Gestures must help users to navigate, take actions and manipulate content (Material.io).
Gestures must be as easy as possible to carry out. Consider screen reader interaction modes - see Accessibility (WCAG 2.1).
The app design must use standard and familiar gestures (iOS Human Interface Guidelines) including:
- Tap
- Scroll
- Swipe
- Pan
- Hold and drag
- Pinch
Single Tap
Single tap gestures must allow navigation, perform actions, and make selection choices within the app (Material.io, iOS Human Interface Guidelines).
App design must reveal the following functionality through a single tap gesture:
- Buttons, Menu items and Data fields: provides item selection
- Top or Botton menu items: provides navigation
- Bottom menu item: scrolls to top of page and refreshes data (if appropriate)
- Top of screen: scrolls to top of page
- Action button: performs the action, such as log out
- Text box: allows data entry
- Tick boxes: selects a Tick box
- Higher level components, such as top level patient information: reveals lower level components, such as patient contact details
Scroll
Scroll gestures must allow navigation through continuous information (Material.io, iOS Human Interface Guidelines), including:
- Lists and notifications
- Body text
- Lists of menu items, such as settings
Scroll gestures must only scroll through one view at a time – do not nest one scroll view within another, on one page (iOS Human Interface Guidelines).
Swipe
Swipe gestures must allow navigation, and actions within the app, (Material.io, iOS Human Interface Guidelines) including:
- Go back to previous page, using swipe right
- Transition across related categories on a single page - a sibling transition
- Reveal or complete action e.g. delete or acknowledge
- Move through a tutorial
- Swipe down to refresh
- ‘Paging’ through multiple tutorial pages
- Acknowledge a notification or alert
- Reveal delete button
If a back button provides navigation to a previous page, the back swipe gesture must allow navigation to a previous pages, as an alternative method.
Pan
Pan gestures must allow users to move elements in any direction: for example, moving in any direction through map (Material.io)
Hold and Drag
The app design can use hold and drag gestures if required (Material.io, iOS Human Interface Guidelines): for example, hold and drag items on to-do list to change order.
Pinch
The app design can use Pinch gestures if required, to allow the user to zoom: for example, to zoom in on photo.
Icons
Icons can communicate the gesture available (Material.io), such as a refresh icon appearing when swiping down on a page, which remains visible until the refresh action is complete.