Column: Mobile Matters

In my last column, Part 1 of this series, I reviewed my research and analyzed on how people hold, touch, and view mobile phones and tablets. I even provided some guidelines on how to design for touchscreen mobile devices. Now, I’m going to explain how I arrived at those guidelines, going into more detail about everything I’ve learned. Looking beyond simple design tactics, this column describes what people actually do and will help you to understand why they interact with their phones and tablets the way they do.

Design Guidelines for Fingers, Touch, and People

For many years, I have performed foundational research, as well as research that was incidental to my design work. From this research, I have learned a great many things about how people hold, touch, and view smartphones. In fact, because I had gathered data on many different things, it had actually started to get confusing. Read More

Touchscreens have been with us for decades—and they’ve been the mobile input method of choice for many of us for about 5 years. In fact, many junior designers and developers—or at least those who were late to the mobile party—have never owned a mobile phone for which buttons were the primary input method.

But there are still very few designers who seem to know how touchscreens actually work or how people really interact with them. In my work as a UX design consultant, working for many different organizations, I’ve encountered lots of myths and half-truths about designing for touchscreens. Read More

I often say that desktop computing—and especially the desktop Web—made the practice of interaction design lazy, by promulgating assumptions that are not always true outside of this narrow domain. With the massive scale of mobile device usage, most of these assumptions are becoming a bit of a problem.

One key area that surprises a lot of designers and developers that I have worked with is input methods. Yes, they know that users don’t have a mouse, but there’s still an unstated assumption that all desktop Web input widgets will work. Perhaps more troubling is that their personal preferences and rumors sometimes supplant data regarding the kinds of actual experiences that exist out in the world.

I’m referring to the presumption that everyone has a touch-screen smartphone. [1] On development discussion forums, some developers say they’ve “never owned anything other than a touch-screen phone”—and of course, all of their friends have touch-screen smartphones, too. But anecdotes, fanaticism, or even conspiracy theories about why your favorite platform is the best really do not help. [2] Read More