Generation gaps are getting shorter and shorter. Add gestural navigation to the list of generation partitions. Soon, your 25-year-old co-worker will be grousing about teenagers making fun of people who insist on using a mouse and keyboard.

Don’t laugh. The moment may not be all that far off.

Where we are.
It’s difficult for many people to get their brain around life without a keyboard and mouse, but for a burgeoning number of people who text and navigate the Web on their touchscreen smartphone, it’s not such a stretch. Using gestures to navigate is easy, natural and practical.

Gestural navigation—the simple, intuitive process of using gestures to scroll up or down, flip through photos, shrink and enlarge content and navigate the Web—will one day have us shaking our head, wondering what took us so long to get rid of the keyboard and mouse. Cloud computing promises to take us even further away from the desktop paradigm, but that’s a whole other discussion.

Where we’re headed.
As mobile computing and smartphone usage grows, navigational technology is likely to replace the standard mouse/keyboard setup. Kids who grow up with on-the-go information access will have little trouble moving away from desktop productivity toward hand-held productivity and all it implies with regard to navigation. 

The mouse-less, keyboard-less Apple iPad aims to push traditional navigation one step closer to obscurity. Even if the iPad doesn’t catch on as Apple envisions, the direction in how we navigate is unmistakable.

What’s changing most rapidly is the idea that you don’t have to be tethered to information. Touchscreens allow the keyboard to come to you with a simple click. Using your Webcam to scan a code and access product information that gives you instant access to ecommerce mode is more de rigueur than futuresque. For marketers, this means digital marketers must routinely add executions that work well on hand-held devices. It means that highly targeted and personalized marketing becomes the expectation, not the exception. On a device that conforms to you, marketing must also conform.  

Looking forward.
It’s clear that smartphones and touchscreens are transforming on-the-go consumption and moving productivity from the desktop to hand-held devices. 

So what’s a keyboard-free world going to look like? We enjoy hints of it already. Augmented reality lets you simply point your phone’s camera to add graphics, sounds and other sensory enhancements over a real-world environment.

If you’ve seen Jeff Han’s amazing TED Conference presentation on multi-touch sensing, you have a firm grasp of where the touchscreen/gestural navigation movement is headed. 

This generation gap that’s growing around how people navigate and access information is not to be ignored from a marketing perspective. We’ve been down this road before, when online marketing was in its infancy not so long ago and marketers were widely split on whether to adjust budgets accordingly. Although the budget battles continue, it’s clear that online marketing is solidly legit. Now, mobile is the rising tide and with it, we’re seeing a new navigational model forming that is practical, natural, and unmistakably promising for users and marketers. So promising, it may lead to your keyboard being added to the museum collection of outdated technologies, right next to typewriters, 8-track tape players, mimeograph machines and the like.