Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces (eBook)

Table of Contents

1. Defining Mobile Devices — The first chapter describes different devices in the context of their unique attributes of portability, connectivity, and awareness. We’ll come to understand how important it is to understand mobile technology and use patterns, and become aware that mobile paradigms are influencing more traditional computing platforms.
2. The History and Technology of Touch — Chapter 2 reviews the evolution of direct screen interaction dating back to the 1950s, and the development of commercialized touch since the 1980s. Today’s devices can be better understood by learning how touch technology advanced before achieving ubiquity through capacitive touch.
3. Capacitive Touch — Chapter 3 addresses how capacitive touch intersects with human behavior and impacts our design work.
4. Standards, Assumptions, and Problems — We’ll learn how various standards, assumptions, and problems can be problematic for designers of today’s mobile touchscreens. The specifications, norms, and principles of earlier times are sometimes not to be trusted as they are too often based on technological assumptions that no longer apply.
5. Finding Out How People Hold and Touch — Chapter 5 covers the observational research Stevn Hoober conducted to discover how people actually manipulate their mobile phones and tablets in everyday use. Through debunking some widely accepted but incorrect assumptions, we’ll learn most of all to change the way we think about designing for touch, because while there are many ways to hold a device, everyone uses them all, constantly shifting from one to another.
6. Touch Accuracy and the Center-Out Preference — To understand touchscreen performance, Steven undertook several studies and found that popular notions of touch accuracy and preferred touch regions are wrong. He discusses this in chapter 6 and shows that people favor the middle of the screen for both reading and touching.
7. How Fingers Get In the Way — Every mobile device user has experienced how fingers get in the way, and in chapter 7, you’ll learn how our designs can take into account the ways people adapt their touch to perform different actions like tapping and scrolling, and to overcome problems of visibility and interactivity.
8. Imprecision and Probability — Chapter 8 covers the issues around imprecision and probability and shows how we need to design systems, interactions, and processes that prevent mistakes — especially avoiding catastrophe when mistaken taps are made.
9. Phones Are Not Flat — Mobile devices are used in all kinds of locations and people handle them constantly. People and their environments can be confusing, confounding, and unpredictable. Chapter 9 describes ways we can consider likely problems when planning the design of our apps and websites.
10. People Only Touch What They See — We start to move into tactics — with a little less theory, data, research, and background info. Chapter 10 covers best practices in how the UIs of interactive elements are designed to attract the eye, afford action, be readable, and inspire confidence that they can be safely tapped.
11. 1, 2, 3 — Designing by Zones — In chapter 11, Steven introduces the concept of information design, describes how human vision is not what it appears to be, and then turns all that we’ve learned so far into a simple formula we can all use to create well-organized, usable templates for touchscreen design.
12. Progressive Disclosure — Shifting from template theory to template creation practice, in Chapter 12, we’ll review the pros and cons of some of the most important page design elements, such as menus, lists, floating bars, and tabs, to see how they can integrate with the concept of information design for center-out touchscreen products.
13. Practical Mobile Touchscreen Design — We’ll finish off by skimming lightly over more or less the entire process of designing digital touchscreen products, from teams to strategy and onward. From these resources we can start building a reference library of how to pursue each aspect of the design process.