370: Designing for One Hand

This week, we discuss the tradeoffs and challenges of designing interfaces for one-handed use. In The Sidebar, we talk about strategies for collaborating effectively with brand and product design.Golden Ratio Patrons:Float Float has been a lifeline for teams working remotely in 2020. With float you can send your team their work schedule (daily or weekly) via Slack or email, and keep them in the loop of any changes to their tasks and projects with live notifications. You can also let your team know where you're working from with Float's scheduled status. Working from the lake house next week? Add it in Float to let your team know, ahead of time! Learn more at float.com/designdetails.CuriosityStreamLearn about any topic with CuriosityStream; the first on-demand documentary streaming service. There is always something new to learn about with thousands of award-winning documentaries on Technology, History, Nature, Food, Science, Travel, and more! Can’t decide what to watch? Try CuriosityStream’s new feature, ON NOW, to watch a continuous stream of the best documentaries. Get an entire year of streaming for just $14.99 when you sign up at curiositystream.com/design.Latest VIP Patrons:Andrea MolnarAaron BurkhartDominic HolmesAltay AydemirAustin SchaferPfutzMable WongThe Sidebar:The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.In this week's Sidebar, we talk about how to effectively collaborate between brand and product design.MKBHD discusses MagSafeRead more about Apple's breathing lightStacy Holmstead asked about how to get The Sidebar and full Patron episodes in one feed - you can! Grab the RSS feed from our Patreon home page and paste it into any podcast app (we recommend Pocket Casts).Stewart Scott-Curran wrote a Twitter thread outlining how they redesigned Loom as a unified brand and product design team.Follow up:Nectar by Joji continues to be on repeat.A reminder about our work journaling episode.Ya'll have pushed the first PRs to edit our transcripts! Check out the tweet and the code.Main topic:vinnie329 asks on our GitHub: I would love to get both your takes on the one-hand myth that a lot of designers seem to buy-in to when designing for mobile. The myth suggests that all people use one hand to interact with their phones and so interfaces should be designed accordingly. This may have been true on the early smartphones which were smaller and where apps tended to be simpler. However, with devices getting bigger and heavier it seems like people use both hands for more complex, high-stakes tasks (buying something) and one hand for simple, low-stakes tasks (scrolling through a feed). Is this what you guys have found to be true? And is there any recent research around how people use their hands to interact with their phones?Luke W. writes about designing for large screen smartphones.Read the Material spec for bottom app bars.Things and Halide have great bottom oriented UIs.Cool Things:Brian shared Loom, a fantastic little tool for quickly recording and sharing presentations to the cloud.Kap is still great.mmhmm looks neat, too.And we DescriptMarshall shared Cracking the Cryptic, a YouTube channel that gets real nerdy about sudoku. But trust us, these videos are amazing. Start with this one.Design Details on the Web:📻 We are @designdetailsfm🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunesArrivederci!P.S. Gorlami