Skillfully use gestures to treat users well

In this era of mobile screen more and more, many developers in their own applications have added many gestures, such as Sina Weibo's right sliding back and everyone's sliding drawer, and even some people say only gestures to save large screen. But the reality is that users do not like too much gesture operation, users prefer to click, rather than to use hidden gestures. So can we create a gesture operation that can be applied to most applications, reducing the cost of learning for the user?

Why do you use gestures?

Unlike the traditional key interface, gesture manipulation is highly hidden. It is hard to know how many gestures are hidden in this application if we have not read the help of a gesture application. Not intuitive gestures to increase the difficulty of the new user, but also allows users to enter the application every time the use of the method, which is likely to give users the application of the difficult information, the final results can be imagined.

Although the gesture operation has many drawbacks, but we can not be unworthy to discard gestures. Due to the limited size of the phone screen, so a lot of information can not be displayed in a screen, such as we need to slide around the main screen to see the application, pull out the Drop-down menu, so the presence of the gesture will make the phone's screen extension, so that users get more information. It can be seen that in the operation of mobile devices we are impossible and there is no need to eliminate gestures, all we have to do is to seek a more efficient and unified gesture operation.

The problem of gesture operation

A common example of this is the Pull-down menu, where we can all slide out of the top of the phone and pull out the Pull-down menu. Have we ever wondered how we know about this operation? When we see others doing so in their devices, we immediately understand the effect of this gesture, and can immediately use it in our own devices, so naturally learned. This drop-down gesture is very simple, read it once, but most importantly it is a global gesture.

What is a global gesture? The simple understanding is the general gesture operation on every mobile phone. such as sliding around the main screen can see the mobile phone application, pulling up and down on Android and IOS devices can be a drop down menu, and the gestures that are common on every phone can be said to be a lifelong benefit, and we don't see how hard these two hidden gestures will be. It is not the global gesture that makes the user complain, but the gesture operation that is designed by each application.

Many people say Sina Weibo in the right sliding back design can be convenient for large screen users, then we will be from Sina micro-bleomycin to see the drawbacks of gesture operation.

On Sina Weibo, when we go to a microblog and slide right back to the previous page, the gesture can be as simple as the back button in the upper left corner. But this gesture is not universal in microblogging, such as we entered a long microblog image, then the right to slide the gesture is useless, we enter a link after the gesture will also be ineffective. The result of such a design is that the user has no idea when the gesture can be used, so most users will end up with a good command of universal clicks.

The same problem has arisen on the zaker. The main operation of Zaker is gesture operation, but it also failed to achieve universality. In Zaker We click on a piece of news and the dropdown will go back to the previous page, but when we enter the comment screen in this news, the gesture of pulling back will fail immediately, and the return button in the lower left corner can only be clicked.

Hand gestures in IOS are also hard to get away with. In many system applications, the left-sliding of an item will appear delete button, we can also see many third-party applications also use this gesture, but it also failed to become a third-party application of the design standards, so the commonality is not high.

It's just a problem with signature gestures in an application, and the actual problem with gestures is more in the case of application switching. The switching frequency of mobile end applications is much higher than that of computer software, and the incompatibility of gesture is a more serious problem. We can assume that when we read the news in Zaker for half an hour, the microblog came to a DMS. When we enter the microblogging response, we unconsciously use the previously used pull back operation, but this operation is not supported in the micro-borrie, so our brain will switch ideas to begin to recall the slide back function in Weibo. However, when we get used to the slide back gesture in Sina Weibo, and then cut into everyone, we will normally click to see the new message, but we will find that just the habit of sliding back function is invalid, after a few seconds after the brain to adapt to the point of the upper left corner exit operation.

Through the analysis, we can clearly see that in IOS this seemingly not fragmented system of gesture fragmentation gradually emerged, how to solve the gesture fragmentation has become a new problem for developers.

What is the good gesture

Good gesture operations are those that let the user know exactly how to use it, and the user knows whether it is available in the gesture. The lock screen interface of IOS is a good example. The IOS lock screen has only a sliding slider to unlock, and in other interfaces such an unlock slider does not exist, so we do not think of sliding at all.

