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You're reading from  101 UX Principles – 2nd edition - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inMay 2022
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781803234885
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Will Grant
Will Grant
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Will Grant

Will Grant is a British UI/UX expert and a digital product designer. He is a web technology entrepreneur with over 25 years' experience, leading teams (and products) at the intersection of technology and usability. After his Computer Science degree, Will trained with Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini at the Nielsen Norman Group – the world leaders in usable design. Since then, Will has overseen the user experience and interaction design of several large-scale web sites and apps, reaching over a billion users in the process. Will is a "design purist" and obsessed with building beautiful, compelling, and familiar products that customers intuitively know how to use.
Read more about Will Grant

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Make Tappable Areas Finger-Sized

If you think your design will be used by touch, then your users’ fingers are the tool that they’ll use. Given that obvious statement, it’s surprising to see UI controls in touch interfaces that are clearly way too small for users to poke at easily with their digits.

As a guide, your smartphone screen is (roughly) five fingers wide and 10 fingers high, so—if you introduce padding (the area around each control)—that’s about 40 controls: a hard limit of the controls that can be comfortably used on such a display. If you were to try to fit more than four or five items horizontally across the display, they would be too small to be comfortably used.

You’ll need to experiment to find the right control size, but if you’re using native control elements (see #39, Use Device-Native Input Features Where Possible), that research has been done for you: they’re already the right size (44px or...

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101 UX Principles – 2nd edition - Second Edition
Published in: May 2022Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781803234885

Author (1)

author image
Will Grant

Will Grant is a British UI/UX expert and a digital product designer. He is a web technology entrepreneur with over 25 years' experience, leading teams (and products) at the intersection of technology and usability. After his Computer Science degree, Will trained with Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini at the Nielsen Norman Group – the world leaders in usable design. Since then, Will has overseen the user experience and interaction design of several large-scale web sites and apps, reaching over a billion users in the process. Will is a "design purist" and obsessed with building beautiful, compelling, and familiar products that customers intuitively know how to use.
Read more about Will Grant