Designing for touch and mobile

What’s possible on mobile and how to design for touch

Toby Vincent of Smudge Apps came from Christchurch to speak to the November meeting. He described his young and very successful company which he set up with Ben Rijl in 2008. Toby is a very entertaining speaker and we’re glad he made the trip.

Toby talked about our mental models and how our existing ideas make us impose our thoughts on design objects. We’re all familiar with books, so we understand the Kindle layout, for instance. But designers must choose models that are familiar to all users, an example being that there’s no point in choosing pre-digital cameras as young people are not familiar with them.  App designers find that being fun can hide many shortcomings – the halo effect – but it does wear off after a while.

Toby’s tips

• When designing apps it’s important to ask people for as little info as possible.
• Make things as natural as possible to use.
• You don’t need to replicate objects – hinting at them is enough to appeal viscerally to users.
• Design things that work in the native platform – design a specific interface with it. Use native code.
• You need to think differently when you’re designing for touch and mobile – it’s very different from using a mouse and a PC. 
• Augmented reality (AR) is when you overlay things that aren’t there on to things that are – very cool but yet to be fully explored.

Big thanks to Write Ltd who provided the venue.