A design that uses a shallow guide makes it natural for users to learn how to use gestures and have a wonderful feeling.

The camera in the lock screen interface is designed to take advantage of the light guide, and the screen will bounce up after clicking the camera, which will directly guide the user to hold the camera down. Pull into the camera's action at the same time will let the user feel the drop will return to the lock screen interface. What's even more fascinating is the fact that, after entering the camera in the lock screen interface, we can really pull back and down to the lock screen interface. The symmetrical design of the drawing camera and the down-lock screen interface is in line with the user's imagination, which brings the joyful feeling to the user directly.

In addition to the lock screen interface, the third party application can also add shallow guidance. For example, when we click on a microblog in Sina Weibo, the original interface slides to the left to cut out the new interface (push effect) This will make people feel that their right to slide should return to the previous interface, the symmetrical animation effect plus light guide will reduce the user's heart pressure, and such guidance is in the user's operation at the same time, Users do not need to recall the application of the gesture can be convenient to use.

Design a gesture

A developer can't design apps in his own small circle, only think of the gesture experience in their own applications, but also should jump out of their own application, to think about how to make a suitable for the majority of the application of the global gesture, so that the design of gesture operation can not only in their own application of good fit, but also will cause other applications to follow, It can even change the interface design of most applications and reduce the fragmentation of gestures.

Reduce useless gestures

There are most useless gestures in many applications, such as clicking on a news entry in the Zaker and sliding right and left to see the previous news and the last piece of news. Such gestures are rarely used, and users are more likely to want to return to the title interface and find themselves interested in the news before entering rather than consuming the flow of extensive reading.

Use of regional gestures

If a gesture is not used throughout the application, such as back gestures in Sina Weibo. Then you should use regional gestures, such as right sliding in the navigation bar (navigation bar) area to return to the previous interface, and slide back to the last browsing interface. Because there are navigation bars in most applications, such as micro-blogs, micro-letters, and so on, this kind of regional gesture can solve the problem that gestures can't be used in long micro-blog and comment interface, and this return gesture can be applied by many applications to ensure the user's unified experience in multiple applications.

Focus on superficial guidance

Users are not able to predict the application's gestures when they are just using it. It is also wise to introduce the initial interface in the application, but no matter how many gestures and hidden operations you have in the application, the initial help can only be described as one of the most important, leaving the rest to the shallow guide. A messy description doesn't give the user a full memory, and it can be a difficult feeling to use.

When we want to design a sliding drawer gesture, we can guide the user through the instructions in the Help interface, and can also add a button in the navigation bar to do the shallow boot. For example, when we click on Everyone's button in the upper left corner, the drawer interface will slide from left to right into the screen, select an item and the drawer will slide out to the left. This symmetrical animation effect will let us have the impulse to the left and right sliding in the interface, if you can pull out the drawer we will naturally feel pleasure.

It is also necessary to include the latent guidance in the regional gestures, as an example of the "right sliding back" gesture of the above "navigation bar". If the application we designed has such gestures, can we remove the back button in the upper left corner? Of course not! Because we want to give the user the right to operate after forgetting the gesture, we should be able to keep the button in the upper left corner, but we need to make some changes to distinguish between the available gestures and the unavailable gestures.

The left image is the traditional interface, and the right image is the interface that supports the navigation bar gesture. You can find that the buttons in the upper-left corner of the interface that support the navigation bar gesture are different, which directly tells the user that the current interface gesture is available, and that the button on the right will give the person the urge to pull.

With this guidance coupled with the left and right symmetrical animation design, a strong visible gesture operation is completed, simply summed up is:

Find the application interface to design a "navigation bar gesture."

Use the initial interface to illustrate a major gesture.

Guide the user's actions and find gestures in real time through a shallow boot.

Preserve traditional buttons to increase gesture visibility and also give users the right to choose.

Goal

Gesture operation is the unique interactive mode of touch screen device, the developer design gesture is also in order to make the operation more fluent, we do not want to continue the gesture fragmentation, we look forward to the developers in the gesture set to seek common ground, learn from each other, ultimately to bring users a unified sense of control.