Corvus Consulting

Last week I got into a discussion on the blog for Spark, a weekly CBC radio show about technology and culture. From the comments came an interview with Dan Misener, and part of that conversation made its way into an episode that asks why computers are so hard to use. The segment starts at the 40-minute mark, and should you be disposed to listen you can do so.

As with most interviews there are parts that get cut. While I liked the parts Spark included, one part I wished would have made it on was about the importance of the iPad’s adoption of unmediated input. The following is a tidied-up crib of those thoughts.

Hands On

If I had to sum up the iPad’s most significant break from generations-old assumptions about computing, it would have to be how the commitment to a touch interface kills the mouse and demotes the keyboard to a casual rather than primary conduit of our intentions.

The touch interface humanely places a premium on our hands as the best input devices; after all, they’re built right into our physical and cognitive existence at deep levels. An interaction model built for the natural range of our hands shortens the line between intention with action, releases the hands from limited, injury-causing positions, and lets them return to direct manipulation.

With the mouse and keyboard model, the hands manipulate proxies to the things we want to work with. We move a mouse to move a pointer to move a target symbol. In a completely touch-based model, the hands move the things we want to interact with. There’s no unfamiliarity with that idea, even for the most technically illiterate, piercing the assumptions of those who have avoided computers as being too hard for them to use.

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I have a bad habit of writing about the iPad, but if you’d like to read more I can suggest three previous posts on Apple’s formula for blockbuster products, the trend towards managed platforms, and in predictions of what the tablet would be before it debuted.