Michael Wolf

Monday February 22, 2010

gesturecons visual language for multi touch

I work with some amazing people, one of which is Ryan Lee. He is a great user experience designer here at Cynergy , you might have seen his work on the web cam demo on channel 9. We had been discussing the future of touch interfaces for some time now , and last week he told me about a new project he was working on named "gesturecons".



The general idea is to help build a common visual language to aide in wire framing and ideation, as well as documeting and standardizing gestural interactions. He explains it best:

"After all of the excitement over upcoming multi-touch slate interfaces like the Ipad I started to read a lot of the related existing design literature. I am surprised about how much thinking has already went into this new discipline, but started to see a gap with some of the existing tools and design approaches. Our way of thinking as web/application designers is about to be turned upside down. No longer will we design around a mouse/cursor, but will have to think about fingers and gestures when we design the next generation of interface. This new type of interface will rely a lot more on setting up scenarios and a much better understanding of how users will be interacting with a UI.

I started to look at wire-frame/ design approaches for this type of design and could not find a good visual language that would help me describe to clients how their interfaces would work. This led me to create a set of wire-framing gestural icons that I am calling “Gesturecons.” "

He has released the gesturecons under a Creative Commons License: http://gesturecons.com/