Customers bring habits from other products, even when your design expects them to start over.

I’ve gone from my iPad to my Mac, absent-mindedly touching the screen, then wondering why nothing happened.

Apparently, my finger has been waiting for Apple to catch up.

Yesterday Apple announced touchscreen MacBook Pros arriving November 6.

Image: Apple

For historical perspective, HP sold a touch-enabled personal computer back in 1983.

Even compared to the iPhone Duo’s 7-year lag behind folding-phone competitors, that’s a helluva entrance delay!

But my accidental glass-tapping points to something possibly more useful than another argument about who got there first.

Apple helped teach us that things on a screen should respond to our fingers.

Then, over on the Mac, it expected us to lose that habit.

Perfectly sensible product categories inside a company can turn into an annoying interruption for the person using them.

Sure, touch has some limitations.

Ordinary finger input lacks the hover state that reveals a tooltip before you click.

Small controls are harder to hit with fat fingers like mine, and repeatedly reaching toward an upright screen can tire out your arm.

Most trackpads already support efficient gestures, too. Pinching to zoom is hardly a breakthrough on a Mac.

The best addition is being able to reach directly for what you’re looking at, when that’s the obvious move.

You might tap a large control, then go back to the Magic Mouse for precise editing. Apple says touch will work alongside existing keyboard and trackpad interactions.

That’s the customer perspective behind I Need That: watch what people try to do before deciding how they ought to do it.

A feature can become extra valuable if another product has taught customers to expect it. Your own products could already be doing the teaching.

Those “mistaken” gestures in usability testing always deserve a closer look.

Please don’t make folks wait 41 years for what they really want!

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.