Design for tables
Feb 08, 2010 In Design By Tim Aidlin 
Years ago, around the time of MIX06, I had a great conversation with a friend who was working on a design for the Microsoft Surface. He said he had to basically re-learn user interface design during the process, since Surface’s screen presented a totally new user experience: a horizontal interface that multiple users (and objects, for that matter) could approach from any direction — a far bigger challenge than a regular computer screen presents. In his office, he showed me a giant sheet of paper with arrows pointing inward from all directions. He said this reminded him just how different the Surface’s user experience was.
Now it’s about four years later, and Apple is poised to release the iPad, a quintessential “casual computing” device that has the potential to change the UI game for touch interfaces. If I’m not overstating the point, the iPad is likely to win where tablet computers (which have been commercially available for years) have failed: the design of its applications.
Just like the iPhone, the iPad will introduce significant, new design paradigms to an enthusiastic group of mobile software users. We can assume that software running on the iPad will be specifically designed for the iPad — not a Macbook or iMac. The software will also take fingers on the screen and the limited needs of a user looking for a very specific experience into account. Buttons will be big. Menus will flick and spin. We’ll pinch and spread. Eventually, the applications will evolve from just giant, modified iPhone apps.
While the iPad’s apps will advance from a mobile platform, current tablet PC apps often advance from the desktop experience. Tablet PCs are also full, robust computers when they might not necessarily have to be, and their user interfaces are designed for mouses (or touchpads at best). Fingers as input devices, simple mobile and social applications, geolocation, or the like are often overlooked. Of course there are exceptions, but still.
Digital designers have been designing for immobile screens that users can only interact with through artificial means, such as a mouse or pen, for too long. Now, however, we Windows developers should assume the users we’re designing for are internet-connected, mobile, and often a member of one or more social-networks. We can collect data and use open APIs to create connections. With the growing popularity of multi-touch enabled applications, our users can individually and collaboratively create like never before.
Additionally, as mobile devices, tablet PCs, gaming systems, and even television interfaces become more connected and available, the community will adopt new standards and metaphors. There is tremendous opportunity at this stage to absolutely re-imagine user interface and standard design patterns. Of course, we don’t have to throw everything out the window, but we *could* — and that’s very exciting.
As iPads, slates, and touch-screen-enabled mobile devices become more ubiquitous, I wonder if we’ll end up with many individual device-dependent interfaces, or if UI will begin adopting universal standards across multiple devices, just as the web coalesced around standards independent of browser, platform, or screen-size. Will platform/browser/screen user interface and user-experience standards fracture even more than they currently have? (See the HTML5 video debate, CSS3 browser-compatibility problem, or even standard forms, for example.) Or will user-interface and experience professionals develop a new vocabulary and metaphors that will span the current and next-generation methodologies of user-interaction?
There are some products — like the HP Touchsmart line of computers — that are building strong experiences, but this is just the beginning. And with the merging of the web, applications, and data in the cloud, it’s a very interesting time to be a designer or developer.
Are you using touch-enabled applications more these days? Do you develop them? What challenges have you faced migrating your skills? Have you seen something that’s changed the way you think about interaction? Drop us a note below, and be sure to follow us at @mixonline.
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Maybe not a good answer to your question, but I’m taking simple baby steps. I’m getting all my clients’ websites to display correctly on mobile devices. It’s a real booger, what with slide shows (no flash, please), interactive forms, and so on.
Today, I was taken aback to see the opinion that the iPhone OS (and by implication, the iPad OS) might be an analogue to IE6, and therefore, not a worthy target of intensive development tailoring. An interesting read: http://bit.ly/czYoLU
I am really excited about this type of technology because of my son, and the possibilities I see for children and adults that have autism.
From my observations of my own son, he tends to interact with his world by touch, while we might use words to express our desires, Autistic people speak different, and I see this device as a way to communicate with my son better.
Also with the way that microsoft Surface encourages social interaction while using the device, this is huge tool to teach autistic people the benifits of human interaction.
Not sure how long it will take before these types of devices will be in my price range, or even available to special schools. This is one technology I have been really excited about, not only from a developer stand point, but as a father, that see something that will benifit my son and all the other children out there, that could have the quality of their life changed because of devices like these.
I got a Dell SX2210T dual touch monitor for Christmas and immediately began designing touch applications for my daughter. Having already become accustomed to using my iphone for entertainment and educational apps, she’s pretty used to the touch interface and its limitations.
The interesting thing I found was that she was far more interested in using touch when it was simple button pressing and and selection (I wrote a preschool app that uses text-to-speech and asks her to select the correct sight word) than for drag and drop (another app let her drag lowercase letters to the same uppercase letters and made cute little “magic” sounds when she got them right). After playing around with it myself, I found my fingers and arms would get sore from dragging them across the screen.
I would encourage touch screen manufacturers to enable their monitors to tilt to extreme degrees to offset this kind of fatique.
Another interesting side effect was that she wanted to combine her fingers with a stylus at times. I have a Wacom Cintiq 21UX as my second monitor and she’s been drawing/painting on that for a couple of years now. It would be nice if all touch surfaces allowed for use of a stylus as well for finer uses like that.
Until then, for dragging and dropping she’s using the mouse and for drawing she simply drags the window halfway over to the Cintiq with her finger or the mouse, then takes it the rest of the way with the stylus. This is great for teaching her the power of different tools, but I think a single UI paradigm might be more intuitive :)
On a side note, most of my work is done in either Silverlight or WPF for Win7/64, but touch stuff seems to work pretty well even if you’re using Vista, and hardware support for multiple touch/pen interfaces is definitely more mature in Vista for now.