Re: Touchscreen Compatibility [was: Feature proposal: combined system status menu]

[Tomas Frydrych <tf+lists gnome r-finger com>]

Hi Allan,

On 22/04/13 16:26, Allan Day wrote:
> Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> > I am not sure what the criteria is with this regard and I might have
> > miss a public discussion about it. What are we trying to accomplish
> > with this whole trend towards touch? I haven't seen any successful
> > single UI story that works well on both touch and mouse/keyboard form
> > factors. Again, bear with me since I might have missed compelling
> > discussions about this design strategy.
>
> So as an initial goal, I'm hoping that we'll be able to have a good
> form of touch compatibility, with a target of laptops with
> touchscreens.
>
> I don't think we have the resources to create several versions of
> GNOME for different types of devices.

Resource questions aside, I want to affirm the main point Alberto made
-- there has not been any successful single UX story that works well in
both contexts. My main concern is that by improving touch experience we
are going to end up degrading the mouse/kbd experience.

As a basic, but I think pertinent, example -- if one of the reasons for
the current design being touch unfriendly is that certain UI elements
are too small (which is the most rudimentary problem any UI moving from
pointer to touch faces), making them bigger will result in
non-negligeable loss of screen realestate on small laptop screens, and
deeper the touch improvements will go, the more significant this will
be. It worries me :-)

Tomas

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