Touch Gesture Icons | Hacker News Reader

Touch Gesture Icons

mobiletuxedo.com

110 pointsSami_Lehtinen19 comments

These are interesting but in my opinion (please take it with a pinch of salt, I am no expert) touch icons needn't have the 'hand' to indicate that they're touch. Hand feels redundant and heavy.

For example, the double-finger-double-tap a coalesced double-ring is good enough, there is no need of hand on the icon. Similarly for triple-tap three rings coalesced together is enough, drop the hand.

'Press and hold' could be done with the icon you've for 'hold timer' -- without the hand of course. For left, right, up and down swipes something else is required. Hand is terrible while arrows alone won't cut it. We also need icons to suggest typing(keyboard) mode or doodling(free hand) mode on touch screens.

If you know that a gesture is expected, the hand is not necessary.

However, it's unlikely that people would recognise they are expected to gesture without some context - the clearest way to indicate the correct context is with the hand.

The hand is providing a necessary function here - although I agree it might be a bit heavy and that it will be less necessary once you've established the context.

An alternative to the hand would be a more distinctive finger (by adding a fingernail?)

Or a mobile pictogram, smaller than the gesture itself.

The press-and-hold is nearly indistinguishable from single tap. You could not use it by itself. The one with the clock says more.

The swipe-ups should have the hand off to one side so the arrows can be seen more clearly.

IMO most of these would be better with just a finger or fingers.

I like all of them except the "hold" ones. I don't have a good alternative, but without seeing the "tap" one side-by-side the meaning of the slightly thicker circle would be lost entirely.

I have seen endless confusion with anything even remotely iconic. People swiping in the "obviously" opposite direction and getting frustrated, never swiping in the right direction. Telling people to "swipe" ends up going nowhere.

We have no iconography. We have no language. It must be representative to actually get people to understand what you want them to do. Iconography can come later, when people actually understand that swiping is a thing you do with your finger. This is at least pretty clear.

They look great. I think there should be a bigger distinction between tap and hold, and a larger emphasis in general on the gesture rather than the hand.

If you zoom out to 50%, that's about how big I would expect them to be on a phone, and some of the gestures (especially tap vs. hold) start to blend together.

Icons look cool, but it seems to me that the constant presence of the hand creates two problems here: 1. It dramatically reduces the clarity of the signs (the dots and arrows), which is actually the part of the icon that DOES guide you (think as well of small sizes/low resolutions), and 2. (as ronaldx mentions already) it adds a repeating motif which I'm sure after a while might become uninteresting, and also may very much graphically define the app it is used in.

As a suggestion, perhaps the relative sizes between the hands and the signs could be reconsidered, and a more abstract level of representation of the hand could be thought of.

I think that these icons should be animated, this will make them much more user friendly.

Some of the swipe arrows, especially up swipes, are not very clear.

Wish it had tilt left/right/up/down for gaming

hmm, hmm give me the idea for a simple programming language that you can code only with toch gestures. thinking of something like http://snappyturtle.meteor.com/ swipe right .... GO x (length of swipe) swipe right (but curved) .... JUMP (length of swipe) swipe down .... REPEAT X swite rigth .... MAKE

should be possible

They're well detailed, but the vector sources are little messy (stray points, lack descriptive titles) so you'll want to clean them up.

These are great but I got a little lost at the numbers, pointing, handshake and thumbs up/down... How are these touch gestures?

> Number Three

This one needs l10n variants. Haven't you seen Inglourious Basterds?

Where was this n weeks ago, when we were designing that touch-first interface?

Exactly what I needed, thanks a lot for that.

Missing 4x swipe up and down?

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