Fat finger testing – an emotional release

http://rx-games.com/fat-fingers-and-touchscreen-phones/

Jeepers doing this app design is such an emotional experience. I go from scared to shy to bold to chastened to anxious to exhilarated. When the first designs came through I was very reluctant to show them around. Not because I thought they were poor, but because I had no idea what to think of them (there are not many precedents) and I was simply scared that other people’s reactions might be overwhelmingly negative or scathing.

And indeed I did get a somewhat scathing reaction to the early designs. But fortunately it came from within Firsty Group, my design and technology partners in this project – the boss, Darin, who said in a typically frank way that it looked too ‘webby’ – too much like a web application. (I had no idea that saying something looked like a web-application could be a criticism.) Anyway, a week or two later we had a strong visual design and great navigation. And it got to the point where showing people and getting feedback became absolutely imperative, as we had to do a ‘fat finger test’.

The fat finger test is necessary because Cool Speech works by having text on screen that you can either tap or double tap: tap once to hear the fast original, tap twice to hear a slow clear version. So the text has to be big enough to be legible, small enough to allow room for other elements on the screen. And underneath each portion of the text, there is a holder – invisible to the user – which is touch sensitive for that piece of text – it is the part of the screen that ‘feels’ the different types of touch, and responds to them. It is slightly larger than the visible text that it holds, and we needed to test whether users with different sized fingers, from thin to fat, could tap around the screen and the right things would happen.

This test went very well – and the comments on the app itself were (for the most part) very pleasing: ‘That’s tremendous’ – ‘Oh wow, that’s amazing’. So just as I am beginning to feel really confident that everyone in the world is going to be bowled over by it (foolish me) I get the comment ‘Yes it works great, but the title is crap!’ That person is a dear friend, but is in a minority of about 0.5% at the moment … but the title is fixed.