How to Choose a Good Gesture
When it comes to incorporating gestures in your UI it’s essential to know your market and the other apps your target audience may be using. Try to employ the same types of gestures in your app. This way, you aren’t only optimising your UI based on your target market’s behaviour, but also designing a more comfortable approach for users right from the beginning.Teaching Gestures
Gestures are a must in every mobile app but it’s always a challenge to make them obvious for users. Touch interfaces provide many opportunities to use natural gestures like tap, swipe and pinch to get things done, but unlike graphical user interface controls, gesture-based interactions are often hidden from users. So unless users have prior knowledge that a gesture exists, they won’t try. Therefore design for discovery is crucial. You need to be sure you provide the right cues—visual signifiers that help users discover easily how they can interact with an interface.Avoid Tutorials and Walkthroughs During Onboarding
Tutorials and walkthroughs are quite a popular practice for gesture-driven apps. Incorporating tutorials in your app in many cases means showing some instructions to the user to explain the interface. However, a UI tutorial isn’t the most elegant way to explain the core functionality of an app. The major problem with upfront tutorials is that users have to remember all of those new ways of using the app once they get in. Too much information at once might lead to more confusion. For example, the Clear app starts with a mandatory 7-page tutorial and users have to patiently read all the information and try to commit it to their memory. That’s bad design because it requires users to work upfront even before they actually try the app.
Educate in Context of the Action
When it comes to teaching users to use your UI, I would recommend doing so mainly by educating in the context of the action (when a user actually needs it). In order to teach people a new gesture you have to start slowly. Given some iteration, instructions can be transformed into a more gradual discovery. Use just in time tips and focus on explaining a single interaction rather than trying to explain every possible action in the user interface. Hint at gestures by providing obvious, contextual clues. Below you can see a gesture education screen from the YouTube app for Android. The app has a gesture-based interaction but doesn’t use a tutorial to instruct users. Instead, it uses hints that appear on the first launch for new users, one at a time as the user reaches the relevant section of the app. The technique is based on text commands which prompt users to perform a gesture and describes the result of the interaction with a short and clear description.
Use Animation to Communicate Gestures
Gestures, usable as they are, would be nothing without animation. As a designer, you can make use of animation to convey information about available actions. For example, in order to make users aware that they can interact with a certain element, you can create a text command right on the interactive element and animate the result of interaction as shown in example below.



Conclusion
While it’s true that touch gestures are mostly invisible to us, there are a number of design techniques that can give users a peek at what’s possible. Just in time tips, animation cues and content teases are some of the ways hidden gestures can be revealed.Nick Babich
Fireart Studio is a design studio passionate about creating beautiful design for startups & leading brands. We pay special attention to nuances all the time to create professional while cool products that will not only meet all expectations, but exceed them.
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