Minimum sensible button size on iPhone

iphone user-interface usability uibutton
Seva Alekseyev picture Seva Alekseyev · Dec 18, 2009 · Viewed 99.2k times · Source

I'm designing an iPhone app that features a rather large set of onscreen rounded rect buttons. Given finger-based touchscreen UI, what do you think would be the smallest sensible button size? I need to fit as many of them as I can in the viewport without compromising the usability too much. Maybe there's an Apple-recommended minimum size? Right now it's 33x33, and it looked OK on a simulator, but I was playing with the app on a real phone last night, and it was awkward - the buttons felt too small.

Answer

coneybeare picture coneybeare · Dec 18, 2009

Apple says that the avg finger tap is 44x44 (from WWDC). All table rows are recommended to be at least that height. It is common for icons to appear 32x32, but have padding to make the touchable area 44x44. Of course, people can tap a 1x1 if they are very careful, but why make people try harder than they need to in order to use your app?

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