Car Metaphors

I recommend reading Don Norman’s article “Gesture Wars“. It is a great review of scrolling and panning history from somebody who remembers.

He writes about confusion and chaos provoked by gesture innovations of Apple, Microsoft and Google and other vendors who feel that they have to implement their own design philosophy, especially when it comes to scrolling.
Norman claims:

“Not only is there incompatibility among the vendors, but given the lack of any cues on the devices, it is very difficult to remember the gestures. We are back to the days of command-line interfaces where everything had to be memorized, or looked up in a manual.”