Category: Touchscreen

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? 139: Every Time We Touch—Josh Clark, author of “Designing For Touch”

Author Josh Clark on The Big Web ShowTOUCH introduces physicality to designs that were once strictly virtual, and puts forth a new test: How does this design feel in the hand? Josh Clark’s new book, Designing For Touch, guides designers through this new touchscreen frontier, and is the launchpad for today’s Big Web Show conversation.

In a fast-paced, freewheeling conversation, Josh and I discuss why game designers are some of our most talented and inspiring interaction designers; the economy of motion; perceptions of value when viewing objects on touchscreen versus desktop computer; teaching digital designers to think like industrial designers (and vice-versa); long press versus force touch; how and when to make gestures discoverable; and much more.

Sponsored by DreamHost and BrainTree. Big Web Show listeners can save 15% when ordering Designing For Touch at abookapart.com with discount code DFTBIGWEB. Discount valid through the end of January 2016.

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Big Web Show Episode ? 139
Big Medium
Designing For Touch

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A Book Apart books Mobile The Profession Touchscreen writing

Designing For Touch

Designing For Touch, by Josh Clark, new from A Book Apart

DESIGN’S future is in your hands. Designing For Touch by Josh Clark (foreword by Brad Frost) guides you through the new frontier in design.

I’ve been a fan of Josh Clark’s since before he was “Josh Clark”—back when he invented Couch to 5K, and gave it away with no strings (or copyrights or trademarks or patents, Lord help us) attached. And I’ve followed Josh’s career as an interaction design consultant, public speaker, and author. Guy’s got it all: intelligence, perspective, and the ability to not just communicate, but persuade. He’s a down-to-earth futurist with old-fashioned showmanship. And all that Josh Clark goodness has found its way into his new book.

Josh genuinely wants designers to not only keep up with the touchscreen but also to reimagine it. Designing For Touch will teach novice and seasoned designers alike about ergonomic demands (and rules of thumb), layout and sizing for all gadgets, an emerging gestural toolkit, and tactics to speed up interactions and keep gestures discoverable. You’ll get the know-how to design for interfaces that let your users touch—stretch, crumple, drag, flick—information itself. And the inspiration to take touch to the next level.

Our little publishing company proudly presents Designing For Touch by Mister Josh Clark. Go get your hands on it.

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The Web Comes of Age – DIBI Keynote Address by Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman – The Medium Comes of Age from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

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Design mobile software Standards State of the Web Touchscreen Usability User Experience UX

Touch-based App Design for Toddlers

As always, Luke Wroblewski nails it:  

When kids interact with software they explore and engage with anything that looks interesting. Especially if it looks like content. Graphical user interface components don’t.

Consider the example of Dr. Seuss’s ABC book on the iPad. The intro screen uses colorful blobs to bring attention to large hit targets. But tap on one of these elements and up pops a standard modal menu asking you to select from one of three options. Modal menu dialogs and kids don’t mix.

More at lukew.com.

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My other iPad is a Kindle

Zeldman.com as seen on Kindle

The new Kindle has a lot going for it. It’s inexpensive compared to a full-featured tablet computer like the iPad; you can slip it in your back pocket, where it’s more comfortable than an old-style paperback; and it includes a Webkit browser. This last point is where folks like us start to give a hoot, whether we’re fans of epub reading or not.

The flavor of Kindle’s browser concerns us because it affords us the ability to optimize the mobile viewing experience with a single line of markup. You can see this in action in the photo at the head of this article (published and discussed on Flickr).

I made no tweaks for Kindle per se; the Kindle is simply responding to a line of markup I’ve been putting into my web pages since 2007—namely, the viewport meta element, which controls the width of the viewport, thus enabling mobile devices with a limited number of pixels to focus all available pixels on your site’s core content (instead of, for instance, wasting part of the small screen on a background color, image, or gradient). The technique is as simple as web design gets:

meta name="viewport" content="width=770"

(Obviously, the value of “width” should be adjusted to match your site’s layout.)

I learned this little trick from Craig Hockenberry’s Put Your Content in My Pocket (A List Apart, August 28, 2007), which I naturally recommend to any designer who hasn’t seen it.

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More Mod on the Digital Book

Embracing the Digital Book by Craig Mod.

A Reading Heatmap: Key passages illuminated by layering all readers’ highlights for the same text.

LAST MONTH, he wowed us with Books in the Age of the iPad, a call to make digital books as beautiful as printed ones. This month, Craig Mod is back with Embracing the Digital Book, an article (or blog post if you must) that begins as a critique of iBooks and Kindle and moves on to discuss the e-reader of our dreams, complete with reasoned social features:

I’m excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book.

We need to step back for a moment and stop acting purely on style. There is no style store. Retire those half-realized metaphors while they’re still young.

Instead, let’s focus on the fundamentals. Improve e-reader typography and page balance. Integrate well considered networked (social) features. Respect the rights of the reader and then — only then — will we be in a position to further explore our new canvas.

Embracing the digital book — Craig Mod

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Design interface ipad iphone Tools Touchscreen User Experience UX

Touch Gesture Reference Guide

The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces including iPhone, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Android, and more.

The guide contains an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands. It tells how to use these gestures to support major user actions; provides visual representations of each gesture to use in design documentation and deliverables; and additionally provides an outline of how popular software platforms support core touch gestures. All in seven pretty PDF pages. It was conceived, researched, illustrated, and designed by Craig Villamor, Dan Willis, Luke Wroblewski, and Jennifer Rhim (document design).

Platform support information comes from the following sources: