Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Death of Rollovers

I just realized today how rollovers don't work on touchscreen displays - I know this probably seems obvious to those with experience designing applications for touchscreen displays. I had this realization when I was visiting the Guggenheim website on an iPhone. The home page for the Guggenheim organization features a pictures of their museums and the names of the city appear only on rollover. Therefore, I was only able to see the name of the city where a museum was located only when I clicked on the picture of that specific museum. As touchscreen displays continue to become more commonly available, designers will not be able to rely on rollovers to display useful information about the behavior of a button.

1 comment:

Francis said...

Rollovers might continue, given a bit of imagination by the implementers - for example using a gesture like a "V" that started and ended outside the button, but where the body (or at least the pointy bit) passed over the button, would be a way of expressing a tentative interest in a button without clicking on it, using a behavioural mapping similar to hovering over it.

But I don't have an iPhone - would this would be feasible on that platform?