The Challenge of Designing Interfaces for the Tablet PC
Larry O'Brien writes, "The pen is a harsh mistress. While the portability and direct manipulation of the Tablet PC form-factor are a dream come true for many users, designing a usable interface for a Tablet PC program is considerably trickier than simply drawing blue lines across a yellow background and calling it a legal pad. UI design is made harder because the Tablet PC is frequently compared to the versatile blank sheet of paper.
The first major challenge in designing and effective UI is obvious the moment you use a tablet: parallax. The Tablet PC’s display is actually a couple of millimeters below the screen surface. Because your eye rarely happens to be precisely perpendicular to the pen’s location on the display, this implies that the pen’s physical location on the screen surface generally appears offset from the location of the mouse pointer on the display. This phenomenon exists with PDAs and touch-screen devices such as ATM displays, but the tablet’s larger display area, varied viewing angles, and generally higher display resolution of the Tablet PC make the parallax more apparent. Figure 1 shows a parallax offset of 15 pixels or so when the pen moves towards the upper-right-hand corner of the display. Note the relative size of the offset, the mouse pointer, and the form’s control boxes: having to compensate a few pixels might sound like a trivial adjustment, but after using a Tablet PC for even a few hours, you come to appreciate how many widgets on an interface are really quite small. So the first rule of Tablet PC UI design is: Make Big Controls and Hotspots."
06-10-2004, 08:22 AM
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