Pinch, Zoom, Tap – AGH!
If you’ve had your eyes open anywhere in public the last couple of years, you’d notice tablets and “phablets” are steadily taking over the role once occupied by knee heating, battery chewing laptops.
They are cheaper, cooler and run on native software – but we already know the benefits of tablets.
You need to be aware your users will, if they aren’t already, be browsing through your site on some form of tablet in the future.
This makes it imperative to design your web elements for touch.
Here at Wiliam, we tend to hammer the whole touch thing home in our kickoff workshops for a new project.
I offer one example.
What’s wrong with this menu for touch driven users? (if you’re on a tablet you can probably see it already).
By contrast, this is the new CBA tablet site. These fields are big, inviting and so prominent even the fattest fingers will have no trouble activating the right one.
In short, think big, think simple. I don’t want to have to do the two finger splits on my ipad to zoom right in to the form field I want. I want that form field to be huge.
If it’s a menu, I want the choices to be clearly separated – I really shouldn’t have to any more zooming just to use the menu.
These are just a couple of things to bear in mind when considering tablet users, but there are plenty more.
Wiliam are specialists in adaptive design and take pride in our user centric approach to the web.
