Brainstorm uses for gestures in the Drupal UI

Gestures

Gestures are a powerful shortcut in touch based design. Not only do they allow power users to complete repetitive tasks quicker they also have the benefit of being invisible. Beginner users, who struggle to complete tasks at all, don’t get the distraction of these power tools. They only have to think about the slow and simple route. We can layer an invisible, advanced interface over the basic one. We can make Drupal more learnable and more intuitive through gestures.

Here are some examples of gestures in action and an example how they could be used in Drupals admin interface.

Swipe

• The iPhone mail app uses this shortcut to reveal a delete button
• The instapaper app uses this shortcut to reveal actions on each item (Delete/Organise/Share)
• We could use this in Drupal on lists of content/modules/anything to drill deeper without the extra tap.

Tap and hold

• The Reeder app brings up a big list of ways to share the link you performed the gesture on.
• We could use this in Drupal to load contextual shortcuts on blocks.

Pull to refresh

• The Twitter app introduced the pull to refresh gesture as an extension to the standard ‘scroll to see more content’ gesture. Once you hit the end of the content a hidden message appears instructing you to pull down to update the list of tweets.
• This has now become a common gesture on the iPhone even in situations where it doesn’t make sense (foursquare)
• The Reeder app extended this smartly by asking to load the next article when you scroll to the bottom of one.
• We could use this in Drupal to replace pagination.
• The best way to find out what shortcut gestures to add is to watch a smartphone user advance through the app and see where they expect them.