> For example, I never swiped physical book pages, by the way. Since childhood I turn a page by lifting its edge first with initial pinch motion towards the edge. For me "swiping" often lifts more than one page which is frustrating.
Yeah, that in particular was weird. Even the animation in the article subtly hints you at why you don't swipe pages in books: that's a quick way to get bent or torn pages. A sideways motion is literally the worst way to start a page flip, since the force you apply acts at the right angle to the motion you want, and instead is trying to compress the paper sheet.
The pinch gesture explanation was even weirder. Myself, I'd go for analogue of using finger swipes and two-finger motions to slide pieces of paper, or other small objects, on a desk. Only in that context pinching sort of comes up as a candidate zoom gesture - bringing small objects closer or further apart.
I think it's easy to explain both swipe and pinch and the author just misses the mark.
Device establishes a simple intuition: while you touch the screen you expect whatever is under your finger to follow where your finger goes until you lift it.
So within that intuition designer's job is to see what gestures are physically OK to do with a screen and what tasks the user needs to accomplish, and to come up with interactions that suitably bridge them together.
So it doesn't have anything to do with book reading or anything. In fact it misleads the readers. In reality designers establish a simple primitive intuition/map and build on top of it. Swipe and pinch are pretty much the two things you can work with on flat screen, and pinch is obviously zooming (per above), so there was no other way for them to do page turning
(If you are like me you probably noticed how this intuition breaks when you try to pinch or move stuff around to find out it's unmovable. This is also why in scroll lists it lets you scroll past the end: to satisfy the intuition.)
Yeah, that in particular was weird. Even the animation in the article subtly hints you at why you don't swipe pages in books: that's a quick way to get bent or torn pages. A sideways motion is literally the worst way to start a page flip, since the force you apply acts at the right angle to the motion you want, and instead is trying to compress the paper sheet.
The pinch gesture explanation was even weirder. Myself, I'd go for analogue of using finger swipes and two-finger motions to slide pieces of paper, or other small objects, on a desk. Only in that context pinching sort of comes up as a candidate zoom gesture - bringing small objects closer or further apart.