Don’t rush to bury touchscreens

We will still need them for some time

This post has been inspired by an article called “The end of screen-based interfaces”, in which the author, Josep Ferrer, insists that a screen is not the best solution to interact with a device and that we use them only until a decent alternative solution emerges. He believes in Zero-UI, a user experience approach in which a user doesn’t need to make unnatural gestures, such as touching a screen. If you are Amazon Echo or Siri user, you already know what it means.

On the one hand, user interfaces usually evolve from very complicated to user-friendly. Both technological development and competition force the business to make user-device interaction more comfortable. In my childhood, I played with brown cards my mom brought from her work. They were rectangular paper cards, and one angle was cut (they looked similar to modern sim cards), and they were perforated in some places. They were used to input data into the computers of the era. Then, in school, I saw a personal computer. The only way to make it work was to type commands on the keyboard. Now our smartphones obey our will, which we express with light touches on the screen.

On the other hand, the long-promised screenless devices era doesn’t seem to have come. According to a Bloomberg report published in many media and based on internal Amazon documents, Echo’s users don’t hurry to use new and complicated functions the device can provide for them. Instead, many of them are ok with basic options. At the same time, the revenue that iPhone sales bring to Apple hit a new record in the first quarter of 2022. So it seems people still trust good old touch screens.

Typing commands on a keyboard is really a tough task. But even older people born long before the digital era can use smartphones because touching things to operate them is natural. We use our fingers to play musical instruments, caress our partners, cook, paint, turn pages, etc,. So, I believe that the Zero-UI era is still yet to come.

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