Thread:Talk:Athena/Some intuitive likes and dislikes/reply

(Replies to this are broken up so that we can create separate threads about specific issues and I can chunk out my responses).

''It may be sensible to abstract this a bit further: screen size and input methods (mouse vs. touch vs. voice ...). Netbooks, for example, have small screen size, but typically no touch screens, so a "tablet UI" that assumes touch may not make sense there. In general, I notice that the word touch does not appear in the design docs, but I think we have to talk and think very explicitly about touching vs. clicking vs. speaking.''
 * I was talking with Tomasz about this exact thing, and how we really are talking about resolutions and capabilities rather than specific device types (mobile/tablet/browser). In effect, though, we have arguably four "near term" target resolutions:


 * 1) Smart phone (small display, touch oriented)
 * 2) Touch tablets (medium display, touch oriented)
 * 3) Notebook computers (medium display, mouse oriented)
 * 4) Desktop computers (large display, mouse oriented)

However, we can't discount the Future, where something may be inserted into home theater devices (with kinetic and motion recognition inputs) as well.

Except in a few specific locations, I have avoided talking about "touching" versus "clicking" or "swiping" because I didn't want to get hung up in the mechanics of how things behave just yet (this is something that we nearly always bikeshed on). The one area I've been more explicit about it with is with the behavior of the sliders and top bar on mobile devices.

I am going to update the main document with more descriptions about various "device" targets as well as some rationales about choices (for example, large search boxes are arguably more important for large resolution, mouse driven interfaces, since Fitt's law makes it hard to get a mouse there with accuracy very fast).