Best practices for touch screen user interface design

Creating intuitive natural interfaces

June 24, 2020 - Willem L. Middelkoop

Past weeks I have been working on a new app involving personal health. The main challenge is to come up with an intuitive, natural interface that works well on small touch screen devices. But what is it that makes an touch screen interface any good? Read along for some best practices.

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Directly manipulating the on screen elements feels natural - a mouse in this use case would be redundant

Recreating old UI patterns on a modern touch screen device is not going to win you any usability awards... (although, who doesn't miss Clippy?)

Snake '97 - It's fun, but it's UI design is arguably bad

The big 'yes/no' buttons reduce the likelihood of error as they do not require mouse pointer pixel precision

The Back / Hide / Save buttons are near the thumb: they are within range and reaching for them does not cover the contents of the screen

Contextual keyboards provide a better way to enable textual input. It makes no sense to show a full QWERTY-keyboard if you only ask for a numeric value.

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Articles (148)

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