Touch me, I’m a website

Who would have thought primetime television during the primary season would show us a glimpse of the future of web design and development?Anyone captivated over the last few months watching John King at CNN zooming in and out of electoral districts on his Magic Wall? The Wall itself was more interesting than the results to me. Perceptive Pixel, the company behind the Wall, gets the credit for upstaging the iPhone and bringing it to the medium size screen (not sure how this would work on the silver screen…) Check out Jeff Han of Perceptive’s demo at TED to see even cooler applications… Maybe because CNN’s Wall is so big and because there’s so much data feeding into it from Google and wherever else, it started to hit me how far-reaching this technology is for what we do every day: web design and development. Some questions to ponder:

• What do Web 2.0 techniques mean when you introduce physical interaction – touch – to the screen of a website?
• When you can “scroll” in any particular direction that your fingers might choose – what are the actual boundaries of any given website?
• A tree-structure for pages doesn’t seem to apply. This blog for example – why do we have to read it going up or down the page when I can navigate diagonally? Or perhaps pinch my fingers into (like on a iPhone) to dive deeper in to the blog archive.
• How do we plan websites that can literally expand in any direction – in three dimensions (the third being the depth of data or visual detail)?
• Whither the mouse? Is pointing and clicking more or less sophisticated than using your index finger? How does that affect our design?
• Will every site need its UI upgraded to support touch-sensitive devices?

The list goes on and on (for me at least) the more I think of it. I first started thinking about this subconsciously while playing around with Safari on my iPhone – ever try and click small links or buttons on a webpage on your iPhone? Ever miss your target with your big fat finger? Does this mean sites need to be iPhone optimized? Probably not if the screen were larger…but that hasn’t stopped Apple from creating a bunch of tricks to make the job easier for our fingers.

So what happens when Microsoft Surface and other companies’ devices start hitting the market and prices come down? We’ll be touching our websites soon apparently. Get ready to QA in a whole new way.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 12:22 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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