(2023-07-29) Obenauer Ln037 Gestural View Construction

Alexander Obenauer on LN 037: Gestural view construction. The more I live in itemized environments for my personal computing needs, the more I see how view construction needs to be a common part of daily interactions.

The power of many of the concepts discussed in these lab notes is realized when people are able to craft unique interfaces that support their specific needs and context.

But once someone takes the time to craft the unique interfaces they believe will support their best, they’ll immediately learn something new — about themselves, the interfaces they envisioned, or both — and they’ll need to iterate on these creations. Back to the crafting, in a feedback loop that will happen as the individual evolves, and their context and needs change, turning this into a lifelong process which few may put up with.

I’ll get concrete in just a moment — but for now, free yourself from the concept of an email client app.

What if reading your new email messages involved essentially constructing the view you want to see your new messages within, each time, as a byproduct of your natural actions to gather and lay out these email items? You might construct this view a little bit differently each time as you learn more about yourself

It’s kind of like search: we usually write a new search from scratch every time, only saving searches that are particularly complex and which we wish to return to often. What if views were just as easy to construct, letting you do so from scratch each time as needed, only needing to be saved for reuse in particular circumstances?

For this experiment, I’ve created a new, gestural itemized environment on the iPad. The goal is as described above: reduce the friction to spin up desired views instead of having to pick among some set of prebuilt ones. Make experimentation so quick and easy that it could become a normal part of our daily use; idealistically, “at the speed of thought.”

Instead, this new experiment looks for ways to have view construction begin as the byproduct of natural gestures as you look for the items you want to see and lay them out how you want to see them. Double-tap, type, fan out, resize.