Some key takeaways from Luke Wroblewski’s notes on Josh Clark’s talk at “An Event Apart” in Seattle:

There are three ways to hold a phone: one thumb/one hand, two hands/one finger or thumb, and two hands/two thumbs. 49% of people observed using phones outside, used one thumb/one hand.

Half of people using phones outside use their devices with one hand, allowing only their thumb to act as their main operator. At half of the sample, it seems more important to design for this use pattern, accommodating for all patterns: one thumb/one hand, two hands/one finger or thumb, and two hands/two thumbs.

Screen size is a lousy way to detect a touchscreen. There’s no reliable way to detect touch on all devices.

This is definitely an issue I’ve encountered when looking at examples of responsive design, especially at sites that consider mobile to be more dominant. Yes, it makes sense on phones to hide menus and navigation and have them appear or expand when tapping on a hamburger button or a dropdown callout. But, if you just take that phone UI and make all of your components 100% width so that it’ll work on tablets, you’re quickly hacking your page to “adapt” to a wider browser and creating additional usability issues. Now that you’ve got 1024px instead of 320px, you have plenty of space to bring back some, if not all, of your main navigation links. Remember, 1024px width is common on both tablets and desktops. Designing with consideration to devices will greatly improve usability because browsing behaviors will differ vastly between the tablets and desktop.

The optimal touch target size is 7mm, based on the average size of human finger tips and pads. CSS2.1 defines a pixel as 1/96 of an inch. So 7mm should be 30pixels.

This seems to be something to take in to consideration for UI elements like buttons, content linking, and generally anything you want your users to tap on in order to dive deeper. For example, take Twitter for iOS. The hot areas for almost everything in the app looks to be at least 30px in at least 1 direction. A tweet displaying only 1 line of content is at least 70px, aided by the height of the avatar, but in any case, if you tap on any of that area, you get taken to that tweet’s detail view, or you might end up on the user’s profile. That’s what is important to the Twitter’s experience. You can tap on URLs and visit those pages in the browser, but that’s secondary to Twitter wanting you to tap on tweets and stay within their ecosystem.

Extra taps and clicks are not evil when you can manage the performance issue. On mobile we might want to rethink our aversion to additional steps. As long as each tap is a quality tap that keeps the scent of information strong, its not a wasted tap.

The most difficult thing is to take something complex and simplifying it. Yes, you’d like to eliminate steps to in order to make a process much more streamlined and quick, but you also have to make sure the user understands what is going on. If you’re building a checkout experience, you’d want to show confirmation of purchase at the end so users know the transaction completed successfully. You wouldn’t want to hide it because it’s an extra state that you don’t need. Even if you send an email confirmation, assume that users are only viewing your product and don’t have access to email.

Will 2013 be the year of the on-screen hashtag? With Twitter and Nielsen coming together to create the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” to measure and capture audience engagement with programming, it’s only inevitable to see the evolution of “joining the conversation” on TV.

A year ago, the season finale of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars” generated the “Most Social Media Buzz of Any Regularly Scheduled TV Series in the History of Television.” And while watching an episode, it’s no surprise there’s a push to create social engagement. When a big event happens, when a character comes to a realization, or when sh*t hits the fan, a context-specific hashtag appears at the top right of the screen. 

A few eye-opening points from the infographic:

• 86% of US tablet owners simultaneously use their device while watching TV
• 88% of US smartphone owners simultaneously use their device while watching TV
• 62% (+18% YOY) use social networks/forums while watching TV on a weekly basis
• Comedy and reality shows have higher engagement than sports programming on social media (though I think this could be skewed based on platform, especially when sporting events continuously break Twitter’s tweets per second records year after year)

A few months ago, I had the sudden urge to relive my childhood and play with a Tamagotchi, Pocket Pikachu, or Digimon, so I walked into Toys R Us hoping to buy one, but came out empty handed. I looked through the App Store to see if an app existed, and sure enough there were a bunch of virtual pet apps, but they all seemed dull in functionality and design. Impending and Realmac, the guys behind Clear, have just announced Hatch, which, from the looks of the trailer, has a good shot to take over the virtual pets app market. Good luck to the team working on it. I’ve adopted a “Pancake” Fugu and I can’t wait to try the product when it’s released.

People purchase directly from your Instagram post by commenting “buy”. No linking off Instagram, no shopping carts or checkout process.

Chirpify looks extremely simple to use and looks like it won’t interrupt the content browsing experience on Instagram too much (most of the friends posts are of goods anyway). I haven’t been able to try it, but I wonder what might happen if an item is sold and someone else comments “Buy” on the post. Would you need to remove the listing from the Chirpify dashboard, and if so, does it remove the post completely off of Instagram? I can see how this will work great for crowd engagement, like purchasing items w/ large inventory from large retailers, selling deals/coupons, donations, and giveaways. To monetize, Chirpify takes 5% of the transaction. Will be interesting to see how the IG community adopts the service.

Bijan’s “People Tagging” issue has been addressed by Instagram! I’ve been frustrated when I’ve @ mentioned someone on an Instagram caption, posted it to Twitter, and because the tagged person has a different handle on Twitter, can’t get notified of the post. I once got an @ message from the mis-tagged user telling me I tagged the wrong person. Instagram’s solution looks like it’ll work well, and they’ve also covered several use cases in cases where Twitter isn’t connected to the tagged user’s IG account. It’s also great to see the team at Instagram working on issues for the Twitter ecosystem even after the API shutoff. They’re definitely building for their users and continuously improving the product’s experience.

Myspace’s massive redesign looks pretty amazing (based on the promo video). There’s a big focus on images and video, and you’ll notice it right away with the full-page dimensions. For now, no banner ads and flashy animated gifs, though I bet they’ll make a comeback in some way, shape or form. Some screenshots remind me of Tumblr, though that’s perfectly fine with me. I’m extremely curious to see how the horizontal scrolling is implemented and whether or not that’ll introduce some usability issues. Will swiping down on my mouse or pressing the spacebar paginate through the content? The entire experience looks like it can be easily translated as a tablet app. There’s definitely going to be a close relationship between users and artists/events. If you look closely at Justin Timberlake’s profile navigation, there’s a nav item for “Shop” and I’m going to assume that that’s going to play heavily in their monetization strategy because of the depletion of ad units.

I’m really digging the search & search results page.