Title: How to design for thumbs in the era of huge screens
Context: Larger screens yield a better user experience. As long as you don’t consider your thumbs to be users.
Synopsis: The apocryphal origin of the long necked giraffe posits that through natural selection, members of the species who had longer necks thrived due to their ability to reach higher branches and the food that their shorter necked relatives could not. Ergo, is it then possible that in a scant few generations humankind will be a race of long thumbed mutants, the Darwinian product of our insatiable appetite for ever bigger mobile device screens? While my evolutionary biology is weak at best, my much sounder grasp of ergonomics tells me that the upward trend in screen real-estate lays at odds with the current limitations of our opposable digit leading to frustration, discomfort, and even potential injury, as we stretch and strain against the biomechanical boundaries of our physiology. Here we seem to favor the visual and cognitive advantages of bigger handheld screens over their inutility vis-à-vis the dexterous shortcomings our stubby thumbs present in this context. In the eternal war of truisms, it appears that “if it feels good, do it”, has been soundly defeated by “bigger is better” at least for the time being.
Best Bit: “So it’s looking like the 3.5″ and 4″ screens of yore will start their inevitable decline very quickly.”
via gizmodo.com
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