Your next UI should be designed for touch, even if you’re not targeting smartphones or tablets. Here’s why:
- Usability
Good touch UI design practices are good design practices in general, so designing for touch not only creates a great experience for tablets, it creates a more aesthetically pleasing, often more useable design for traditional keyboard and mouse UIs as well. - Efficiency
Tablets fall into a device class that is very similar to the desktop. You’re probably already supporting iPad’s 1024 x 768 screen dimension, or something close to it. Using responsive design you can adapt to small variations in screen dimensions as needed, delivering your product to tablets and desktops at the same time. - Opportunity
The market for tablets will only get bigger and is currently experiencing exponential growth. In fact, the iPad now represents 2% of Web traffic in the U.S. (source) - Scalability
The giants of the market are converging on touch UI, even for the desktop. Apple’s OS X Lion is borrowing many conventions from iOS and Windows 8 is borrowing many conventions from Windows Phone 7. It’s only a matter of time before touch UI becomes a primary way to interact with the desktop.
Apple’s Magic Trackpad enables multi-touch gestures on the desktop.
Windows 8 offers a full touch experience on the desktop.
The touch revolution is already here
Noticed anything different about your favorite Google sites lately? Google’s been busy updating the look and feel of its major destinations like search, maps, calendar, Gmail and more. The new designs incorporate larger targets, simplified iconography and an emphasis on content over chrome (not to be confused with Chrome). The changes taking place are not only more aesthetically pleasing, they are also tablet- and touch-friendly. 
And Google is certainly not alone when it comes to incorporating touch UI conventions into their designs. Take a look at Flow, a recently launched productivity app, and you’ll see several examples of iPad conventions in their desktop web UI. Clearly mobile and touch were a source of inspiration for their product design.
We’re just getting started
Designing with touch in mind not only makes good business sense, it makes for better product design. Expect to see a lot more touch-friendly UI designs in the coming months.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments!
See Also
- Interesting Touch Interactions on Windows 8
- Apple Converges on a New Era of Computing
- Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
- Mobile First – LukeW
C: I think that you are right on with the above comments, but would go further. I have beef thinking a lot about touch based applications and interfaces with respect to their impact on design, but extended into architecture and product space.
Touch based UI has the potential (will /is) the first UI to transcend the desktop and have real impact on the rest of our lives with respect to the products we buy, the houses we live in and the cities that we inhabit; far beyond the design of mobile communications devices. It is simple enough, small enough and elegant enough to scale through a myriad of applications at a distributed level and will not only be embedded in, but will alter the way that we think about everything from appliance design to furniture.
As we think about this from the perspective of building design, we think less about adding multitouch interface to everyday objects, but more about embedding these technologies invisibly in the world of things we touch, which tends to be everything. Although admittedly we see a future that is less star trek and more benign.
Thank you, Robert. You make an excellent point. While this piece was really directed at designers building apps as we know them today, touch offers some incredible opportunities to re-think how we interact with objects. Have you read Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling? I recommend it if you are interested in the topic of “intelligent” objects.
[...] of iOS-like gestures on the desktop. It’s a great example of how the computing world is converging on touch UI. Here’s what Apple has to say about OS X gestures: OS X Lion brings you a new way to interact [...]