There’s been buzz in UI circles about the end of hovers since the iPad’s debut. I’ve mentioned in talks that touch tablets pose a design challenge for web apps that rely on hovering with a mouse. But the fact that hovers don’t work on touch devices doesn’t spell their doom. If we step back from hovers to the wider picture, comparing the desktop’s vocabulary with the limits of “tap, hold, and drag” can give us a handle on the gradually differentiating roles and equally bright futures of desktops and touch tablets.
As touch tablets wax in popularity, they illuminate the role and utility of desktops (including laptops, which belong on a desk anyway). Take the desktop’s arsenal of gestures. Besides click and right-click, you have shift-click, command-click, command-tab, command-space, ctrl-a, ctrl-e, command-~, command-w, and on and on and on to even include, yes, the hover.
I always felt like computers were meant to be used with at least a hand poised on the home row, because without that arsenal of verbs things just take too long. As a power user, watching someone who isn’t familiar with all the shortcuts can put your patience under observation. To some folks, everything about the desktop is a hindrance, like swimming in molasses.
But to the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.
While the future of the desktop is bright, like some maturing stars it also becomes more concentrated. If I place a bet, it’ll be that the desktop negotiates its place among tablets to settle on a role we haven’t seen in a while: the workstation. As for interface designers, we will sometimes shift out of the one-size-fits-all mindset to ask ourselves: Which device is this app really for? The workstation or the tablet?
D. Lambert
on 09 Jun 10Not so fast with the demise of hover>
http://blog.componentoriented.com/2010/05/they-finally-made-my-hover-screen/
Dave
on 09 Jun 10So, in conclusion… you think :hovers will still be used, but a case can certainly be made for avoiding them?
Joe Stevens
on 09 Jun 10I don’t know if :hover is dead. Its extremely useful on the desktop when showing a user that something is going to happen when they click it. However I do think a case can be made for not using :hover to do anything else. If we want our sites and apps to be useable on the desktop and tablets then we can’t use :hover for any important interactions at least without making a click action for the interaction as well.
Kevin Haggerty
on 09 Jun 10Bravo – a great reminder of the massive utility of quick keyboard commands. After Effects is a great example of this, there’s key shortcuts for everything. Most good 3d packages as well.
Lee Graham
on 09 Jun 10I think you hit it on the head, “If I place a bet, it’ll be that the desktop negotiates its place among tablets to settle on a role we haven’t seen in a while: the workstation.”
Perhaps if the app belongs on both the tablet and workstation, we simply have a script that determines the type of device and loads the correct UI (HTML, JS & CSS)?
This is by no means revolutionary or new. But data is data is data… and we simply need a separate “viewer” per-se for the various types of interactions pending the user inputs that are allow.
D. Lambert
on 09 Jun 10Whether touchscreens ever actually support a “real” hover (per the link above), I think the real usability issue is that we need an interaction that’s richer than just “click”, and you’d like that interaction to be somewhat standardized across devices.
I’m running into this quite a lot on my HD2. There’s no keyboard at all on this device, and some of the current programs really suffer without one. The email client, for instance, assumes that any click on a message means you want to read it, when what I really want is to delete it. Yes, I know that I can hold my click and get a right-mouse menu, but it’s a much slower interaction than I’d like.
Earlier today, I saw a note about someone developing a pressure-sensitive touchscreen, and maybe that becomes the solution (so a hard press would pop up the context menu right away, or something like that).
Ultimately, both usability and economics suggest that some sort of abstraction would be helpful. You’d really like to have some common vocabulary of operations beyond “click” so that (1) users don’t have to learn a completely customized set of gestures for each device, and (2) developers don’t have to implement those gestures differently on every device.
Andy Croll
on 10 Jun 10Totally gets my point.
The use case of a ‘full page’ website now includes touch based devices: you have to consider what your audience is using. If it’s both we have to consider the increased programming effort and potential user confusion of a ‘touch’ version as well as a ‘hover’ version.
Roger V
on 10 Jun 10I can picture one day that tablets will have a hover mechanism – and I mean “hover” quite literally. It would be interesting having a touch interface that can sense the proximity of your fingers to the screen. The user could simply point to the screen and that could imitate a “hover” gesture. This could even be expanded to the swiping gesture (for scrolling purposes) – a little flick of the finger in the air next to your screen and the interface responds appropriately.
I don’t think hover is dead by any means – we’re just waiting for it to be implemented in a more literal way. The computer/gadget market isn’t quite ready for that yet.
Paul M. Watson
on 10 Jun 10It will be interesting to see if this minority can survive, continue to maintain a market of desktops as the majority shift to touch. Or will we be forced to find speed and power in touch devices?
Jared
on 10 Jun 10The Wacom tablet I have detects the hover of the pen. I don’t know the hardware challenges with detecting a finger but I can imagine a gap where hovers aren’t available, but, my guess would be the technology, like the link mentioned in the first comment, will become a standard feature again at some point.
Greg Macoy
on 11 Jun 10Hear, hear!
Joe Sak
on 11 Jun 10I would like to say how eloquent a defense of desktops this is, and when compared to the video of Steve Ballmer at D8 that David shared, you’ve blown him away.
Where Ballmer repeated the same meaningless sound-bytes about form-factors, you presented relatable feelings toward desktop computing that give me clear reasons for the importance of the platform.
Thank you.
This discussion is closed.