The video shows people interacting with a vertical touch-screen. For short amounts of time, like getting money from an ATM, this works OK, but for prolonged usage like working on office documents, it leads to Gorilla Arm [1]. I'm afraid people will find out the hard way and will get desillusioned about their touchscreen user experience. Why doesn't Microsoft foresee this?
From the Jargon File:
"Gorilla Arm: The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.
The vertical touch screen use case will really only be a factor at kiosk-type installations, which have a short usage time. Any extended use is going to be done on a laptop or desktop, which has a trackpad or mouse to fall back to if it even has a touchscreen, or a tablet, which can be held in an ergonomic manner. You seem to be inventing a form factor that Microsoft isn't promoting, just to be able to criticize it.
I don't think that's necessarily true, though I disagree with the GP. He mentioned in the video, and they're already demoing this at places like best buy, ultrabooks will be coming out with touch screens en masse once windowes 8 is released. A lot of them pivot, but after using one briefly in a normal mode, I found that I was clicking smaller things with the trackpad, but that for big things (like the start screen), it was much more convenient to quickly flick the screen than to go and use my dexterity on the trackpad. you wouldn't use touch in office, for example, but you might use it for navigating around the operating system quickly and easily.
This is an excellent point. Last week I was at the mall where I saw a new Samsung TV that had a kinect like camera thingy built in. It claimed that you could use it to play Angry birds and navigate the TV using only your palm/hands. Guess what? Thanks to being horrendously inaccurate and jumpy I got gorilla arm within just a few minute of demo usage and said "fuck it, I'm not interested anymore. Samsung should really fix their image processing quality".
My second experience is with the Asus eeePad Transformer. It's great to randomly touch the screen when using a mouse would take a few seconds extra but in the long run you'd end up using the keyboard/mouse subconsciously since your arm starts hurting.
I totally agree they are doing a Huge mistake, and it may go bad for them, already alot of things are pretty messed up with Microsoft. They should have instead enforced a good multitouch trackpad. Microsoft is trying to sit between netbooks and tablets and there is no middle ground!
- yet their new GUI is clearly not mouse optimized and I'd argue it's not trackpad gestures optimized either. The mouse movement to do anything is just too long.
At least the start screen should work better with mouse than the old start menu. They had a comparison of approximate easiness of targeting an item in the start menu [1] and in the new start screen [2]. The heatmap uses Fitts' law so colouring depends not only on distance but also on size of the target.
"It describes untrained movements, not movements that are executed after months or years of practice"
That was exactly my intuition looking at those graphs. There's no way I'm going to be as fast reaching an icon in the upper right corner of the screen after heaving clicked start as I am reaching the top item in the start menu, after some training.
Furthermore, if you don't consider a trained state, this model seems simplistic to me. If you account for the ability to actually find an entry, top items in the list should be faster to click than middle ones - and I doubt a 2D grid is going to be as fast to find something on, until the training effect kicks in.
How often do you target the top item in the start menu (note that it would be the most frequently used) and how often would you target the one in the upper right in the screen (where at least I wouldn't put something I use often – the lower left seems more appropriate for that)?
Well I'm not on Windows right now, but I guess it depends on the use case. For normal use of the start menu almost never. However pressing start key + typing the application name shows the best hit at the top as far as I remember. How is this solved in Win8? Does typing an application name bring up a search result list similar to spotlight on OSX/iOS?
I think if you type the application name the expected behaviour would be to just hit Return to launch it.
But you are right, as far as I remember the search results take over the screen and appear from top to bottom. But I fear you cannot really cater for people who click a button, then start typing and then click again – all of which would be done on the keyboard instead of constantly switching.
Or maybe they need it for gathering thoughts. The time required to switch input devices may come close to the time required to formulate in one's head what is it actually what one is looking for. But that is pretty much speculation ;-)
From the Jargon File:
"Gorilla Arm: The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_arm#.22Gorilla_arm.22