COVID has drastically altered the way the world has operated over the last year from social distancing guidelines to doing away with handshakes. The question is how different will things be going forward? Well, an increased emphasis on hygiene may be one positive outcome that comes out of this whole ordeal. And one way that could manifest itself is on a radically different touch screen design that would feature moving buttons so that we don’t have everyone always pressing on the same spot.
Fast Company explains:
“Even before the pandemic, grocery store touch screens were kind of gross. After grabbing unwashed produce and packs of raw meat, dozens of customers poked at the same checkout buttons. When was the last time they were cleaned? Who knows.
But a new idea out of the London-based design studio Special Projects fixes the hygiene heebie-jeebies that come with grocery store touchscreens. Called Moving Buttons, it intelligently moves the onscreen buttons for each customer, ensuring that two people never touch the same spot. The idea is a concept rather than a realized product, illustrated through simulated videos rather than an actual coded interface.
Granted, we now know that, while the SARS-CoV-2 virus can live on some surfaces for days, touching infected surfaces isn’t what’s driving the pandemic—and might not matter much at all. So self-sterilizing copper and pocket UV lights, while promising for the general spread of germs, won’t stop COVID-19. That said, the pandemic does seem to have awoken our inner Mr. Cleans, bringing to light the significance of curbing the spread of disease wherever possible.
And Moving Buttons feels like the perfect shared interface for a cleaner future. Its key insight is that it moves a button around the screen as users search for items or pay for orders. This approach is highly unconventional in interface design, to say the least.”
These screens only have so much surface area. Won’t people eventually touch the same spot as someone else or overlap on a spot someone else touched? Perhaps. But even still this approach is a lot better than the standardized screens we currently employ. Or at least a little bit cleaner.
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