I recently had the privilege of holding and playing with Apple's iPhone. Wow, What an experience it was! It was wonderful to play with the device's on-screen keyboard, iTunes' Cover Flow, shifting photo slides, turning the little animal 90 degrees and the like.What I realised after playing with the iPhone is that there is new paradigm of User Interfaces from What You See is What You Get (WYSWYG) to What You See is What You Touch (WYSWYT).
Since Graphical User Interfaces came up with Windows Icons Mouse and Pointers (WIMP), it has been fun moving a mouse beside a keyboard and watching something move accordingly on the screen. Although it becomes a simple and wonderful user experience dragging and dropping stuff this way, it requires a lot of getting used to initially. Novice users have to learn some principles of the mouse e.g. it doesn't work if you lift the mouse in the air.
To be honest, we can all agree that this is not a perfect user experience because in the real world, if you want to open a door, you don't move around and click some weirdly named device on one side while watching its effects on another. You push or pull the door open. If you want to poke or slap someone, you poke or slap them. As simple as that!
At Baobab Health, we have seen how touchscreen systems are so intuitive to users. No one needs a class to learn how to touch a button on the screen; not even in developing countries.
I'm therefore excited to see Apple bringing this user experience to the masses with their iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Of course there have been others who developed Touchscreen systems way before Apple. But Apple's design genius and hype production behind their touch devices have opened doors to more simple intuitive and exciting user experiences. Just hope Facebook's touchscreen slap feature won't be as painful.
