I got my mum one a couple of years ago and she's hooked. She literally doesn't leave the house without it if she's going anywhere that involves some manner of waiting. Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input. Granted, I still have to occasionally show her how to perform certain actions on the device, but save for the first few weeks, that's now quite rare.
I think the thing with tablets is that they function for some adults as a replacement for casual use--browsing, e-mail, videos, etc; a consumption device, as you stated--but not for content creation. My mum still uses her computer to send e-mail, for instance, but everything else she does on her tablet. Maybe it's because she's a touch typist, but I suspect there's something about a keyboard that's a very difficult thing to replace.
>Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input
I would imagine most people find touch input more intuitive than mouse input, if only for the reason that it accomplishes the same thing but better(at least on an intuitive level).
A mouse is like a pair of chopsticks. Sure, after a while, you can coordinate it pretty well, but it's still a lot easier to build a house of cards directly with your hands than with chopsticks.
I desperately want every screen to be a touch screen. There is no more direct way of the "indicate something on a screen " action than touching it. Even precision issues due to fingers being pretty big usually get solved through decent heuristics or new gestures.
The only place that's still iffy is text editing. But even there some things (rapidly , but roughly, going to a spot in your text) that could be a great help.
With enough of a screen, text editing is not bad either. I didn't realize how terribly I wanted a touch screen for work until I worked with excel on a touch screen with a keyboard. It was unbelievably fast. With my left hand I could poke cells, the equation and scream around doing that. Meanwhile, my right hand was typing letters and numbers. It was like the first time I heard the Beatles. I was laughing to myself while working on the departmental budget.
It was so good that I sit at my desk at work now and just grump at the damned stupid screen.
Interesting. I'd never considered spreadsheet use, but that sounds like an area worth exploring for touch-based interaction. For some things, reaching out and "grabbing" (for lack of a better term) seems to be a more natural gesture than trying to isolate whether the UI expects left click, right click, or some permutation of drag + clicking.
I wonder now how much cross over will eventually occur between keyboard + touch interaction. One for input, one for manipulation. In essence, that merges the best of both worlds.
I've considered this. Multi-touch would be great for this. Pinch horizontally to shrink the selection, anti-pinch (I've never really though about what that motion of moving your fingers apart would be called) to expand the selection. Pinch vertically to be able to drag it around and drop it where you want.
I can't wait for a 28" touchscreen at my desk with some software to make the touch interface and excel, CSS and other random statistics programs work together a little better. It will genuinely make work easier, and make me more productive.
On the other hand a mouse is more efficient for pointing at things than anything else I tried - touching the screen, touchpad, etc... it's why when I'm working on my laptop, even though being on a MacBook I have a pretty good touchpad, I'm still attaching a mouse.
Same goes for the keyboard - no matter how big the screen real-estate is, it doesn't beat a physical keyboard, because a physical keyboard gives a tactile feel to your fingers and thus you can do touch-typing. My wife doesn't do touch-typing, she's just an ordinary user, but even she complains that things are hard to type on her 11 inch iPad.
Indeed there are applications that are more productive with a touchscreen, coupled with the possibility of carrying them around and looking at the screen while walking, it's a good combination - but for very different things.
It's not only the touch input, but the simplified model of how apps work in general. "One app running at the time and filling the whole screen." That matches the mental model of the most people. Traditional multitasking window GUI can be really confusing for people who have not grown with it,
I agree. I think that even for people who have some exposure to multitasking GUIs, a simplified UI can alleviate much of the mental overhead if they have a very specific goal in mind. In my mum's case, she has quite a lot of previous experience with computers, so her tablet is mostly for reading, looking up things of interest, watching videos or movies, etc. But as a consequence, her computer is relegated mostly to content creation.
I think that's a fantastic use case for tablets, too. Older users (60+) can benefit tremendously from their relatively small form factor and simplified UI; it's just a shame that they're largely neglected and under-served when you examine most of the advertising...
Or your mother?
Seriously. It's actually kind of amazing.
I got my mum one a couple of years ago and she's hooked. She literally doesn't leave the house without it if she's going anywhere that involves some manner of waiting. Touch input is something far more intuitive to someone in her generation (so it seems with my meager sample size of one) than mouse/menu-driven input. Granted, I still have to occasionally show her how to perform certain actions on the device, but save for the first few weeks, that's now quite rare.
I think the thing with tablets is that they function for some adults as a replacement for casual use--browsing, e-mail, videos, etc; a consumption device, as you stated--but not for content creation. My mum still uses her computer to send e-mail, for instance, but everything else she does on her tablet. Maybe it's because she's a touch typist, but I suspect there's something about a keyboard that's a very difficult thing to replace.