Designing for Touch

Design

Handheld apps that work by touch require you to design not only how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand. This workshop explores the ergonomic challenges and interface opportunities for designing mobile touchscreen apps.

Learn how fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head and require you to leave behind familiar design patterns.

Josh will present nitty-gritty "rule of thumb" design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps that inform and delight.

Who is this workshop for?

This is a workshop aimed at designers, developers, and information architects making the transition from desktop to touchscreen apps for mobile and tablet devices.

What will you learn?

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

• Discover ergonomic guidelines for comfortable tapping and what that means for the visual layout of mobile apps.
• Devise interface metaphors that invite touch and create emotional attachment.
• Explore how touch suggests subtle cues for how your app works, and learn how to make use of this new class of affordances.
• Learn why buttons are a hack. Tap into direct manipulation of content to encourage exploration in ways that traditional controls cannot.
• Design gesture interactions, and learn techniques to help people discover unfamiliar gestures on their own.
• Train in gestural jiujitsu, the dark art of using awkward gestures for "defensive design" and protecting against accidental mistaps.
• Explore the psychology behind screen rotation and the opportunities and pitfalls it creates for designers.
• Find out how the form and context of tablets create different interface requirements from phone handsets.

Cage Match: Mobile Web vs. Native App

Get ready to rumble with this mobile battle royale: native app vs mobile web. Your referee Josh Clark pits the polish of native apps versus the accessibility of the web to help you choose the right platform for your app and audience. It's a decision that hinges not only on tech specs or audience reach, but also on subtle cultural differences, user needs, and audience personalities. (Hold onto your seats, folks, the winner of this prize fight may surprise you.)