Designing Web Applications for Touch Screens

Any device that has touch as an interface and a way to input data and finally show an output is called a Touch Screen device. These devices have become an integral part of everybody’s life and hence it is also crucial to design them accordingly. In this article, we will discuss about Designing Web Applications for Touch Screens. We will discuss How can design for Touch Screens, the Importance of designing for touch screens, and some best practices to follow.

Designing Web Applications for Touch Screens

What are Touch Screens?

Touch Screen Devices are not just our mobile phones. Any device that has touch as an interface and a way to input data and finally show an output is called a Touch Screen device. Tablets, Smart Watches, Touch Screen Laptops, and Smartphones all come under touch screen devices. Designing becomes even more crucial for touch screens because now screens do not just display the information, they are also responsible for taking input data from the users.

Also, Mobile Phones are the most common touch screens and according to a 2021 estimate, the number of mobile devices in the entire world is about 15 billion. This makes mobile phones the most scalable option for applications and we need to keep that in mind while designing our application or website.

Designing Web Applications for Touch Screens

Designing Web Applications for Touch Screens can be broadly divided into a three-step process:

1. User Research: The process of designing web applications for touch screens starts with user research. The designer takes detailed notes of the user research. there’s a lot of information that will be gathered so the designer has to analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data. The role of the designer is to create reports and presentations to present that complex information to other people in the team.
2. Wireframing and Prototyping: Wireframes are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept. A wireframe for a digital product is similar to a blueprint for a house. Wireframe clearly illustrates how the product functions and the core elements of its design.
3. Visual Designing and testing: The designer then comes up with creative and innovative design solutions. he/she designs the User Interface and creates different visual touch points and establish the interactivity with them. Along with that the interfaces are tested and iterated upon the shortcomings.

Importance of Design in Touch Screens

• Better User retention: User retention is a very tricky job and is completely independent of how good the functionalities are. For Touch screens, design becomes more crucial because mostly touch screens like mobile phones and wearables have smaller screen size and it is most difficult to fit components into it.
• Effective and Enjoyable interaction: Design is the way through which users can interact with any touch screen applications. User interface design is aimed at easy enjoyable and effective interactions between the users and the app. The primary goal of designing for touch screens is to provide the best interaction to the user.
• Saves resources in longer run: Investing in UI/UX design is longer term, so instead of getting the UI changed every time a new feature is added, its better to have a UI/UX team that researches and comes up with the features required, design, interface etc.
• Communicate your mission: The visual elements takes the major part of communication in touch screens. Irrespective of what help marketing provides, users have to come to your website/app to buy product/service or know about it. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user.
• Scaling the application with Mobile Design: Most of the touch screens are mobile phones. Mobile development of applications is better known for targeting more customers and getting more eyeballs to your product/service. The mobile approach design can help us scale the application to more number of people. Design concepts like Repetition, Alignment etc. become even more important for touch screen design since the size of the screen and the visuals that can fit in are limited.

Best Practices

• Consistent design and experience: The design of the application for Touch screen devices must be consistent to the design we have of other devices. This provides a better experience and a factor of relatability which user switches from one device to another.
• Contrast: setting up a proper contrast to the UI is can be obtained through organizing the, design establishing hierarchy, emphasizing a focal point and adding visual interest. It can be done by a lot of different ways – we can add contrast with color, with weight, with size of typography or even with the imagery.
• Alignment and Proximity: A proper alignment in the UI helps organize and group elements, it creates a visual rhythm of elements on the screen, Alignment and proximity brings order in unordered typography.
• Repetition: Proper use of repetition through increasing consistency, increases the user’s ability to learn and identify the pattern in our interface or layout and it also reduces confusion and helps the user guess objects in the layout properly.
• User feedback and iterating: Taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about the product/service and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the digital product/service we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.
• Hierarchy and Organization: When designing web applications for touch screens, one thing that we must take care of is the fact that every application has a Unique Selling Proposition. And the design must have a clear hierarchy where that Unique Selling Proposition is highlighted and we are communication effectively with the user coming to the product app or website.

Conclusion

Touch Screens specially mobile phones are now one of the most scalable option for applications and websites. Everybody might not have a Laptop that too everywhere, but mostly all of us carry our mobile phones with us. Designing for these devices allows us to tap into a lot more audience that the traditional desktop design.

Make sure to remember the points we discussed in this article when designing your next application or your next website for touch screens.