Designing for Touch

A Book Apart #14

by Josh Clark

Touch introduces physicality to designs that were once strictly virtual, and puts forth a new test: How does this design feel in the hand? Josh Clark guides you through the touchscreen frontier. Learn about ergonomic demands (and rules of thumb), layout and sizing for all gadgets, an emerging gestural toolkit, and tactics to speed up interactions and keep gestures discoverable. Get the know-how to design for interfaces that let you touch—stretch, crumple, drag, flick—information itself. It’s in your hands.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Reference, Programming

169 pages, ebook

First published October 29, 2015

About the author

Josh Clark is principal of Big Medium, an agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. Josh has over 30 years of experience in emerging technology, user experience, and design innovation.

Josh is co-author with Veronika Kindred of Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfacees with AI (Rosenfeld Media, 2026). The book gives designers and product leaders the know-how to create AI-powered interfaces—dashboards that design themselves, apps that manifest on demand, agents that just get it done, and much more.

Josh speaks around the world about digital design and emerging technology. He is author of many books, including Designing for Touch (A Book Apart) and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps (O’Reilly).

Before the internet swallowed him up in the 1990s, Josh was a producer of national PBS television. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, interviewed the cabinet secretaries of nine US presidents, and was head writer for a primetime game show. In 1996, Josh created the “Couch-to-5K” (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical exercisers take up running.

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative and entertaining. I've been fortunate enough to hear Josh Clark speak on this at An Event Apart and this book was like an extension of that. His speaking personality definitely comes through in the text.

[Natalía Papadopoúlou · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only thing that I wish after this book is for somebody to update it for 2020.

[Ani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting insight into how people use their devices and how to improve the experience. Unfortunately I found the book and information repetitive.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Designing for Touch is good. It covers a lot without getting too heavy. I'd recommend if you're new to designing touch-friendly interfaces. It's a nice read. I flew through it and picked up a few nice tidbits. Came away with some potentially interesting gesture ideas.

[Chris Elkjar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great quick little overview of the challenges with more complex touch interactions.