Designing Gestural Interfaces

Dave Cronin of Cooper writes a nice review of Designing Gestural Interfaces:

Dan Saffer’s new book Designing Gestural Interfaces is a great step towards defining a clear language of physical interactions. The book provides a solid overview of the important things to consider when designing for touchscreens and motion-sensitive controllers, as well as good design practices like prototyping and documentation. For me, the real meat of the book is the discussion of patterns like “spin to scroll,” and “wave to activitate,” as well as the catalog of gestures that could be used as the basis of a physical control idiom (like “shake head no”).

Both of these sections should provide good food for thought as you contemplate how to get beyond simple point-and-click interactions.

Read the full review

O’Reilly has published another short excerpt from Designing Gestural Interfaces, from the chapter on Communicating Interactive Gestures. Go read it.

Review of Designing Gestural Interfaces on Designers Review of Books:

In some ways Designing Gestural Interfaces is a book that is long overdue, given the long history of gestural interaction. In others it is a first and valiant stab and pinning down a currently emerging and rapidly changing area. My guess is that within three or four years, he will already need to update it, but for designers working both in interaction and product or industrial design right now, this is a must-read. If you have anything to do with designing any kind of consumer electronics device, you should get a copy of Designing Gestural Interfaces and get a second copy to give to the marketing department who will, no doubt, be trying to stuff multitouch interfaces on everything.