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Comment by MrMetlHed | Hacker News Reader

This is how my 8-year-old works on her school Chromebook. And all of the kids at her school that I've seen using laptops are similar. Touch the screen to interact, type on the keyboard. I think they're just wired to believe every screen should be touchable and go with whatever is easiest for them in the moment.

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A touchscreen is a way more natural and intuitive interface than a mouse cursor driven by a trackpad.

If I'd never used a laptop before I'd probably do the exact same thing as the kids!

Exactly. Why on Earth would they default to touching something away from the screen that's an imperfect map to it when they can just touch the thing they want directly? I've seen so many people saying they don't understand and would never use a touchscreen on a laptop, and I just have to think they've not really been around non-technical adults or children.

Because the ergonomics are shit. Holding your arm up is tiring.

because it’s much further away. if you have your desktop adapted to be keyboard-driven, things that are far apart in 2d space may be very close in logical user-event space. same holds here. moving a single finger and clicking usually requires much less movement. and movements compound.

and your observation is not at all universal. moving a vehicle is much easier via a mapping to a more abstract control, as opposed to controls resembling the effector. this abstract control also fits many vehicles. the same is true for all sorts of controls.

You lose control without a desktop and mouse. I can't even begin to count the number of times I got hit with a dark pattern where an app steers me in a direction that I can't click out of because on touch interfaces, you have less control.

" you have less control."

Keyboard and mouse don't give you any more autonomy over the application developers state machine.

I'm not sure I understand the claim of "being in control". The UX is different, sure, often. But that's not "control" over the design of the application.

Sure they do, with KB/M against a browser app you can open the dev console, you can inspect element, you can do all sorts of things that you can't do in a native app for touchscreen only.

Exactly. I was planning to write these reasons but I refrained because the use cases are endless. It boils down to the fact that you can more easily escape the current context for something else.

That's an OS issue not a touch vs keyboard issue, therefore not related to what we're talking about. A phone can run an OS with devtools if you so choose, and a laptop with a desktop OS can have a touchscreen.

Browser developers implemented the dev console there. You are not reaching it ”just because you have kb/m”. You can reach dev tools as easily via touch on a pc with touch support.

I feel so constricted and frustrated when I have to use my phone. I often even put things off until I can get back to my computer.

On a touchscreen, I can tap. That's it. Select? Tap. Move? Tap. Highlight? Tap. The only one that makes sense is draging for moving, but even that's a pain in the butt because it often misinterprets the tap+hold duration that's necessary before it works. When I'm editing text (navigating, cut-n-paste, etc.), it gets what I want wrong more often than it gets it right, I mean like 80/20.

With the phone, they had a green field to design an entirely new UX for touch interfaces, so there's no legacy to blame.

For interacting with a UX that's designed around keyboard and mouse? I get how it's intuitive to reach out and touch something you can see, but in terms of much of the UX it doesn't make any sense.

Except that for computer screen you need to hold your hands up in the air, while with mouse and keyboard they basically rest upon the surface. That's far less tiring.

True, but this is only the case if the track pads are absolutely awful, like you get in very low quality Windows laptops.

Huh that's really interesting because my 12 year old has been using a school-provided chromebook for 3 years now and she and all her peers almost NEVER use the touchscreen, they use the trackpad almost exclusively. And I've watched her using her ipad too, and she uses the touchscreen when she's in (her words) "that kind of app" but if she's in Google Docs she's 100% trackpad.

I wonder if by the time she's 12 she'll switch over more and more. I suspect that the trackpad is just a little too disconnected in her brain for now, especially since we don't really do a lot of screens / laptops. I don't think pinching to zoom and scrolling quickly and tapping things far away from where the cursor is will go away easily though.

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