Greetings!  We’ve been hard at work over the past year developing a slew of great touch products and enabling our customers to easily add great interfaces to their products.  Our NIM1000 “drop-in” touch module featuring Android is ready to go and is already being used by a variety of OEMs for some very interesting applications.  We designed the NIMble Platform to be very versatile, but the sheer variety of applications still amazes us.    

The upcoming 2010 CES Show in Las Vegas is bound to feature a large number of touch-screen devices, some of which will be great examples of what a touch interface should be, while others will not.  This inspired me to create a list of important considerations when designing a great touch device, part of our “secret sauce” in creating great touch products here at Touch Revolution.    

Touch Revolution’s 10 Keys to Designing Great Touch Devices  

1.) The Right Mindset  
Start with the goal of creating a great touch device, not just adding touch to an existing design.  You need to approach the design holistically — a touch interface cannot be an afterthought. There are too many other important factors that end up affecting the overall “touch experience” such as the industrial design of the product, the processor selection, the supported features, and even the price point.  

2.) Capacitive Touch Sensor  
Projective-capacitive touch sensors (the same type used in all the popular mobile phones) are the best type of touch sensor to use for most applications.  They require only a lightweight touch of the finger, do not require a stylus, can be mounted flush with the bezel or face of the product, are easy to clear, and are very scratch resistant.  They do carry a price premium compared the inferior technologies like resistive sensors, but that will continue to decrease over time.  

3.) “Touch OS”  
Its important to have an platform or OS designed for touch on your device, making it much easier to develop applications with great touch-based UIs.  This is important for connected devices with third party app developers (like Apple’s iPhone OS or Android on a mobile phone) but is also important for standalone single-app devices, as it makes the app development process much faster and easier.  Features like “flick to scroll”, “swipe”, and “drag & drop” are already built-in to the OS and don’t have to be re-engineered from scratch each time an app is created or revised.  Regular embedded Linux, Windows CE, Qt, and other embedded OS’s lack Android’s touch-friendly framework.  Start with the right platform and you’ll be happy in the long-run.  

4.) Integration Testing  
I can’t stress enough how important it is to plan for a lot of integration testing when developing a touch device, especially with a capacitive touch sensor.  You’ll often run into issues with RF/EMI affecting the touch sensor, software driver optimizations, cable-routing issues, application performance issues affecting touch responsiveness, unwanted optical effects between the touch sensor and the LCD, ESD concerns, etc… The only way to find and fix these issues is to allow significant time for QA and to have engineers with the right background doing the troubleshooting.  Integrating a sensitive capacitive touch sensor into a product is often underestimated, and I’ve seen many people pay the price.  

5.) Graphics and Processing Horsepower  
A great touch interface is intuitive, inviting, responsive, and fun to use.  But all these things require fairly advanced 2D and sometimes 3D graphics which consume a lot of processor cycles.  An advanced UI is pointless unless the hardware has enough horsepower to run it well, without lags, delays, or choppiness. 

6.) LCD Selection  
Choosing the right LCD is hard enough… but choosing the right LCD to use in a touch device is at least twice as difficult.  Important factors to consider include understanding RF/EMI issues between the LCD and touch sensor, matching the active area and viewing angles, minimizing optical losses, and bonding/sealing the LCD and touch sensors properly, among many others.  

7.) Mechanical Integration  
Most touch sensors (projective capacitive included) are made of glass, which has plenty of benefits, but adds significant constraints when integrating into a product.  The touch sensor must be integrated correctly to prevent breakage in the event of a drop, to prevent even slight deflections that could interfere with the capacitive sensing baseline, and to eliminate any issues  – doing this incorrectly could result in breakage during drop, flexing of the touch sensor causing electrical issues, or numerous EMI or ESD system-level issues.  

8.) Industrial Design  
By their very nature, touch devices are intended to be very interactive with the user — whether they’re stationary or mobile — meaning ergonomics, usability, and intuitiveness are key.  This is important not only for the UI design, but for the physical design as well.  How is the device held by the user?  Is there room on the product for a firm grip?  For users of all ages?  The entire interactive product experience must be designed holistically, not as a smattering of components that comes together at the last minute. 

