When Mouse Clicks become Buttons, Touches, and Multi-Touches

When you're designing pages for mobile devices, you have to keep in mind that most handhelds don't interact with web content in quite the same way as traditional computers. Often, instead of point-and-click, it's Tab-and-click. Users of handhelds navigate to hyperlinks and to the fields in forms by using arrows, scroll bars, scroll wheels, or keys. This and other interface differences often affect how you should design your mobile web pages.

A mobile user, it turns out, doesn't have a mouse. Okay, so you're thinking, “Duh. State the obvious, much?” — but this lack is important: Some techniques used in designing sites for computers just don't work on handhelds. For example, on pages designed for traditional computer screens, designers have several significant tools that help users identify hotspots (clickable links) — for example, rollovers and alternate descriptions that depend on the mouse. When users hover (place the mouse pointer over and linger on a hyperlink or button), a rollover changes the appearance of the hyperlink; alternate descriptions provide feedback in tooltip-like boxes (usually a description of what the link does), as shown in Figure 5-4.