Sessions at Breaking Development 2011: Nashville about Multi-touch on Wednesday 14th September

Handheld apps that work by touch require you to design not only how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand. This workshop explores the ergonomic challenges and interface opportunities for designing mobile touchscreen apps. Learn how fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their heads, requiring you to leave behind familiar design patterns. The workshop presents nitty-gritty “rule of thumb” design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps and websites that inform and delight.

• Discover ergonomic guidelines for comfortable tapping and what that means for the visual layout of mobile apps and websites.
• Devise visual metaphors that invite touch and create emotional attachment, while providing subtle cues for how your interface works.
• Learn why buttons are a hack. Tap into direct manipulation of content to encourage exploration in ways that traditional controls cannot.
• Design gesture interactions, and learn techniques to help people discover unfamiliar gestures on their own.
• Train in gesture jiujitsu, the dark art of using awkward gestures for "defensive design" and protecting against accidental mistaps.
• Explore the psychology behind screen rotation and the opportunities and pitfalls it creates for designers.
• Find out how the form and context of tablets create different interface requirements from phone handsets.