Category Archives: Touchscreens

I really like the idea of using a second finger as an amplifier of an action in multitouch systems.

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Looking at some apps for both iPhone and iPad, I discovered some of the best of them have placed controls in ways that best match the ergonomics of our hands while holding them, particularly the saddle joint of the human thumb, with its ability to roll in a particular almost-45 degree sweep. In order to access other parts of the screen requires a reach with the index finger or an extension of the thumb to access it. … Put the high-use controls in the Easy zones, and controls that are less used (and certainly those you don’t want accidentally pressed) in the Reach zones.

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Things to keep in mind when designing for different types of touchscreens.

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When it comes to touchscreen devices, we’re not making the best use of our fingers.

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Tablet computers offer a unique opportunity to rethink how we type, mostly because traditional touch typing doesn’t work well on them unless the tablet is resting on a flat surface, like a desk or a lap. But most of the time, we’re holding tablets, which turns typing into a process of hunt-and-peck with one hand while the other hand tries to hold the tablet steady. Keyboard solutions from mobile phones don’t work well either; they just aren’t designed for the larger screen space, and spaced out keys make for a Fitts’ Law nightmare.

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Fast Company has an article 3 Ways the iPad Could Kill QWERTY. I find it unlikely that QWERTY as a typing construct is going to go away, as the system and the keyboards we know now have evolved over decades to its current refined state. See, for instance, this collection of early typewriter keyboards. However, I do think tablet PCs such as the iPad offer other possibilities for typing, especially given that typing using touchscreen keyboards as they currently are, well, sucks.

Two new typing configurations I’ve considered revolve around how we hold tablet PCs. Typically, unless you are using a stylus, a tablet is held with two hands, with thumbs on the front or side of the device, and your four remaining fingers on the back. It’s a natural, grasping gesture for humans. This leans me to think there there could be two possible new typing methods: one typing using your fingers on the back of the device by making use of ghost fingers, and another typing with just your thumbs using the screen on the front of the device.

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What you have here is what I call cinematic reading. The “camera” moves from item to item like a camera would, or like your eye would if you were scanning the page, then stopping to read different items: text to partial image to fuller image to whole page, in a variety of configurations. You can, of course, manually override it via double tap or pinching/spreading. But it offers a solution that could be applied to other combinations of text and image: that is, reading that isn’t books or mostly text articles. Namely: magazines.

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After giving this talk over a dozen times over the last two years, I’ve decided to retire Tap is the New Click. Here are the slides.

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Conference phones suck. That’s what nearly everyone told us when we started talking to them about how they used their phones—often specially-designed, very expensive phones—for conference calls. We knew this, of course, since we’ve used and disliked them before ourselves (and probably you have too). That’s why we decided to design a new VOIP conference phone for small businesses.

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One of the great things about working at a company with both interaction and industrial designers is that when collaboratively designing a device, you have better control over where bits of its functionality are located: in the hardware or the software. At Kicker, we call the activity of figuring out where a feature “lives” Functional Cartography.

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