vevent

Iphone UI and Usability

Introduction:

This is the first installment in my series about iPhone User Interface Design and Usability.

The iPhone has brought a revolution in the way modern smart phones work. The iPhone interface is seen as defining what a cool UI should look and feel like these days. There is no question that the iPhone has brough about a major improvement in usability and user experience on the mobile platform. But not all is perfect about this UI.

In this series I’ll be looking at various aspects of the iPhone UI and tell you what I think about them. Sometimes I will bitch about a missing feature, other times I’ll look at typography, and other times I’ll look at technical aspects of UI design implementation on the iPhone

So on to the first Installment:

Do we really need to Implement MouseDown Effects on the iPhone?

Anyone designing and implementing GUI interfaces in the last 15 years knows that there are a number of functional states for buttons that have a related visual state. An important example is the MouseDown functionality that allows the user to press and hold on a button. This is especially important in direct manipulation interfaces where you press and hold an object and then move the cursor- in this state the object that has been pressed moves with the cursor and a MouseUp allows you to release the opbject and leave it at that spot. Another use of MouseDown is to give a user visual feedback that they are in fact pressing on an object and helps in lowering mistakes in clicking objects.

Enter the iPhone with its wonderful direct finger interaction. The iPhone supports MouseDown functionality, but in certain cases I think that it is superflous. I raise the issue because of a discussion I had yesterday with one of our designers. He was spending a lot of time with one of our developers in getting a MouseDown implementation to work like he wanted it to work. In the big screen world with Mouse and Cursor I agree that such attention to detail is important. However, my feeling is that on the iPhone there are cases where MouseDown interaction is either not really important to implement, or if implemented, can be done in a simple way.

Why do I say such appocryphal things and what are the cases in which this is relevant? Well- since on the iphone there is no cursor, except for our fingers, then the rule of thumb (sic.) is simple: any target object that is smaller than a finger tip (and therefore when touched/pressed will not be visible to the user) does not really need a mouseDown state. In this case it is nice to have- but is not a Must have.

Opinions?

Next time: when should an action be triggered?

Posted by amnon on Apr 07.09

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