Design for gloves: building mobile interfaces for extreme conditions
When your users are wearing insulated gloves in -20°C weather, every pixel matters. How we designed Orbit's capture flow for real-world conditions.
Orbit's mobile app is used by field inspectors working in some of the harshest climates. Often, they are wearing heavy, insulated gloves, making standard touchscreen interactions extremely frustrating.
Designing for these conditions required throwing out the traditional mobile UI playbook. Tap targets needed to be massive, swipe interactions had to be avoided, and visual feedback needed to be incredibly high-contrast.
Our design choices
- Tap targets of at least 80x80 pixels
- No complex gesture-based navigation
- Using the hardware volume buttons as physical capture triggers
- Voice command fallback for hands-free data logging
These simple, practical design changes transformed Orbit's utility. Field inspection times dropped by 45%, and safety compliance went up because inspectors no longer had to take off their gloves to log data.