Re-imagining Apps for Ultrabook™ (Part 1): Touch Interfaces

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Welcome to the Re-imagining Apps for Ultrabook™ series. This set of videos will not only introduce new ways of thinking about the design and development of desktop applications, but also offer practical design advice and guidelines to help you take advantage of the new opportunities we discuss. As your host, I’m really excited to kick things off.

Over the past several years, both in my product work and writings, I’ve focused primarily on designing for mobile devices. Mobile has not only grown tremendously, but popularized new ways for people to interact with digital services as well. New capabilities like multi-touch, location detection, device orientation, and much more have made mobile devices a playground for new interactions and product ideas. It’s been an exciting ride to say the least.

Now many of these revolutionary capabilities are making their way to a new category of devices through Intel’s Ultrabook™ system and, once again, a new set of opportunities is available for designers and developers to re-imagine software. It’s an exciting time for desktop apps and I hope this video series will not only inspire you to explore new ways of thinking but help you with detailed design advice as well.

To start the series, we’re going to look at the opportunity touch interfaces provide for desktop applications. Specifically, we’ll outline the impact of new input methods in personal computing and walk through the top-level principles behind designing for touch.

The mainstream adoption of touch by consumers makes it a key part of re-imagining desktop apps and, as a result, a great way to begin this video series. So without further ado here’s the first video in our program, Touch Interfaces.

Resources
In the video I mention a number of resources that are listed below for quick access.

• Revolutionary User Interfaces by Asymco
• Building Ultrabook™ Applications in a Post-PC Age by Intel
• Designing Natural Interfaces by Nathan Moody
• Developing Natural User Interfaces by Joshua Blake

About Your Host
Luke Wroblewski is an internationally recognized digital product leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 700 million people worldwide. He was co-founder and CPO of Bagcheck (acquired by Twitter in 2011), chief design architect at Yahoo! Inc., and is the author of three popular Web design books including his most recent: Mobile First. Luke is a contracted vendor with Intel; opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily represent Intel's position on any issue.