4 ms·

> Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to tak

> Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to take more actions to accomplish the same task. If I have to dig through a deeper menu structure, or flip back an forth between pages instead of having the information all on-screen at once, that change is touch-friendly but hostile to desktop and many laptop users.

WorldMaker 6y ago
First of all, if a UI is badly structured and needs a lot of flipping back and forth that isn't touch-friendly either. Good UX design should be about putting everything the user needs at the user's fingertip (literally so in touch-friendly, but figuratively so for mouse and keyboard). Particularly on that subject, density is mostly orthogonal to touch-friendly outside of touch target size, and that's something that Microsoft has been very honest about as a series of lessons learned between Windows 8 and Windows 10. Keep in mind a lot of the density changes in Windows 8 weren't about touch-friendliness, they were about good typography and reading friendly white space. They tried to optimize the basic app templates for comfortable reading patterns as if every app needed to be a well typeset newspaper with good strong margins between columns/articles. On the surface it was a lot of good ideas individually, but the criticisms were valid that it led to some very sparse designs by default and that they made overriding the defaults a little too hard, the defaults a little too hand-holding. For reading-only "information" the density of an app can be the same, touch-friendly or not. It's the control targets that should be adjusted just that little bit bigger. The difference in size between a past mouse-only target and touch-friendly is a lot smaller than people think, people are fairly comfortable at touching some very small targets (have you seen how dense most smartphone apps are today?). Even there too, Microsoft found out and admitted that user comfort for touch-friendly allows for far more density of touch targets than they at first recommended in Windows 8. (There's some interesting debate if those changes in UX Research Study results over the lifetime of Windows 8 and early Windows 10 testing were due to increased user familiarity with touch surfaces over those intervening years or some interesting unanticipated bias in the earlier studies.) The density of the UI should be a factor of the user's ability to focus on said UI more than a "touch-friendly" concern. Even after Microsoft greatly adjusted their design guidelines on density in Windows 10 they keep a lot of their own apps UI at low density not because they "have to" for touch-friendly, but for various concerns like user friendliness, good typography, and analysis paralysis when the user is confronted with too many choices at once.

WorldMaker 6y ago

First of all, if a UI is badly structured and needs a lot of flipping back and forth that isn't touch-friendly either. Good UX design should be about putting everything the user needs at the user's fingertip (literally so in touch-friendly, but figuratively so for mouse and keyboard). Particularly on that subject, density is mostly orthogonal to touch-friendly outside of touch target size, and that's something that Microsoft has been very honest about as a series of lessons learned between Windows 8 and Windows 10. Keep in mind a lot of the density changes in Windows 8 weren't about touch-friendliness, they were about good typography and reading friendly white space. They tried to optimize the basic app templates for comfortable reading patterns as if every app needed to be a well typeset newspaper with good strong margins between columns/articles. On the surface it was a lot of good ideas individually, but the criticisms were valid that it led to some very sparse designs by default and that they made overriding the defaults a little too hard, the defaults a little too hand-holding. For reading-only "information" the density of an app can be the same, touch-friendly or not. It's the control targets that should be adjusted just that little bit bigger. The difference in size between a past mouse-only target and touch-friendly is a lot smaller than people think, people are fairly comfortable at touching some very small targets (have you seen how dense most smartphone apps are today?). Even there too, Microsoft found out and admitted that user comfort for touch-friendly allows for far more density of touch targets than they at first recommended in Windows 8. (There's some interesting debate if those changes in UX Research Study results over the lifetime of Windows 8 and early Windows 10 testing were due to increased user familiarity with touch surfaces over those intervening years or some interesting unanticipated bias in the earlier studies.) The density of the UI should be a factor of the user's ability to focus on said UI more than a "touch-friendly" concern. Even after Microsoft greatly adjusted their design guidelines on density in Windows 10 they keep a lot of their own apps UI at low density not because they "have to" for touch-friendly, but for various concerns like user friendliness, good typography, and analysis paralysis when the user is confronted with too many choices at once.