GestureWorks has released 20 something gesture icons for their Flash and Flex development environment. Although their multitouch library is geared at developers, the icons still look interesting in their own right. A lot of the interactions supported include two handed, as well as multi finger gestures. The downloadable library comes in various formats (PNG, PDF and EPS). Enjoy.

Also, I just created the gestures tag to keep track of all these related posts.

Credits: GestureWorks

Ron has recently initiated a project with the intention of creating a visual language for representing gesture based user actions. He shares the belief of “gain[ing] common grounds when discussing interactions” and has just released the Gesturcon Touch Pack under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. The zipped file contains EPS, PNG and Illustrator files for your use. His approach supports such interactions as taps, holds, double taps, flicks and is achieved with circular shapes. @vitorious also threw the idea of combining this with my own notation. Hmm, pretty cool.

Credits: Ron George

Vincent, a friend of mine, has been tinkering with some new ways of portraying simple touch screen interactions on his Get Around application. He uses a big overlaid thumb with a set transparency to indicate the touch. For indicating a dragging action, the thumb also contains an arrow with a direction. Just thought to share this as I found it interesting. To refresh quickly, Elaine has also approached the same problem previously in a slightly different way.

Credits: Vincent Steurs

Changing elements on a page can be forceful. Traditionally, the popup or the dialogue box is an example of a rather unforceful behaviour where the overlaying element does not affect the underlying interface. It appears on top and nothing underneath changes other than a drop shadow or a grey out. This does not have to be the case however. One example of such more forceful push and shove behaviours can be seen during dragging operations. Bill documented this nicely in such a diagram. As an item is dragged and its position changes, the surrounding items are affected as they are pushed around. Using key frames, one can imagine the underlying rules during such an operation.

Finally, these push and shove rules do not have to be limited to dragging alone. As RIA elements become more flexible to resizing, dragging, animating or any other positional and size changes, such behaviours could be considered.

I found this example on Bill Scott’s superb companion flickr page for his upcoming
Designing Web Interfaces book.

Credits: Bill Scott

Sometimes multiple elements change at once as a result of one user interaction. This is especially so during draggable interactions. Here is an interesting way of solving that visually by means of a matrix. On the left y axis all of the elements are listed, whereas on the top x axis the various state conditions are displayed.
Credits: Bill Scott