Touch & Gesture

Content as the Interface: Touch & Gesture Applications

Catalyst Resources designs innovative and creative application interfaces using multi-touch and gestures for mobile devices, desktops and large-format display environments. These interfaces allow the user to more directly interact with the content on the device and provides an adaptable interface for limited screen space. Depending on the application and the design, touch/gesture can provide a gain of efficiency or convenience over traditional mouse and keyboard input, as well as an enhanced means to observe and interact with data, shifting the role of the user from a passive information responder to an active, real-time participant.

Unique design considerations

With traditional mouse and keyboard applications, the user interface is based on menus, widgets and panels that are distinct from the content. The inputs are asynchronous, one at a time. With touch and gesture, the user directly interacts with and manipulates the applications and the data displayed. The interface is almost invisible. Inputs can be concurrent and multiuser for collaborative activities. For application, touch and gesture UIs provides immediacy, richer experiences, greater productivity, group collaboration and dynamic interactions around content.

Areas of Application for Mission-Critical Services

• Health Care/Biotech - For medical collaboration, diagnostics and devices, touch screens can simply complex systems, increase exploration and encourage information exchange.
• Enterprise Data Visualization - Direct manipulation of objects and analytic views of real-time data enables efficient exploration of associations, dependencies and relations. Data can also be simultaneously explored or manipulated by multiple users.
• Location & Mapping - Maps now incorporate vast amounts of satellite imagery, GIS data, weather information, real-time traffic conditions, and other elements, that are particularly easier and more natural to explore via touch/gesture.
• Industrial/Instrument Control - Touch simplifies the human/machine interface for industrial equipment by enabling the operator's reactions to be natural and intuitive, reducing training time and adding more capabilities to the machine itself.
• Mobile Devices/Tablets - Gesture and touch-based systems kicked off the revolution in mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Window 7 Phone, iPad, etc). You often see people making gestures on devices that do not understand (e.g. tapping the screens of non-touch-sensitive Blackberry displays). Touch and gesture provide an adaptable interface for limited screen space.

Fundamental principals of UI design

While touch/gesture movements are often considered natural and intuitive (e.g. making a spinning motion to rotate, a swipe to move, a pinch to shrink, a shake to select another choice) we still apply fundamental principals to the design of any touch/gesture application UI: visibility, well-defined modes of expression, a clear conceptual model of the way they interact with the system, feedback, the ability navigate unintended consequences and extensive user-validation. We work to create actions that are predictable - identifying the "of course" factor instead of looking for the "wow" factor.