For some time now, I've thought of drag and drop as an evolutionary step in the development of UIs that may eventually find itself superseded. In the early days of GUIs, it helped cement the public's mental models of object-based computing, but it lends a certain physical continuity that I think may not be as important anymore.
Trivial as it may be, my moment of clarity for this was in playing an iPhone solitaire game in which cards are not dragged, but rather the user touches the source, then the destination. I realized just how much less demanding this was than dragging (indeed Vance's comment about motor load), and how the animation of the cards supplied all the physical continuity required. I think dragging is still necessary when the user is required to select something on a continuum -- but for a simple target-to-target connection, a source-destination combination of taps may be all that's needed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46469 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
