Designing for E-ink devices:

challenges, best practices & guidelines.

Hany Rizk@myExpDesigned - hanyrizk.com

E-ink

Strong points

• Readability

• Portability

• Battery life

Issues

• Ghosting

• Interaction

• Design

Study

• Heuristic Evaluation

• Usability Test

Results

• IA on the readers’ OS

• Touch interaction

• Long response times

• Little visible feedback

Guidelines - General Design

• Links should be underlined.

• Use font faces with slightly contrasting stroke weights.

• Use highly contrasting shades of gray together.

• Use black for the main text, and grey (italics) for secondary text.

• Use bold & bigger font sizes to highlight text importance.

• Display each page’s content in one screen, no scrolling.

• IA should be intuitive and similar to that of familiar tech devices.

• Be efficient with screen space.

• Don’t fill the screen with clutter.

• Optimize your design for e-ink.

• Use clear, intuitive graphics.

• Leave no room for user-error.

Guidelines - Interaction

• Show a change in color to highlight an element’s change of state.

• Tapped keyboard buttons should pop-up magnified, for visual feedback.

• Visual feedback should be given after actions (such as loading indicators).

• Button sizes on touch-screens should be large enough for easy access.

• Have sufficient space between interactive elements, to reduce imprecise tapping.

• Respect & apply Fitt’s law!

• Double pressing a navigation button should speed up navigation.

• Button-based devices should follow mobile usability guidelines.

• The cursor should be displayed in selected input fields for easy text editing editing.

• Filters & other sorting methods should be provided for faster browsing in pages.

• Provide signs of orientation to the user.