The main purpose of most computing interfaces is efficiency. There's nothing more annoying for anybody using a computer than sluggishness, the inability to produce the right results or seemingly unnecessary waiting time. At any point in time during the computing experience, the person in front of the machine has a goal in mind and wants to make steps towards it. We've grown so accustomed to this efficiency that anything that slows us down is seen as a problem and we only have little patience for any distraction. And if we fall into the trap of clicking on a hyperbolic link on the web ('Data analysts hate her! Mom discovers one weird trick for finding insights') or lose ourselves in hour-long TV tropes or Wikipedia binges, we feel the sting of guilt throughout.
Jacob Nielsen has called this very purpose-driven behavior lean-forward: We're deeply engaged and treat computers and the web as an active media. This is in contrast to TV, books or magazines, which is about passive consumption, entertainment and lean-back.
Computers as active media are usually a good thing. It really helps us getting things done (even though our innate training of 'click to make something happen' is sometimes highjacked by click bait and other attention parasites). But at the same time it also restricts our openness for new things and locks us into a very narrow mindset. Seemingly unrelated but possibly relevant information is brushed away as distraction and ruthlessly ignored.
Especially with visualizations, having an open mind is central for them being any use at all. As Ben Shneiderman famously stated: 'the purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures'. And while these mysterious insights stay conveniently ill-defined throughout all of visualization research literature, we all know what they are: sudden bursts of intuition und understanding about the underlying dataset. Encountering them follows no clear process and is usually an unpredictable combination of visual pattern recognition, perseverance and sheer luck. And discovering insights in even the best visualization with our goal-obsessed, notification-riddled web minds is a real challenge.
Tablets and touch visualizations could change that: for some reason (missing notification features? marketing spin? body posture?) people treat tablets more like passive, lean-back consumption devices such as TVs or magazines. Tablet owners stay longer on a single website, read longer articles, and also spend more money online. When interacting with tablets, we're less stubborn and goal-driven, want to be entertained and instead of shunning it even look for distraction. Even though there is still discussion whether tablets are truly lean-back media or if the difference is more between bed, knee and breakfast use, they definitely cause different behavior than smartphones or desktops and treat us to a different mindset.
Visualization could greatly benefit from this automatism. Just by changing the medium from desktop to tablet, people approach visualizations with a more open mind and increase their chances of stumbling on insights. Using a touch visualization turns us into lean-back analysts - not fiercely driven by the unnerving urge for efficiency, but open for unexpected discoveries in our data and new insights.
And both tablets and desktops can even work in concert: desktop visualizations for the more clearly defined analysis processes and touch visualizations for the lucky breaks, the penicilins and Teflons.
So, despite the seemingly major differences in display-sizes and interaction modes, the actual difference between regular and touch visualizations might be purely in our heads.