Signs it is time to revisit touch target size

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few signals that touch target size is due some attention.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration
• Around 44px square is the usual minimum

The practical version

Spacing between targets matters as much as size. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.