Month: May 2016

How Far Can Your Thumb Reach?

A common challenge that we all face, especially with the trend of making bigger phones, is reaching widgets far away from our thumbs reach, on our phones screens while holding them. Designers try to optimize that by placing most frequently accessed buttons in the most comfortable reach for the thumb (by using heat maps from test sessions or from live products). A recent paper proposes a model for calculating the thumb functional area[1]. By giving the algorithm four values, it calculates the area and plots it. The four values are:

  1. Finger Span or Hand size (s): the distance between the thumb and index finger as shown in the figure
  2. Index-finger distance (d): the distance of the index fingertip from the point of intersection of the hand with the phone
  3. Hand orientation
  4. Hand position from origin

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Analyzing Clutter in Color

I was recently assigned a task – as part of my graduate studies – to analyze the clutter in colors in any interface. It was sort of a freestyle task: everyone should come up with his own approach. I chose to analyze the color feature congestion in the feature space[1]. The analysis follows the dominant color approach, in which a score is given for the variability in colors in images. Based on that, each image is given a score. The higher the score, the more the image is congested. Lower score means the dominant colors are close to each others, which implies that the feature space is not congested, i.e. uncluttered.
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