The Cons of Touchscreen Websites

Touchscreens are everywhere – from smartphones to televisions to phone booths and more. So with the interface on the rise, why not make your website a touchscreen as well?

At first glance, making your website touch-interactive may seem like a good idea and that you’re keeping up with the trends, however touchscreen websites can actually be more problematic than easy to use.

Cursors vs. Fingers

When you use a cursor, you can click on one-pixel elements, which makes navigating a website fast and precise. Your finger, however, takes up more room, which means that you’ll be clicking on multiple pixels when you may only want to click on one.

Think about two small buttons next to each other. It’s likely that when you try to click one using your finger, you’ll end up accidentally clicking the other one as well.

Typography

Because your fingers cover more area when you navigate, web developers are going to have to use larger call-to-actions to make sure your touch stays accurate. This means that your typography must be larger as well in order to keep a clean design and your website could end up being much larger than you want it to be.

Multi-Touch Software

Making your website multi-touch-capable can greatly improve your user experience, however there is a very limited amount of multi-touch software available for web developers today, which can make it difficult to create a truly easy-to-use touchscreen website.

Visual Blocks

Another problem with using your finger to navigate is that as you move your finger closer to what you want to click on, you lose sight of where exactly the tip of your finger is touching. With a cursor, you can see around the arrow. It’s harder, however, to see around your finger.