Wireless Informatics Forum

When it comes to handset design and innovation, the mobile industry has a strong herd mentality, often driven by short product lifecycles and a strong reliance on the Asian ODM powerhouses (frequently resulting in a parts-bin approach to handset development).

One of the strongest currents over the last 12 months has been the trend for touchscreens. After the iPhone and early LG devices, nearly all major handset manufactures have released devices that feature a touch-input mechanism; even RIM, at the vanguard of business mobility.

While I would like to believe that this signals a trend towards greater experimentation in user interface design and progression towards gesture-control and other innovations, the cynic in me sees an industry selling itself short and disappointing consumers with ‘me-too’ products that at best fail to meet consumer expectations and, at worst, simply aren’t fit for purpose.

Remember, the UI is merely the window into the handset. It is the means by which we navigate and interact with on-board features and services. The success of touchscreen must, therefore, be intrinsically linked to a device’s operating system and menu hierarchy.

Now, I’m by no means an Apple fanboy, but the iPhone works because the device’s OS compliments touch navigation. Clean hierarchies, graphical menus, strong integration with hardware (e.g the accelerometer). Arguably the iPhone OS was only ever designed with touch and gesture in mind, the same can’t be said for any other OS, even Android. Simply porting a touchscreen UI onto a legacy OS, or iteration such as S60 Touch, is going to yield challenges as legacy code does battle with new input mechanisms and changes in the ways that consumers interact with their devices.

This is the difference between Touch Enabled and Touch Optimised.

That’s not to say that everything should be Touch Optimised. Indeed, this is the trap that many seem to fall into. There will always be applications and products that simply don’t suit touch as the primary method of navigation and input. Outside of basic SMS and IM (which can be satisfactorily serviced via virtual keyboards), messaging is an obvious example and a full QWERTY keyboard will usually win favour amongst business users. Even a basic T9 keypad has the upshot of being operable with one hand.

A more pragmatic approach to touch should be adopted. Development and design decisions must be based on qualified and considered use cases and evaluation of which interactions benefit the most from the natural flow of touch and gesture.

Touch, for touch’s sake, may build early market share and tap into the current Zeitgeist, but I suspect that it may come at the cost of long term brand loyalty and credible evolution of touch, gesture and haptic control. Only last week a study of nearly 20,000 consumers by Reevoo.com found that half of the 10 least popular phones were touchscreens. Only the iPhone and LG Renoir made it into the Top 10. Users cited some very basic complaints, including icons that simply weren’t big enough for ‘male fingers’. A quick check of the ‘Introduction to S60 Touch’ guidelines published by Symbian shows a recommendation that icons should be no smaller than 7mm x 7mm with a 1mm gap between. Quick, go grab a ruler; that’s pretty small.

Clearly there is a need to evolve traditional handset form factors and user interfaces. The way we interact with our devices has moved on, so too has the core use case for mobile devices. Indeed, one of the touchscreens greatest benefits is its ability to free up valuable real estate on the front of a device and allow visual content to finally be viewed on a respectable screen size.

The way in which we interact with a mobile device will, to a certain extent, always be limited by its physical form factor; a fact that will mean compromises will always have to be made. The danger is that to try and remove these compromises, designers and UI specialist will be tempted to integrate several input methods within a single form factor. Can current form factors accommodate new developments in pressure sensing or resistive technology casing (essentially turning the entire unit into an input mechanism)? Can these technologies co-exist and how long before we overwhelm the user to a point that UI advancements actually become counter-productive?