I still struggle with using a touch screen to type, play games and write code and I'm supposed to be gen z. (I'm exaggerating a bit but the experience is genuinely sub-par to a keyboard or a controller.)<p>I wonder if the touch screen is inherently a bad input device or is it a generational thing?<p>My parents can't use a video game controller but I can with ease.<p>Do you think the babies who are growing up on ipads are going to have great dexterity with touch devices as adults and prefer it to a keyboard?
It's about tradeoffs. Positives for touch screens include:<p>Low cost and small physical space requirement, assuming an appropriately sized screen is already part of the design. You can often fit a bigger screen by foregoing physical buttons.<p>Direct rather than abstract interface is easier to instruct 'press the picture of the item you want' vs 'use the arrow keys to highlight the item you want, then press the button to select it'<p>Reconfiguring the interface is a software change (and generally inexpensive) vs a hardware change<p>Negatives include:<p>Lack of tactile feedback, generally, means more focus is required to confirm desired actions.<p>Users hands and arms aren't transparent, so it can be difficult to see the screen while interacting with it.<p>Context can change while interacting which can be confusing (this isn't exclusive to touch screens)<p>Filling input buffers is harder. On old Nokia phones, you could navigate menus quickly by pushing number keys and get ahead of the UI, but if you knew the sequences, everything would work out. It's a lot harder to do that on a touch screen if you're pressing buttons that change the on screen button layout --- you're going by memory for the screen location without tactile feedback. I think uis are more likely to discard early taps than early keystrokes, making it possibly less reliable as well.<p>If the touch sensitive layer is widely seperated from the display layer, calibration to converge touch and display becomes sensitive to viewing angle and can be difficult to use. I'm thinking of touchscreen atms and touchscreen soda dispensers that I often have to offset my touches so they register.
I'm 45, my kids all play mobile games on their phones all day long. I can't stand playing games that way. I certainly seems like it. Then again, I love WASD and never have gotten good at controllers either. As for touch interfaces in the future... Sure, they'll use them more, but I think they're still more fundamentally limiting, it will just be less so over time.
I think it's a terrible input device for typing, okay for games (<i>if</i> the game has been designed with touchscreens in mind - if it's a port of a game originally designed for controller/mouse and keyboard just forget about it).<p>I can't touch type on touchscreens at all even though I can effortlessly type on a physical keyboard. My first few smartphones had physical keyboards and I could type quite fast on them after a week or two learning the layout but I just can't do it on touchscreens even after 10+ years.<p>I'm 34 so I guess I'd be an older millennial?
All input devices take practice to operate well. They also have different ceilings.<p>A touch screen is fine for viewing things, but the ceiling for text input is very low; no matter how much you practice you will never be very effective at it. With a keyboard, however, the ceiling is much higher.<p>I don't have much experience with a game controller, but I would say that they are better than a touchscreen. They still get beaten by a keyboard plus mouse, even if most games don't need the full keyboard.
Touch screens are the most intuitive things. I've seen aging people who never really used computers or mobile devices try to touch things that look like buttons or labels on TVs, microwaves, ranges, etc to control them. Sometimes the devices respond and when they don't, I think maybe they should.
Touch screen is silly.<p>I don't belong to profession that need to be productive via touching computer screen.<p>I'd pay more for non-touch screen laptop.<p>Accidental touches can and does screw things.<p>Just got a new touch screen laptop and hope to find a way to disable toucheability