Digital Design Blog

Innovation at Your Fingertips: Designing for Multi-Touch

How do you design one of the first multi-touch, multi-user interface experiences for a retail environment?

That’s what our Avenue A | Razorfish design team solved for Microsoft and AT&T Wireless. Last week, at the CTIA Wireless Conference, the companies announced their initiative to bring Microsoft Surface to life in an enhanced retail environment, giving customers the ability to explore their mobile worlds using touch and device recognition technology.

The plan is to roll out the Microsoft Surface computers on April 17 in select AT&T retail locations, including stores in New York City, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco. Then we will work with AT&T and Microsoft to learn and iterate the experience and prepare for more widespread expansion across AT&T’s 2,200 U.S. retail stores.

Call it shopping 2.0, if you must. But the project clearly starts to forge a new experiential path for retail and other environments. Most interestingly, from a design perspective, there were a number of new elements that our team had to tackle: how to design for multi-touch; how to design for multi-user; and how to design for device recognition. Putting it all together was quite an impressive feat.

Over the next few weeks we’ll host some Q&As here with the design team on how to design for Microsoft’s Surface, as well as how to handle design and development for that other multi-touch device — the iPhone.

Until then, here are a number of hi-res photos of the Surface-based AT&T Wireless retail experience:

You can learn more about Microsoft’s Surface here.

You can learn more about AT&T Wireless retail environment here.

You can watch a video of the CTIA demo here (courtesy of CrunchGear):