In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface.
Lukas Mathis, Gestures from Ignore the Code
Possible solution: use complex gestures only as shortcuts:
Instead of forcing people to learn complex gestures, such gestures could be offered as optional shortcuts, offering quicker access to certain features for those people who are willing to learn the gestures.
An example of this can be seen on the iPhone, when deleting an element in a list view. You can either touch the «Edit» button to activate the «Edit list» mode, which allows you to delete list entries. Or you can swipe across an individual entry and delete it this way; the gesture is not obvious, but this doesn’t matter since it is not the primary way of deleting list entries, but merely a shortcut.
Gestures may be harder to discover than elements of a GUI, but they are also a lot more fun to discover. In time, as we internalize all the potential ways that we are able to touch interfaces, complex gestures will become more easily discoverable.
