Designing for Smaller Screens
Smartphones, IPhones, cell phones of all types, PDA’s, tablets, Kindle fires, and other gadgets have new technology that makes browsing the Web possible. The phones and tablets are becoming the most popular way to communicate and for businesses to sell products. They make surfing web sites effortless, but not all devices have high-quality resolution on their smaller screens. The site comes in huge, it is hard to load, navigation is difficult to use, the graphics are blurry, text is challenging to read, and photos distorted if they appear at all. Designers now have to consider how they are designing, what the pages will look like on the smartphone with smaller screens. New technology is coming out for the smartphones and all the other gadgets.
Nicole Cohen author of “Timeline: A History of Touch-Screen Technology” has a great article covering the technology that will go into the phones as we know. The first touch screens were invented in 1965 by “E.A Johnson of England’s Royal Radar Establishment” and were used for air traffic control in the U.K. until 1995 (Cohen). It was a precursor to the ATMs, kiosks, and ticketing machines. In 1972 the University of Illinois’ PLATO IV terminal was the educational computer system they used in Illinois classrooms. It used infrared touch panels that were starting to be developed in the 60’s. In 1993 Simon Personal Communicator Phone was “the first product to combine touch screen with a telephone” (Cohen). Apple in 2007 successfully released the first smartphone, the IPhone. It had limited multi touch capability but it could pinch to zoom in and out of maps and photos. It featured many new applications in icon form. In 2010 the IPad providing a larger screen, making it easier to surf the Web, send email, watch videos, read and play games. In 2011 Samsung’s SUR40 is an interactive tabletop; it uses “optical sensors to track multiple fingers and hand, as well as other objects” (Cohen). Now the mini IPad has come out and sales are sky-rocketing for the newest device.
Kinetics for Windows has 3D motion mapping and will affect the way designers have to deal with the new program. Leap Motion is coming out in December and will have designers wanting to use this motion sensitive application to draw in 3D. It will sense the motion that shows up on the screen. It will show how designing for the smartphones and smaller screens is different from designing for the larger desktop computers and laptops. The technologies for these phones are changing and new ways to design for them may be beneficial for the designers. Christopher Mims who writes for MIT Technology Review said “If you thought that the touchscreen interface on the iPhone and subsequent tablets opened up a whole new way to interact with your device, imagine something that combines the intuitiveness of that experience with the possibility of such fine-grained control that you could do away with the trackpad or mouse entirely” (Mims). The designers will have to change the way they design for the smaller screens, be able to tweak the coding; make small changes that possibly will improve the images and graphics so that they can be clearly seen and used on the smartphones, smaller screens and other gadgets.
The new technology is available for the Smartphone, IPhone, IPad, tablets and other mobile gadgets. “It's easy to argue that people won't, after all, want a single device that does everything. But there's an economic and even social rationale here that can't be ignored: the more we replace with our phones, the fewer consumer electronics we have to keep updated, and the less cluttered our lives can become” (Mims). The more devices available for browsing the Web, the more the designers will have to adjust the way they design for the devices. It is easy to hit the Web application and open any site. Businesses are more likely to want their site accessible. That means they may need
