As we design for different screen sizes and dimensions, it is common to focus on the smallest of screens. We need our designs and interactive elements to fit and work on small screen devices, such as phones and watches. Many teams focus on resizing and optimizing menus, interactions, content, and experiences to work well on these small devices.
However, other screens are increasing in size and becoming touch-enabled. Some laptop and desktop monitors are touch-enabled. Larger tablets, such as the Nabi Big Tab with a 24-inch touchscreen, are available and Tesla cars use a 17-inch touchscreen for most controls. Since screen sizes are measured on the diagonal, the Tesla screen has 3 times the area of a 9.7-inch iPad screen, and the Nabi Big Tab has 6 times the area of an iPad.
Just as designing for small screens is different than designing for the desktop, designing for these larger screens has its own special set of considerations. What works well with a mouse on a large-screen device may not work well on a large touchscreen. What works well on a smaller-sized tablet may not scale to a large tablet.
What considerations do we have to take into account when designing for larger touchscreen devices? The following observations are a result of my family’s usage of the Nabi Big Tab, a 24-inch tablet aimed at parents and their children. (A perk of working in user experience and interaction design is occasionally buying a gadget in the interest of “research.”) My focus is not on reviewing the device or analyzing the usability of particular apps or games, but instead on how the size and scale of the device impacts our experience with it.
Input: Typing, Forms, and Gestures
On-screen keyboards are often awkward for input, but that awkwardness is amplified when the keyboard scales with the size of the device and becomes 24 inches across. Every key press on the BigTab required an arm movement, rather than a finger or hand movement. Typing with thumbs or even in a standard keyboard-typing position was not possible due to the size of the on-screen keyboard. You simply couldn’t reach each key without moving your arms.
In addition, the large size of the screen meant that the text being typed appeared far from the keyboard. On a small screen device, an on-screen keyboard is close enough to the selected field that a quick glance can check your spelling. On the large screen, answers were far from the keyboard, causing glances up and down between key presses. Between the split of visual attention and the arm movements, each keypress felt like an individual action —something noteworthy rather than unnoticeable because of the work involved reaching each key.
On form pages, the huge BigTab keyboard often obscured most of the fields and let users see only one field at a time. It was hard to know what field was next or even if there was another field, though the screen size would have allowed for more content visible at a time.
The extra physical effort (not strenuous, but notable) combined with the tedium of seeing one field at a time made relatively short processes like setting up the device feel long and cumbersome.
Gestures were different on the larger screen as well. One finger felt inadequate for pressing a button that was several inches wide, and swipes and drags required more effort and physical movement. Using the device was a more physical experience than using a smaller touchscreen.
Increased physicality was not necessarily a bad thing. My 6 year old played Fruit Ninja with gusto — crazily swiping through each piece of giant fruit as it appeared on the screen.
Designs should scale the keyboard appropriately to help minimize fatigue, take advantage of the large screen size in form design to reveal more at a time, and think of ways to use the physicality of the device to the user’s advantage. For instance, sorting and organizing complex lists or data could be far more satisfying with the space of a large screen and the feedback of “physically” moving items to one list or another.
Touch
While the large screen was completely enthralling to my 2 year olds, the size of the touchscreen was a drawback for my daughter. She leaned on the screen with one hand in order to reach another part of the screen. As a result, the puzzle pieces that she was trying to move jumped from one hand to the other, if they moved at all.
Using the large screen was particularly hard for her, based on her size relative to the device —most of us aren’t using devices that are nearly as big as we are. However, her attempts to use it also illustrate a problem far more likely to be encountered with large touchscreens: that of unintended two-handed touches and other accidental touches.
We see this play out in our testing of mobile devices. We witness more accidental touches or brushes of the screen as people maneuver standard sized tablets than we do when watching people use their phones.
Designs need to anticipate and accommodate accidental touches and consider ways to incorporate larger gestures, hand presses versus finger touches, and multi-hand interactions.
