Even if your premise is true, is it better to move your head up and down or to move your hands forward and backward to reach the touch screen?
Considering zero part of my keyboard is in my field of vision I'd say yes I'd have to move my head up and down. I haven't had a chance to play with the new MacBook Pro yet but it seems like a reasonable assumption.
> Even if your premise is true, is it better to move your head up and down or to move your hands forward and backward to reach the touch screen?
It's actually two different use cases here. A touch screen helps with touch type of controls. So precision zooming and scrolling is kinda awesome on one (though scrolling is weak with the nice touchpad). The touchbar is meant to be more utility like a row of function keys.
I don't think it's entirely fair to directly compare the two. For instance moving it to the bottom of the screen instead of the top of the keyboard turns it from easy to access touch keys to more informational. At least in my opinion.
Zero? Is that even possible?
When using a laptop, it's impossible to look at the display without being able to also look at the keyboard (and touchbar) by just moving your _eyes_. You don't have to move your head.
I think your assumption is not reasonable at all.
I don't look at my keyboard when typing so other than the slight realization that it is there on a laptop I never look at it (but yes it would technically be in my field of vision in this case but that misses the point). However on a desktop setup / docked laptop the keyboard isn't anywhere near where I could see it without significantly moving my head down.
Regardless discussing field of vision is more of a red herring in this debate; it's really about the eye movement and context switching. I should have chosen different wording.
> When using a laptop, it's impossible to look at the display without being able to also look at the keyboard (and touchbar) by just moving your _eyes_. You don't have to move your head.
I think you confuse the physical act of moving ones head to be more disruptive than moving one's eyes. It's actually about the same when you're talking UX assuming the head is moving to change the field of vision. This is something you keep track of and many times head movement will be removed or ignored from testing data when you're tracking where the user is looking because you can move your head and still keep your eyes in one place.
I hope you understand that you move your eyes when you look at different things on your display. The touchbar is just another display that is only slightly lower than the lowest part of your display. You don't need to move your head to see that, only your eyes. The same eyes you move when you look at different things on the main display.
But of course. That was a huge part of my point. Moving your eyes off the display is a _big move_. It's not a typical UX pattern. These things are very well tracked in user testing with eye tracking. The idea is to incrementally move their eyes and never require large movements else you end up having UX issues.
Judging from the downvotes I'm guessing many haven't looked into or used eye tracking during user testing. It's quite interesting, you should check it out!
One thing to consider is that things like editing video are already mouse centric, and the keyboard shortcuts augment the interface. You don't leave your hands in home position.
If you're working on the laptop, using the trackpad, you're already in the mode where you are going back and forth, and your hands need to move around.
When using a mouse, trackball, etc, you can get into workflows based on having one hand operating the mouse, while the other does the keyboard shortcuts. So there could be very interesting uses with two hands.
What makes it not so compelling to me, is that I do serious work with my laptop closed, and a big monitor (I'm music producer/audio engineer).
The amount of information you need to get on the screen at once, if possible, for media authoring applications, requires a relatively rigid focus on the screen. Having my head hunched over a little laptop display is not going to work for extended sessions.
The problem of creating physical interfaces that work well with the screen relates to the abstraction that is involved in GUIs. You have to keep steady focus on the screen, keeping track of the mouse, and what you are doing. You enter kind of a trance, pretty quickly, where you have accepted a two dimensional representation of a complex structure, and are operating within its framework.
This divorces the metaphorical actions of the user in the GUI, which is what we care about, from the physical actions of the body.
For a new user interface to work, it will have to be incorporated into this metaphorical framework the user operates in.
If it deviates to much from the abstractions of the interface, it breaks the trance required to get into the flow, and will simply not be used.
I suspect one of the issues will be if users can actually quickly look down to see what they are touching, or perceive enough with peripheral vision, without losing track of where they are on the screen. It's a reasonable location for the touch bar. As the user gets used to where controls on the touch bar are located, the visual cues might be enough to consistently target the virtual control.
It could also be really helpful for keyboard commands that have a lot of modifiers, and which you don't use much. They can be real handy at times, but the trouble of looking up the key binding in the heat of the moment prevents the habit from getting built up.