Chapter 7INTERFACES
7.1 Introduction
When considering how to solve a user problem, the default solution that many developers choose to design is an app that can run on a smartphone. Making this easier still are many easy-to-use app developer tools that can be freely downloaded. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to see just how many apps there are in the world. In December 2018, Apple, for example, had a staggering 2 million apps in its store, many of which were games.
Despite the ubiquity of the smartphone app industry, the web continues to proliferate in offering services, content, resources, and information. A central concern is how to design them to be interoperable across different devices and browsers, which takes into account the varying form factors, size, and shape of smart watches, smartphones, laptops, smart TVs, and computer screens. Besides the app and the web, many other kinds of interfaces have been developed, including voice interfaces, touch interfaces, gesture interfaces, and multimodal interfaces.
The proliferation ...