Focus
With a larger screen, more is potentially visible at a time. However, when more is visible, more is also competing for the user’s visual attention. Normally when viewing a large screen, we sit at some distance away from it. A desktop monitor is 2 feet away on the desk. A TV may be halfway across the room. This gives us a broader view of the contents of the screen.
A touchscreen device needs to be much closer to the user, by necessity: I needed to be close enough to the screen to touch the screen. But that physical proximity made it difficult to see the “big picture” when I was focused on one detail. For instance, an error message the top of the screen was easily missed because the user was focused on an action at the bottom of the screen.
Moreover, it is difficult to see much on the screen when interfaces simply scale up to fill the larger screen size. Images can become fuzzy. On-screen choices are limited. The zoomed interface combined with the close proximity to the user (close enough to touch the screen) means everything on the screen is super-sized, which can make it difficult to understand what you are looking at.
Portability
The Nabi Big Tab was portable, in that you could carry it from room to room more handily than, say, a desktop computer. But it was far different than toting a smaller device across the room. It is not surprising that, by its very size and shape, it does not have the same portability as a smaller, lighter device. However, it is notable how rarely we moved this portable item, because it was so large.
The tablet weighed 10.5 pounds. This meant that my son could not carry it across the room to show me something, like he commonly does with smaller tablets. This also meant that we used it almost as if it were a desktop — a device that had a “home” in our house, the primary place where it was used. This is in contrast to our smaller tablets, which travel commonly from room to room, even as they’re being used.
Environment of Use
The large size of BigTab made it difficult to know how and where to set it up. My 6 year old, who is used to using an iPad either on his lap, or at a table, wasn’t sure how to best sit with the device. The tablet included an attached stand, but the device is large and heavy enough that he worried that he might get overzealous in his game playing and knock the stand down. However, for watching content rather than actively interacting, the attached stand was substantial and allowed for comfortable viewing from a seated position. It was the need to be close for interaction that made the experience more awkward.
The most comfortable position we found was to place the device flat on a bed (or floor) and to sit next to it. This allowed us to look at the screen from above, making it easier to touch the desired target. By contrast, when the tablet was laid flat on a table, the height of the table and the size of the device made it awkward to interact with it. The far corners of the device were too far to easily reach while seated in a chair, particularly for younger users.
Because of that, it was not comfortable to interact with the tablet for extended periods of time. Unlike a smaller tablet that can move with you to a comfortable location, this was not an item you can hold on your lap or shift position with.
Sharing and Privacy
The Big Tab is intended for sharing, and it lent itself nicely to that use. The big size and multi-touch screen worked well for multi-player games, where teammates and rivals huddled around the screen and played together or against one another. It was fun and engaging to play together on the device.
Sharing an on-screen experience on a smaller device can feel invasive as someone leans over the primary holder of the device. But with a larger screen, huddling around the device allowed some personal space. My 2-year old happily watched my 6-year old do dinosaur puzzle after dinosaur puzzle without getting in his older-brother’s way.
Because of this, it was hard to do anything privately on the larger screen. For single-player games or solo interactions, the large screen size was awfully enticing for tiny sibling hands to interrupt play. It was also a bit disheartening to see private information, such as credit card information, displayed in type several inches high and visible from across the room.
Different Devices, Different Experiences
It’s not surprising that using a design on a larger touchscreen device is a different experience than using the same design on a smaller one, or on a larger non-touch monitor. As we discuss in our Scaling User Interfaces course, designing for different screen sizes needs to take into account far more than just the dimensions of the screen.
A number of factors — such as input type, portability, and privacy of the device — impact not only usage of the device but also how we should design for the device. Screen dimensions cannot be the only consideration in adapting designs for varying screen sizes. Rather than thinking of different devices in terms of their limitations and disadvantages, let’s focus on the potential for designing experiences that uniquely take advantage of the devices’ characteristics.
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