Hacker News Reader

Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

I picked up a Dell touchscreen laptop and literally have never used the touchscreen. I even forgot it has it. I just can’t see any reason to use it and how it’s better.

View on HN

I probably use it for around 10-15% of navigation and scrolling on web sites. It's not a case of "I'm on a web site designed for a touch device, I will therefore now start poking the screen", but more along the lines of noticing it'd be much quicker to work a sequence of buttons by touch than by tap.

Touch is definitely much faster to get through certain styles of forms. The first that came to mind where I'd often tend to touch is the TFL (Transport for London) journey planner.

Does {tab}/{space} not work in some forms?

As it happens, tabbing around a badly designed form often doesn't work correctly. Then there are UI with hundreds of focusable inputs where while tabbing might work correctly, is extremely cumbersome and slow to use.

This is not to suggest replacing a keyboard with a touchscreen, any more than suggest a keyboard is no longer required since a mouse or trackpad is available. It's just an additional form of input, and one I'd personally definitely miss.

I agree with you. The keyboard/mouse has been a standard input combination for PCs since the 80s. Maybe it's time we added touch to the standard. Seems some additional input methods are likely well past due.

My work provided laptop has a touch screen. I only ever use it when I'm trying to point out something on the screen and touch the screen by accident. It's always jarring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com