Brad Myers | Pick, Click, and Flick: Stories About Interaction Techniques

When people use technology and devices like a computer, smartphone, tablet, watch, game console, set top box, or other consumer electronics, interaction techniques (IxTs) are the low-level reusable building blocks out of which their user interfaces are constructed.

An interaction technique starts when the user performs an action that causes an electronic device to respond, and includes the direct feedback from the device to the user. Examples include physical buttons and switches, on-screen menus and scrollbars operated by a mouse or finger, touchscreen widgets and gestures such as flick-to-scroll and pinch-to-zoom, text entry on computers and touchscreens, input for virtual reality, consumer electronic controls such as remote controls, game controllers, input for virtual reality systems like waving a Nintendo Wii wand or your hands in front of a Microsoft Kinect, interactions with conversational agents such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Microsoft Cortana, and adaptations of all of these for people with disabilities.

This talk will be based on Brad Myers’s university courses and his new book on this topic.