9.) Optimized Touch Software  
With an advanced touch interface, there are many “layers” of software involved with translating the motion of your finger on the touchscreen into a responsive action on the LCD.  The firmware running on the touch controller, the touch driver running in the OS, and the driver for the LCD itself are all important, and all must be optimized for fast response time quick refresh.  Any lags in this software stack will result in a terrible user experience.  

10.) Great UI  
This one is fairly obvious, but many people still don’t seem to get it.  A touch screen interface should not just be a series of “virtual buttons”.  Instead, more intuitive and powerful gestures can and should be implemented such as flicks, swipes, pinches, and drags…. things that are difficult or impossible to do with physical switches.  The interface should be intuitive, accessible, inviting, and responsive.    

So there you have it — a thorough list, but certainly not complete.  Delivering a great touch product to market can be difficult, but can also be game-changing for many industries and applications.  Shameless plug here - Working with Touch Revolution and our NIMble Platform is one sure-fire way to make sure you overcome all these challenges and get to market on-time, under-budget, and make your customers happy.    

With the large number of touch devices soon to make a splash at CES 2010 in January, let’s see how many of these items their designers took into consideration.  See you at the show!    Touch Revolution will be exhibiting some of their products, reference designs, and concept products in their booth at the 2010 CES Show in Las Vegas from January 7-10.  You can find them in the Las Vegas Convention Center, Central Hall, Booth #13744.

Hi, Mark Hamblin here – founder of Touch Revolution.  For this first blog post, let me give you a quick introduction to the company and what we’re about.

We at Touch Revolution see the recent growth in popularity of touch devices as the beginning of a fundamental change in the way people interact with devices, appliances, and technology in general.  The types of touch interfaces that started with mobile phones will become the standard for electronics devices of all sorts – in the home, at the office, in the car – virtually anywhere people directly interact with technology.  These devices will have a variety of capabilities, features, and form factors – WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, accelerometers, haptic feedback, small screens, large screens, integrated, stand-alone, portable, … the list goes on.  But there will be one common thread: natural touch-screen user interfaces that provide an intuitive touch experience and make them nimble devices with the ability to change function with the touch of a finger.

We call them NIMble^TM Devices (NIM = Natural Interface Module) because the hardware input features no longer limit the applications that can run on the device – just change the application software and the device can have new features, deliver new services, or completely change its function.  Virtually any device can deliver the standard telephony, contacts, internet, calendar, text messaging, chatting, email, and media player, along with a limitless set of other applications for communication, education, entertainment, etc.

Computing and digital devices are becoming more and more pervasive and ubiquitous in our lives.  We carry little computers in our pockets (cell phones), we interact with a computer when checking in at the airport, we have devices in our cars to give us directions, and there are even little embedded computers that run most of our appliances at home.

But the adoption of these devices only goes as far as the devices are easy to use.  What’s the point of a computerized self-serve airport check-in system if nobody can figure it out?  What’s the point of an in-car GPS system if its more difficult to use than asking for directions at a gas station?  How do you make these growing number of embedded electronic devices intuitive and easy to use?  With great touch interfaces, of course.

We think Android is a game-changer in this changing market because it is a solid, open application framework built for touch, and built to enable connected services.  Android provides a common rallying point for hardware and application software development, providing the interoperability necessary to drive investment and innovation.  If you want to make intelligent and connected consumer electronics devices, we do not think you get there by taking a PC and downsizing it to a consumer electronics form factor.  We think you get there by taking a mobile phone with an open application framework built for touch, then scaling the technology to multiple CE form factors.

In order to make this future a reality today, Touch Revolution has created a platform based on Android that allows product and service vendors deliver customized touch devices or embedded touch interface modules quickly and cost effectively, integrating the best touch screens with the most flexible touch application framework while allowing complete control over the applications and services available on the device.

I look forward to making touch the common device interface in the future, and am excited to see some of the innovations that develop around Android. Let the Touch Revolution begin….

Welcome to the Touch Revolution blog. We are launching the company at CES 2009 in Vegas this week (South Hall #1 - Advanced Display Technology Tech Zone - booth #21424) We will be officially launching this blog with a first post later today. Please revisit us then. Thanks.