Josh Clark

Founder of Global Moxie

Main Conference: Mobile Myths Debunked

Workshop: Designing for Touch

Handheld apps that work by touch require you to design not only how your pixels look, but how they *feel* in the hand. This workshop explores the ergonomic challenges and interface opportunities for designing mobile touchscreen apps. Learn how fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head and require you to leave behind familiar design patterns. The workshop presents nitty-gritty "rule of thumb" design techniques that together form a framework for crafting finger-friendly interface metaphors, affordances, and gestures for a new generation of mobile apps that inform and delight. This is an intermediate to advanced workshop aimed at designers, developers, and information architects making the transition from desktop to touchscreen apps for mobile and tablet devices.

What will you learn?

Discover the ergonomic demands of designing for touch.
Find out how the iPad's form and size create unique design considerations.
Devise interface metaphors that invite touch.
Design gesture interactions, and learn techniques to help people discover unfamiliar gestures on their own.
Learn why buttons are a hack and how to design interfaces without traditional UI controls.
Train in gesture jiujitsu, the dark art of using awkward gestures for defensive design.
Explore the psychology behind screen rotation and the opportunities and pitfalls it creates.

Speaker Bio

Josh Clark is a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He's author of "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" (O'Reilly, 2010) and "Best iPhone Apps" (O'Reilly, 2009). Josh's outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services, training, and product invention workshops to help creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.

Before the internet swallowed him up, Josh was a management consultant at Monitor Group in Cambridge, Mass, and before that, a producer of national PBS programs at Boston's WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the uberpopular "Couch-to-5K" (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)