

Best Practices of Touch Screen Interface Design - wmeredith
http://www.voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/05/best-practices-of-touch-screen-interface-design/
A collection of lessons learned (and a few ignored for the sake of aesthetics) while designing and research the design of a Mobile Safari (iPhone/iPod Touch) web app.
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sanj
The Newton provided some nice UI guidelines. One of the ones I liked was
putting controls on the bottom of the screen and the results/display on the
top. This prevented your hand from obscuring the results.

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wmeredith
That's a good point. I've appended it to bullet point #7.

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sanj
I think that direct manipulation on a touch screen is a big deal.

"Grabbing" an object by touching it and then being able move it is an even
better illusion on a touch screen than with a mouse. And it is delightful.

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ComputerGuru
But "grabbing" is a less-efficient solution. Just as moving the mouse around
may be less efficient than typing on that keyboard; grabbing stuff to interact
with them can be a waste of time. More intuitive != more productive; and the
current problem (IMHO) with mobile devices is that they have such low
efficiency rates that their productivity _despite_ the advantage of being
always on and always with you still suffers (as a result of size, awkwardness,
and time-consuming adaptations we need to use).

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sanj
I totally disagree. Building a handheld application requires getting into the
mindset of the UI that it requires. I say this having worked on handhelds for,
um, 15 years now.

And you're _badly_ undervaluing delight.

Let me give a concrete example from my own work.

A buddy an I wrote a text-adventure parser so you could play stuff like Zork
and HHGTTG on the Newton. It worked really well and was reasonably popular at
least partly based on the interface.

Understand that you _always_ have access to a keyboard on the Newton -- there
was even an external one.

But what we did was to have a word automatically entered on the input box when
you tapped on that word above in the description.

That was scads faster than tapping something out. And made users wicked happy.

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ComputerGuru
Thanks for sharing your experience in this field. But (and forgive me if I'm
mistaken) your application was a special exception where the option of using
the touchscreen UI made more sense, just as the Nintendo DS has a usability
edge with its touchscreen. But for the more-general "productivity"
applications - from email clients to word processors to graphics design
software (where the "word bias" isn't an issue), I don't see touchscreens
being the more efficient way to go.

In my opinion, delight is great, but not when it comes at the expense of
productivity. For games and leisure, productivity is a non-issue and - you're
absolutely right - delight and simplicity should be the developer's number one
focus. But for productivity tools, making things easier and quicker to get
done is the most important thing. There's nothing more frustrating than
banging out an email on a touch-screen keyboard; for productivity tools,
increased productivity _is_ the delight.

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sanj
So perhaps point #8 should be:

don't use a touchscreen when you shouldn't.

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nirmal
Good to see that this is being blogged about. There's been a lot of research
done to find the most efficient button sizes for handheld touchscreens. I
think the next big push is going to involve design guidelines for truly mobile
apps, apps you use while actually navigating the world and not stopping to
work.

See <http://www.mediateam.oulu.fi/publications/pdf/1076.pdf> for a paper
called "Target size study for one-handed thumb use on small touchscreen
devices". It's a good starting point.

I had to think about this hard when we created Mobiphos,
<http://nirmalpatel.com/mobiphos.pdf> to study mobile collocated photo
sharing.

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wmeredith
Yes, I whole heartedly agree. This is one of the strengths of touch screen
interfaces. Reaching out and manipulating something is just about the most
natural way to interact with it. Just watch a baby for a few minutes, they're
instinct is to touch everything.

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ComputerGuru
It could be argued that the reason they touch is because they haven't learned
to use other (more efficient) senses in-tandem with the unique human ability
to deduce and comprehend. We can touch things to see what they do, or we can
process what we see and hear to arrive at the same conclusion but with less
physical effort and in less time.

