Marcin Wichary, at his site Aresluna, writes a terrific essay on the design evolution of “finger-friendly” interactions, copiously and exquisitely illustrated with custom-built interactive “playgrounds.” He uses typewriters and typing as a launchpad to explore the tremendous speed at which our fingers operate, seemingly independent of conscious thought, and the various ways we’ve designed machines and software to appear fast enough to keep up with our digital “time travelers”:

Our hands are amazing, our fingers are amazing, and our brains are amazing, too. Altogether they are capable of feats that not so long ago made absolutely no scientific sense – and sometimes still don’t today.

Artists and performers have known that intuitively for centuries. Today, a lot of creativity and productivity happen onscreen, but our interfaces do not often respect the fingers the same way older instruments did.

I want to tell you more about it, and about your responsibility, as a designer, to make sure they do.

Part of Wichary’s conclusion:

I think often delight is absence of delight. In places and apps that welcome fast fingers, delight can be abstaining from a transition or something cute but deathly. Pushing for delight of the right kind can mean long fights with frameworks to reduce even one-frame delays, tweaking CSS to allow no wasted pixels between icons (so you can click quickly without hesitation), an understanding of accessibility that goes beyond the surface, and testing and fine-tuning so that keyboard focus is continuous: always present in the right field, never delayed, never stolen by random popups.

And I am not sure if we, in the industry, fully internalized this.

His piece is a fantastic history lesson on typewriters (unsurprising considering his pedigree), and a thoughtful review of several clever and time-saving (or at least time-dilating) user interface designs (some of which, like thumb shifting, we’ve regrettably lost). You’ll be unsurprised to discover that many of these clever UI designs originate with (or were popularized by) Apple, even as Apple has regressed over the years with some of its design choices.

The essay is 7,700 words and includes 38 playgrounds. Set aside some time for the piece, and read it on a large screen so you can interact with those truly delightful playgrounds.