Self-Revealing Gestures

This chapter focuses on the self-revealing gestures, which are a philosophy for designing gestural interfaces that posits that the only way to see a behavior in users is to induce it. Users are presented with an interface to which their response is gestural input. This approach contradicts some designers' apparent assumption that a gesture is some kind of “shortcut” that is performed in some ephemeral layer hovering above the user interface. In reality, a successful development of a gestural system requires the development of a gestural user interface . Objects are shown on the screen to which the user reacts, instead of somehow intuiting their performance. The trick, of course, is to not overload the user with UI “chrome” that overly complicates the UI, but rather to afford as many suitable gestures as possible with a minimum of extra on-screen graphics. The biggest problem with making the gestures self-revealing is getting over the idea that gestures are somehow natural or intuitive.