More Touchscreens Everywhere, Please

On previous Idealistic Friday’s we’ve established that we want our consumer electronics devices to be driven by open source software and have a WiFi connection. The next thing we’re going to demand in our new improved world is inspired in part by the blockbuster device of 2007, Apple’s iPhone. Even those of us who don’t have an iPhone (I don’t) are affected by it. Certainly all the geeks among us have at least had a friend hand us their device to show how cool it is. And it is damn cool. And it’s cool in large part because of that big, beautiful touchscreen.

photo credit: QypeThe touchscreen on consumer electronics is something so brilliant that it’s amazing it hasn’t become ubiquitous already. I’m not talking about touchscreens on computers. I don’t want fingerprints all over my monitor when I already have a perfectly good device for entering text (the keyboard) and pointing (the mouse). But the majority of consumer electronics devices are too small to put a keyboard and pointing device on them. Hence the touchscreen.

What are the advantages of a touchscreen? Well first of all we’re all pretty used to graphical user interfaces on PCs by now and the touchscreen allows graphical user interfaces on these much smaller devices. The alternative is clunky menus which seem oh so 80s in comparison. Most importantly the touchscreen allows the manufacturer to turn the entire display surface of the device into a dynamic input surface as well. It effectively makes the display larger while making the input area larger at the same time. Quite the bending of the laws of physics there. The bigger display and the dynamic nature of the input area means that you can accomplish far more complex manipulations while making the device easier to use

Improvements all around. Any type of complex interaction with a device that’s too small for a keyboard is greatly improved by using a touchscreen. My car navigation system uses a cursor, my wife’s uses a touchscreen. My car salesman tried to sell me on the “no fingerprints on the screen” angle. He’s wrong. The touchscreen is just far easier to use. So much so that it negates the minor issue of smudges on the screen. Even very simple interactions could be improved with a touchscreen though. My microwave has a small led display and some pre-defined buttons. So when you want to cook a food that it has pre-programmed you often need to cycle through the menu and then try to decipher the 4 letter spelling of the word. With a touch screen you could have a picture of a big bag of popcorn next to a small bag instead of repeatedly hitting the popcorn button to find the “Rglr” size. Imagine setting the time on your clocks by dragging the hour and minute hands into place - or sliding back and forth for a digital clock.

Avoid annoying the customer. Have you ever walked up to a door and pushed only to find you need to pull? That happens because the door is poorly designed and doesn’t follow conventions. Increasingly people are coming to expect touchscreens and will often intuitively push on the screen to get things to happen. When it doesn’t work the way they expect people get annoyed. Annoyed people don’t recommend products to their friends. Lack of a touchscreen where it is intuitively expected was a big part of Scoble’s complaints about the Kindle device.

So why isn’t it already so? Even though they’ve been around for a long time in some form or another touchscreens the way we see them today are relatively new. It will take some time for device manufacturers to get them into their products. And then there’s the issue of cost. Since consumers can be so overwhelmingly cost driven in their purchases manufacturers are reluctant to add even a small amount of cost to their devices. But as with anything scale will make touchscreens more affordable and I think they’ll prove to be such a competitive advantage that it will be suicide to not use them widely.

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It’s fun having the power to change the world in this virtual way. I think that in general this is the way that entrepreneurs and creative people view the world. Exercise your mind and imagine how you can improve the world around you even if you don’t have the power to do so at the moment. And follow along here because I have plenty more ideas for you and eventually a fictional device that brings all of it together.