Friday, July 1, 2011

Touch Screen User Experience

Touchscreens are becoming popular with their intutive design and ease of interaction, right from the mobile devices, Electronic Devices, Kiosk’s to ATM everywhere touchscreen has made a presence everywhere. Now a days key pads are replaced by touch screens


I also noticed couple of touchscreen applications/devices, where I got lost just because I wasn’t aware which gesture to use, as no proper guide was provided. I was suppose to pinch on an image to zoom it and I was trying to tap on it. these are all common problems we face. I want to provide


some of the guidelines which can improve the user experience of Mobiles


  1. Provide clear Navigation
  2. Use familiar Icons
  3. Make Icons, buttons, links and interfaces easily clickable
  4. Position and space the icons
  5. Use Simple language
  6. Maintain consistency and provide clear indications
  7. Implied Textural in Mobile Design
  8. Capture the richness of communication.

3 comments:

  1. Venkat, I also get a bit turned around in some apps. My cell phone is an older one with a qwerty keyboard and no data plan. My husband is the one on the iPhone. When I end up having to use his phone for anything, I always feel awkward. It's gotten better, but the experience still feel unintuitive.

    This is making my development of a mobile app for one of the individual projects for this class a bit more challenging and also more interesting. Since I'm not normally engaging these devices, I find myself learning about the possible behaviors as I go. As I learn what's possible, I'm also trying to figure out how to apply behaviors in a way that will be obvious to the user.

    So from what I've been experiencing doing designs lately, I'd add one more item to the list: "Go with convention." If users are familiar with a behavior to do a certain task, and your app has that task - don't try to be clever; go with convention so your users know what to do.

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  2. I think that point #3, that of making major elements more easily clickable, needs some "convention," as Briandy points out, in order to avoid some of the disasters I've seen recently.

    I was recently catching up on soccer-related news on my iPhone and landed on a site that would skip to previous/next articles if you slightly slid the page, respectively, either to the left or right. Unfortunately, the mechanism and the event being used to capture the required touch, aren't perfect; sometimes a delayed click on a link triggers the 'next article'-slide functionality, instead of bringing you to the link. This is obviously an attempt to emulate the iPhone's 'Photos' app navigation, but it may not be one suited for info-based platforms (sites).

    Thomas

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  3. You gave some very helpful points and I wish all phone companies would take note of it. Every time I have a new phone I have to start all over again by learning the particular signs and motions of that company. There should be some universal signs, movements and icons etc. so that we always know what to do, no matter what company we are with. CLEAR is the word indeed..!!

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