For the workshop I prepared a brief overview to help consider different settings and situations a user can find himself in. Since I thought this overview could come in handy for people who didn’t attend the workshop I wanted to share it.

Download the Cheat Sheet PDF here.

It will share a few things with my previous workshop in Kassel, yet still have another focus partly due to a quite different setup this time round – it’ll be running for half a day instead of three. Main things to discuss and talk about will be design problems and considerations when it comes to interface and user experience design on touch devices. And because some hands-on experience can make things a bit more obvious we’re going to have a lot of that, too.

Though a few details are not defined, yet … I’m already very much looking forward to it. And if you are planning to be around, book now :)

A couple of days ago while working on a design for an iPad application I came across the situation that I wanted some interface elements to be the size of some real world objects. Moments later I found myself using a quickly created image that helped me to get a better understanding pixel/cm ratio.

Sure, I could have just calculated the values but it just felt more natural to arrange actual things at the screen. If you’ll ever find yourself in a similar situation feel free to use the image. I’ve added a png file at the iPad’s native resolution (1024×768) as well as the pdf, in case you would like to modify it.

Download .png file
Download .pdf file

We’ve also improved the region setting in general to make it easier to select a region manually if you don’t want to use the current location or you find yourself in a situation where location service just don’t work.

To find a complete list of changes and improvements please see the blog post over at Seasons for more.

In November I gave a three day workshop about design for touch devices at the School of Arts Kassel. I had a rather simple agenda in mind and was excited what was going to happen. The main reason for that were the students’ very different backgrounds – something I knew before I preparing the workshop. Some of them were graphics designers, illustrators, others film makers and only a few had any software development experience.

From previous workshops I knew it made little sense to talk a lot about programming. Sometimes it just scares the hell out of people. Hence I’ve started with a simple task – take existing applications or games on the App Store, try them and come up with a review for three apps. Shortly after that we had a great open discussion eventually turning into what people were interested in and why they came to the workshop in the first place.

At the end of the first day we had three groups working on completely different things. One group was thinking about how a mobile version of an existing desktop application could work and look like. Another one was exploring different input mechanisms and gestures for a game. The third group came up with a great piece of interactive storytelling. After three days we had a brilliant selection of mock-ups, storyboards and written concept.

With the target audience mainly being the likes of what I usually find to be our clients I was less interested in talking too much about our work but more in talking about possibly helpful considerations prior approaching a marketing or creative agency. 2010 was the year when pretty much everyone got excited about calling an app their own, if they haven’t been already. Advertising and marketing agencies welcomed and encouraged this too, resulting in sometimes at least questionable results.

So I started my talk with some customer reviews I found on the App Store.

Now in the latest of buggy apps they have released the refuses to download the latest edition (that I’ve now paid for!)

Wired Review

It’s basically a bunch of image files. Poor navigation, very little effort to live up to the new medium -  a real disappointment. Great magazine, though. In print, that is.

New Yorker Review

I just find the navigation confusing and unintuitive

Times Review

The app runs sooooo slow when compared to accessing the NYT website from my iPad.

New York Times Review

Looking at these reviews of magazine apps it’s a at the very least worrying that no one is talking about the magazine’s content. Hence I was raising three questions:

1. What are you trying to achieve?
2. Who would you like to address?
3. What’s your long-term strategy?

Clearly games do have a different goal and different answers to above questions than a corporate website or business application. So I ended up talking about possibilities in web development as well as about development budgets and maintenance costs of native applications by giving different examples. Eventually it all came down to a simple form factor vs. device approach.

It’s great to have people excited about applications but let’s get them excited for other stuff, too! Because choice is good and it puts us into a position where we really have to explain why one thing is more suitable than the other.

When the iPhone was released a few years ago people started using smart phones increasingly as entertainment devices although their potential is far from being realised properly for this type of use. Despite introducing a touch screen interface to a vastly wider audience, the capability of the iPhone hasn’t been explored as much as it could have been; a quick browse of the App Store reveals a host of applications which interactively share a lot in common with desktop computers and consoles, but not so many which harness the unique features of the device.

Only a few developers are taking advantage of the iPhone’s features and an even smaller number of applications use it to integrate the device in to a bigger experience which exists beyond the handset’s screen, choosing instead to limit it to the confines of its case.

I like to think of the building blocks we used to play with when we were kids. The same way these blocks could be stacked on top each other to create new objects, smart phones are capable of carrying out simple tasks using the accelerometer, GPS, the camera or the microphone that can be combined to create exciting interfaces. The challenge is to distribute tasks to the technologies that are most suitable for the creative idea. Often this may mean using a variety of different devices – desktop machines, for example, offer a vast amount of processing power – to get the desired effect and this is by no means a bad thing.

The key lies in the connectivity of these devices. It takes only a fraction of a second to connect to the Internet and send or receive some data. In many cases users barely notice the difference between working locally and being connected to the Internet and this fast transfer speed opens up an incredible variety of opportunities for technologies to talk to each other.

The invisible hand in all this is the web server. You could argue that there are ways of connecting devices to one another directly but the reality is that in most cases you won’t be aware of all the different setups and devices, thus increasing the risk application is just not going to work properly. Putting a web server in the middle means that you only have to specify the communication between your devices. And with the help of standard web technologies it’s pretty straightforward to implement such a thing.

At Pirata London we’ve recently created ‘The Boat Race‘. Built as a tech demo, the game transforms the iPhone into a Wii-style games controller while the game play itself takes place on a website you’re visiting with your computer. Using the iPhone’s accelerometer, the user’s movement is tracked and reported back to the site to propel the player’s boat through the water. By separating tasks between relevant devices we’ve brought people out of the confines of their screens and made a very simple but genuinely communal gaming experience.

I’m looking forward to creative ideas that combine outdoor digital screens and smart phones or perhaps connect the devices we find in a typical household. We now have a genuine opportunity to create much more integrated experiences across more and more differing technologies.

This article was first published over at The FWA