A Touch Notation for designing for touch screens by Matt Legend Gemmell

Misc

Examples

Here are a few examples of using Touch Notation to encode various gestures. When I’m creating formal documents using Touch Notation, I tend to use black for the number of fingers and blue for the entire gestural part, just to give a subtle sense of energy and motion to the gesture. You’ll find that the gesture instructions in tutorials in the iPad versions of the iWork apps do the same thing.

  • Tap (with 1 finger)
Tap with one finger
  • Double-tap with 3 fingers
Double tap with three fingers
  • Swipe right with 2 fingers
Swipe right with two fingers

“Within the last twelve to eighteen months, I’ve crossed a threshold whereby the vast majority of my work is now aimed at touch-screen devices. I often have to sketch out feature specs, interaction designs and so forth, and I enjoy working on paper whenever I can. I quickly encountered a problem: touch-screen gestures are difficult to describe concisely. To solve this problem, I created a means of talking about such gestures symbolically; I call it Touch Notation.”

http://mattgemmell.com/2010/07/14/touch-notation#

Designing for Social Interaction – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

Misc

Social web design will become an important part of every interaction designer’s skillset. To do it well, we’ll need to understand some basics about human relationships. If your users’ needs center around strong ties, you’ll design something very different than if they center around temporary ties. Understanding the difference between strong, weak, and temporary ties will help us build better online social experiences.

The full article:

http://boxesandarrows.com/view/designing-for-social