Touchscreen Testing - Usability is both design and engineering...

With so many phones moving toward giant touchscreens and very few physical buttons, it's worth considering just how easy they are to use. The good news is that the interface is completely flexible, capable of showing buttons and display elements in the perfect location for any given application, and changing things completely for the next. The bad news, aside from no tactile feedback, comes when things don't WORK as promised. Moto Labs set out to scientifically analyze the performance of mobile phone touchscreens - so you can see whether your off-target touch is just user error and/or your imagination, or if it's really the hardware's fault. They experimented with a robot finger that traced perfectly straight lines across the screens, and repeated with different finger sizes and touch pressures. The results are shown in this image, and they're pretty amazing (at least to a nerd like me) - there's a real difference between all these phones' touch performance! It's something to consider, on the subject of usable design: it's not just how it's designed, it's how it's engineered to deliver.
[via Gizmodo]