Five mistakes teams make with touch target size
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit touch target size.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Warning signs
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration
- Around 44px square is the usual minimum
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
Spacing between targets matters as much as size. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Where to go from here
In practice
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about touch target size before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Spacing between targets matters as much as size — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.