Status Updates From Designing for Touch

It’s an inconvenient fact that websites run inside an emulator we call a web browser. Put another way, websites are apps inside an app—a highly variable one at that. In touch design, the headache pounds when you tally the ways browsers pour their own controls into the screen: buttons on the bottom, buttons on the top, buttons that disappear and reappear depending on how you scroll or where you are on the page.

“THE NEW PHONE WAS A MARVEL. It worked in a wholly different way from what came before, yet still charmed novices and technophiles alike. Industry observers called it intuitive, efficient, even fun. It quickly became a status symbol, owned by a few. As time went on, nearly everyone got one, and we now find its operation so natural.

The year was 1963, and the device was Bell Telephone’s Touch Tone phone.”

hah!