This article was originally posted on the Code Computerlove blog, 6th April 2010. http://blog.codecomputerlove.com/2010/04/06/mouse-gestures-are-they-the-future/

A link went around the office this morning about a Dabbleboard, an online white-board tool.

While the tool itself is nothing out of the ordinary, comments were made about the way they have integrated mouse gestures into the application.

For example, drawing the first part of an oval will cause the app to draw a complete oval, thus negating the need to keep going to the toolbar and selecting the “draw oval” tool.

Doing this:

Draws this:

Neat, huh?

So, gestures: are they the future?

For more experienced users, or in instances where users have been trained to use a system they can certainly boost productivity, but I’d be very wary about unleashing them on the general public, where they may fall into the hands of novice users.

For example, I have “active screen corners” set up on my Macbook: when I move the cursor to the top-right of my screen it reveals the desktop, the bottom-left shows all active windows and the bottom-right shows the dashboard in all it’s widgety glory.

Configuring active screen corners:

Showing all active windows:

I find this setup allows me to navigate through my open applications and my dashboard widgets quickly and easily. I’ve been using that setup for so long it actually feels restrictive when I’m on a computer that doesn’t run like that. It’s become instinctive. For me.

However, when my wife tries to use my laptop she gets herself into a bit of a muddle with it: windows whizz around & disappear seemingly at random and she doesn’t understand why it’s happening. She used to think she had done something wring, or worse that she had “broken it”, but after explaining to her what’s happening and why, she now asks me “how can you work like that?”.

The gestures are a very personal preference, and while they make perfect sense to me, for her they create make the user experience a frustrating one, and longer sessions usually result in her proclaiming how much she hates Macs.

It’s a fine line between a feature that aids productivity and one that is unpredictable, unintuitive or so twitchy it just gets in the way.

For experienced or trained users, gestures can be a great productivity enhancement, just make sure they’re appropriate for your users, that it’s obvious they’re enabled and that their effects are clearly sign-posted!

And having said all that, I admit I’ve never quite got my head around Opera’s mouse gestures. They’re weird, and it feels like they fight against the natural shortcuts within the O/S.

Maybe I need a training course in how to use them?