Posts tagged “touchscreen”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] NoseDial iPhone app – [The craziest workaround I've seen. Also reveals the cost of producing WTF solutions is falling to near zero] Whether you're at the Christmas market, taking a winter walk or out skiing – you don't have to take off your gloves when you want to call your friends on your iPhone anymore. Now you can dial using your nose. NoseDial isn't just a favorites list you can style individually. The app also shows you pictures of your friends and allows you to navigate through your contacts by tilting your iPhone and to then call them using your nose. Forget special touchscreen gloves and iPhone input pens, just call using your nose. This saves money and is a lot more fun.

Come on come on and TOUCH ME baby

touchscreen.jpg
Orlando airport, June 2008

A touch screen looks like any other monitor; designers have not created anything in the physical form that denotes interactivity. It falls to the content (what is on the screen) and the context (where is the screen placed) to invite people to touch. In this case, they’ve chosen to add an external static sign to indicate what you should do.

This is in an airport, so informational rather than advertising content might be a more natural draw for interacting (seriously, an interactive menu experience?) and having this thing sitting near an escalator doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s not a place to linger.

Here we have another example of post-design, fixing a problem in the original design by adding on another piece. Seeing that added instructional text made me wonder how we typically know that a screen is one that we can touch and interact with. It’s an interesting opportunity for the hardware manufacturers to create some visual language that can help with that invitation.

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