Joseph V. Ferrante

Baby faces: user-interface design for small displays

User in&face conferences and literature usually dwell upon projects in which large color palettes, high spatial resolution, and large-size displays are presumed to be available. Many consumer information appliances and handheld devices are often more limited in their characteristics, yet m increasingly important to bring the power of the Web, productivity tools, databases, transactions, and entertainment to more and more people on the go, or at least not in front of higher-performance PCs, NCs, or workstations. Professionals with insight into the challenges and achievements of designing graphical user interfaces for small displays will debate the best way to design fa products in which many characteristics are significantly limited, e.g., fonts, color resolution, spatial resolution, and graphics. These user interfaces, which might be called “baby faces” seem simpler in some ways, but also are actually quite complex as a design challenge when one designs to account for their limited characteristics.