How do you create hybrid interfaces you touch, talk to and poke?
With so many ways to control our interfaces, from touch to voice, what’s the key to designing for them all? Rob Tannen gives his take on things:
“Providing a choice in how to interact with product is not entirely new — for years computer users have relied on keyboard shortcuts rather than just the mouse for inputting commands, but these tend to be exceptional or specialized. While you can do some commands one way, you need to rely on a primary input to access all of the functions. But we should soon expect to see complete control through a choice of several user interfaces. In fact, people naturally interact with the world via multiple modalities –consider a rider “interacting†with a horse through a mixture of vocalizations and physical gestures. Now that our technologies are catching up to human (or at least animal) capabilities, product designers need to figure out the best way to choose and combine these interaction modalities.”
