25/05: Medium Display Panel Sizes No Longer Get The Love

Category: user experience     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: add comment

Looking at the recent evolution of user interfaces, there seems to be a consistent trend of making things smaller or bigger than the typical dimensions of desktop/laptop screens, while the usual (let's call it 'medium' for the sake of this argument) size seems to fall out of grace with computing platform manufacturers.

As examples, everyone is mesmerized by the iPhone and similar portable (and consequently small) media players. eBook readers, netbooks, portable gaming systems, portable medical systems, etc. seem to converge towards convenience and ease of use, which means a small physical size. But while making things more compact has been the typical direction of human technology for obvious reasons, making things larger is in a way a major change of direction, unless we take a closer look at the more recent mainstream advancements in UI paradigms. Touchscreens, multi-touch devices, electrostatic user interfaces, they all require a fairly realistic motion in terms of scale, so moving your fingers or limbs on or above a large surface but responding on a small screen is very counterintuitive. Even brain user interfaces (BUIs) require a large display to project the motion sensed by electrical sensors.

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