12 LESSONS from An Event Apart San Francisco – ? 4: Jason Grigsby was the 10th speaker at An Event Apart San Francisco last week. Jason’s session, Adapting to Input, presented designers and developers with a conundrum many of us hadn’t yet considered when designing for our new spectrum of web-capable devices.
Responsive web design forced us to accept that we don’t know the size of our canvas, and we’ve learned to embrace the squishiness of the web. Well, input, it turns out, is every bit as challenging as screen size! We have tablets with keyboards, laptops that become tablets, laptops with touch screens, phones with physical keyboards, and even phones that become desktop computers. What’s a design mother to do?
During his session, Jason guided us through the input landscape, showing us new forms of input (such as sensors and voice control) and sharing new lessons about old input standbys. We learned the design principles needed to build websites that respond and adapt to whichever inputs people choose to use.
Four truths about web inputs
Jason began by sharing four truths about input in 2016:
- Input is exploding — The last decade has seen everything from accelerometers to GPS to 3D touch.
- Input is a continuum — Phones have keyboards and cursors; desktop computers have touchscreens.
- Input is undetectable — Browser detection of touch‚ and nearly every other input type, is unreliable.
- Input is transient — Knowing what input someone uses one moment tells you little about what will be used next.
A Golden Rule of Inputs
Just as many of us screwed up our early approach to multi-device design by consigning the “mobile web” to a non-existent “mobile context,” we now risk making a similar blunder by believing that certain tasks are “only for the keyboard”—forgetting that by choice or of necessity, the people who engage with our websites use a variety of devices, and our work must be available to them all.
One of my principal takeaways from Jason’s presentation was that every desktop design must go “finger-friendly.” Or, as Josh Clark put it back in 2012, “When any desktop machine could have a touch interface, we have to proceed as if they all do.”
Learn More
For more illuminations on input, read Jason Grigsby’s “Adapting to Input” in A List Apart, and check out these amazing demos and articles:
- Hololens Gestures
- Leap Motion Oculus Rift tour
- Microsoft Research Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction
- You cannot reliably detect a touch screen
- Interactive touch laptop experiments
- New Rule: Every Desktop Design Has To Go Finger-Friendly
- jQuery Pointer Events Polyfill
- Pointing the Way Forward
- Compass.js
- Warby Parker Gyroscope Example
- Lightsaber Escape Gyroscope Example
- Generic Sensor API Draft
- requestAutocomplete
- Autofill: What web devs should know, but don’t
- Payment Request API
- Web Cam Toy
- HTML Media Capture and getUserMedia
- Web Speech API Demonstration
- Web Speech API Translation Demonstration
- Web Bluetooth
- Physical Web
- One amazing video that shows the potential of the physical web
- Open Device Labs
- Four Truths About Input
Tomorrow I’ll be back with another top takeaway from another AEA San Francisco 2016 speaker. The next AEA event, An Event Apart St. Louis, takes place January 30-February 1, 2017 in the shadow of Mr Sarrinenen’s fabulous arch. See you there!
