lifestream in bits

Marco.org: A smartphone retrospective

great point by Marco. as usual.

This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Other manufacturers had…

reblogged from marco

designing for mobile/tablet: tap, flick, pinch, spread, etc

Web designer gurus and User experience magicians have leveraged the hover state to great lengths when designing new applications for the web or for your desktop. Traditionally the hover state is used to only reveal additional information to the user when they are focusing on a specific area of the application.

A great example is backpack site, when you move your cursor on one of the items on a list

then you have the ability to delete it, edit it, move it, etc.

Now with more and more touch phones/tablets (that lack pointing devices, aka mouse) we have to rethink how we are going to replace the hover state. They guys at 37 signals have posted a possible solution. They are replacing the hover state with a tap (I guess your finger doesn’t click hence a tap). Although they came up with an elegant solution, something doesn’t feel right just yet. The only reason one would tap on a list is because they already know there is a hidden menu somewhere in there. It’s certainly not intuitive nor discoverable. My first suggestion is to add a “tappable” icon next to the list, at least this could give a visual indication of what can be done with it.

But maybe “replacing the hover state” shouldn’t be the goal. On phones/tablets we have other gestures that we never had before. Here is a sample

(the full list and a lot more resources can be found here)

(Re)Thinking of a mouse-less experience is definitely a huge priority for all of us. Most importantly we have to think of new experiences with smaller devices leveraging new interactions. That’s exciting stuff.