I would like to learn what is the best practice in regards to UI Design for coding-ease but above all, app responsiveness.
As touch screens have grown, the overall area that users can reach with ease (particularly Portrait mode) has shrunk in proportion to screen size.
Area Of Efficiency (AOE) is the portions of the screen which are reachable by users thumbs (w/o straining) when holding device in both hands. Think of the thumbs as windshield wipers originating from bottom corners of the screen.
When trying to keep all of my UI Input Objects (buttons,textfields etc) in the AOE, I have found myself using the same buttons to do many different actions at different stages of “App Usage” in fear that populating view with many buttons(hide/show as needed) would make my App slow or use up memory. In order to achieve this, my 2-3 buttons each have a few conditional checks of current App stage in order to fire the desired actions.
So which is theoretically more efficient at runtime?
- Many buttons on top of each other, performing their own single action, & hide/show as needed at App stages.
- Fewer buttons, performing many actions conditional through “if else” or “switch”.
Note: although I would prefer to code as efficiently (less lines) as possible, I care 1000x more about App responsiveness and performance. Coder codes once, but User uses repeatedly.
