Touch interfaces vs traditional mouse and keyboard input

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

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.

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

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?)

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Articles (153)

2024-11-11 Write your own words
2024-11-10 Go Viral on X
2024-10-20 Marathon
2024-09-10 I see dead people
2024-05-11 Developing a native iOS app
2024-03-24 Half Marathon
2024-03-05 No, I Won't Build That!
2024-02-16 Vision Pro
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