You don’t know what touch is, until you’ve used it.<\/p>\n
I’ve been using a touch based mobile phone (an HTC Hero, running Android 1.5) for the last 4 or 5 days, and I’m convinced that everyone who is in the technology space must<\/em> use a touch based device as one of their primary devices for at least a week. <\/p>\n I’m not asking you to switch to an iPad permanently. I’m not saying that the iPhone is better than your Nokia or your Blackberry. I’m not saying that touch will kill the keyboard. All I am saying is that touch is different, and the only way to really understand it is to use it for a while. After you’ve understood touch, you can go back to your favourite input interface. But remember, that if you’re in the business of technology, touch will be a major part of the lives of a major part of your customer-base in the foreseeable future – and it’s different enough that for every product you put out, you must ask yourself, how will this appear on a touch based device.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Here are some reasons:<\/p>\n Yes, in theory, I knew that interacting with a program using a touch based device is very different from interacting with it using a mouse and a keyboard. I already knew these things:<\/p>\n However, it is only after using the phone myself for day-to-day tasks that I realized that there are a hundred little things that make things different<\/em>. For example:<\/p>\n There’s a whole bunch of tiny issues like these that can completely kill a user experience unless the app has been specifically designed for the touch interface, by someone who actually uses a touch interface (as opposed to someone who’s just imagining the touch interface).<\/p>\n In spite of all the issues I pointed out above, I’m convinced that touch is a very intuitive interface, and is a huge improvement over mouse+keyboard for a large number of applications. Enough has been written about this on the web, so I will not repeat those arguments here. If you’ve not heard those arguments before, you should befriend Google.<\/p>\n But the point is that whether you like it or not, a major fraction of your customers\/consumers will be using touch to consume your content. So, get with the program. <\/p>\n I somehow had this vague notion that the people who really need to spend time understanding touch are those who are building iPhone or Android apps. Then, while using my device, I realized that I was visiting a lot of vanilla websites using my mobile phone browser. And some of those sites sucked.<\/p>\n So, even if you’re not a mobile app developer, you still need to worry about touch. If you have any website out there, if you’ve put out any content on the web, you should spend some time in understanding how your content shows up on touch devices. <\/p>\n And, yes, this even applies to you if you don’t have anything really to do with the UI of whatever it is that you’re working on. The UI is the only thing about your product that the end user (the person who’s paying) interacts with. So better make sure you take an interest in that.<\/p>\n That’s right. You need to use a touch device as one of your primary devices for about a week before you “get” some of these issues. You need to view your content, or use your app, using that device to really understand.<\/p>\n I can count a long list of friends who played with a touch based device for about 15 minutes (mostly playing some games, and a photo album) before deciding that they’ve seen enough. But, good UI is about deciding which inconveniences does the user get used to over time, and which ones continue to remain a pain. And the only way you’ll know that is by going through it yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Touch is different<\/h3>\n
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Touch will be a major part of your life<\/h3>\n
It’s not just about mobile apps<\/h3>\n
I said “primary device” and “1 week”<\/h3>\n