Infinite Inputs

Luke Wroblewski, author of Mobile First and Web Form Design and a co-founder of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), gave this talk at dConstruct in 2013. In the beginning, there was the keyboard and the mouse. Today, the kinds of input our devices support keep growing: touch, voice, device motion and much more.

Each new input type opens up new possibilities for interaction and requires interface designs to adapt. So when will this deluge of new input types end, so we don’t have to keep redesigning our software? Wroblewski’s answer: it won’t, not until everything is input.

Touch-era patterns such as pull to refresh and drag and drop show how new input types create new interaction conventions.