Common mistakes when designing for touch screens

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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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.

Navigation structures that rely on hovering are NOT going to work on touch screens

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

Catapulting birds is fun because of the natural interaction that is key to the Angry Birds game

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

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Articles (148)

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2024-03-05 No, I Won't Build That!
2024-02-16 Vision Pro
2024-01-16 Health and fitness data
2023-12-15 Backup Rotation Scheme
2023-11-10 Apple Watch as Phone
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