When snowboarding came along, some people frowned, others tried it. It took a different approach to operate it, but a lot of them had more fun. Some went back to skis and complained about the lack of control and other stuff. Hills do not really discriminate and both skis and boards are seen today.

In this case we have one way to change the way we operate our computers, but to make it work, we have to use the materials we give ourselves; it is not a good idea to treat it like it should be like a keyboard and mouse. So what does material excel in and what can we use it for?

Keyboards work in a very simple way; you press a button and that button or key resembles a character or modifier. In the traditional sense keys have edges and we use our motor memory to locate a key, while using the physical feedback from the key to determine where we pressed it and get a better mental model of how the keyboard is oriented. This way, we make better judgements about where keys are located; a nice feedback loop.

When we talk about a multitouch panel, we lose quite a bit of feedback. We do not have keys, we do not press down anything. We are left with a slate and the pressure feedback from our fingers. These surfaces are however able to draw an interface anywhere on top of it, so let us find a way to use that and I believe we are already seeing the first steps into really using multitouch surfaces for text input.

Swype actually uses the fact that you do not have physical keys. The basic idea is that you swipe across a virtual keyboard and it uses the changes in directionality to type and uses a word list to make corrections or suggestions. It is however based on direct touch (for corrections) and still uses a keyboard. Because Swype is used in direct touch, the keyboard is present where you look, so you can actually see which "keys" you are hitting. So the swiping is a nice idea, but to make this indirect, we need more.

So... motor memory, pressure sensing, low feedback, flexible interface surface... We need something that does not require positioning because that is the bane of screen surfaces. You cannot position your fingers anywhere with precision, so we have to take the text input to the fingers.

Microsoft actually patented an idea of mine to use wrist detection. They relate it to positioning a virtual keyboard, which is a good idea: rely on that motor memory! If the keys are in the same exact spot every time, that might work. It has some minor problems with occlusion and not being able to lift your hand to check what is under it (the system would lose your wrist to position it).

Another idea is to come back to the swiping, but inverse the relation between key and finger; if we can track the hand when it is slightly above the surface, we can use real simple gestures by every finger to input text. Just on the top of my head are a lot of practical issues with comfort and high error rate, but one hand could probably power enough to avoid the sandwich problem*. It just screams to be tested.

By the way, I am not saying we should ditch the keyboard, but I like snowboarding, maybe I like this as well ;-)

Next time: "Surface real estate"

*The sandwich problem is the problem of people preferring to eat a sandwich with one hand and operate their computer with the other. I really think designers forget this way too often...