What Does "Touch-friendly" Software Actually Mean?
When Instron launched Bluehill® Universal, one of the most common questions from customers was straightforward: what does "touch-friendly" actually mean? It is a term that gets used a lot in software development, but the reality behind it is more nuanced than the label suggests — and understanding the difference between software that is merely touchable and software that has been genuinely designed for touch was central to how the Bluehill Universal team approached the project.
Bluehill® Universal is Instron's latest static testing software, built from the ground up for touch interaction with large touchpoints and intuitive gestures to make the user experience simpler and smarter. The development brought together software teams from across the world, each representing different Instron software products, to create a consistent design language that carries across the entire Instron software portfolio.
Here is a closer look at what went into building a touch-friendly materials testing platform — and what that experience means for operators in the lab every day.
As part of the simplification process of Bluehill Software, the team devised ways to quickly make modifications to the workflow that fall right in line with the touch experience. Something simple, like modifying the data presented in the live data display, users can just tap the data channel and quickly edit the units or number of digits. Another new feature is QuickTest. QuickTest runs a very simple test to break, capturing just a few basic results. The test can be set up on one screen and can be completed in two taps.
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The Bluehill Universal team is excited to get this product into the hands of customers after several years of development. Building on the traditional Bluehill Software architecture, the team has added a modern and user-friendly touch interface using the latest software technology. In doing so, Bluehill Universal has been made more powerful, with features such as Instron Connect, QuickTest, and a completely overhauled data and results exporting feature. Like Bluehill 3, these new features will set the groundwork for many additional progressive features in the years to come.
The Bluehill Universal user experience was designed by a global consortium of software engineers from across Instron, each representing a different software product in the portfolio. Working closely together, the team developed a Bluehill application style consistent enough to be translated across all of Instron's software products. That same design language is visible in the Bluehill HV Software package, which shares the look and feel of Bluehill Universal — a deliberate outcome of the two development teams collaborating throughout the process to implement the new style in a consistent manner.
Touch technology has been around for several decades, but has really moved mainstream over the past 10 years. With the introduction of smartphones, touchscreens have become a part of the daily lives of millions of people. Before that, you may have used a touchscreen at an ATM or at a kiosk of some sort, albeit infrequently. Touch is no longer a nice-to-have feature, but an expectation among software users. Children are now learning to interact with computers via touch before they may learn to use a traditional mouse and keyboard. Therefore, the team understood this as a requirement to provide modern materials testing software.
Touch users expect the touch experience to be similar to what they have learned by using their smartphones. This expectation encompasses many aspects of the experience, from the hardware of the screen to the software itself. Users expect to be able to simply tap objects on the user interface (UI) to invoke certain actions, along with other gestures that they have learned from using their smartphones. With this in mind, Research & Development went through many revisions of the software and the touchscreen itself to ensure the best user experience.
"Touchable" and "touch-friendly" are two terms used to describe the user experience of a software application when interacting with it via touchscreen. From a software standpoint, there is no difference between a mouse "click" and a "tap." So, almost any software application can be considered touchable. However, just because it is touchable does not mean it is optimized for touch. Many of us have experienced this with our smartphones, where you open a website or an app and you cannot quite tap something, or you try to use a gesture and it does not work. This is where touch-friendly comes into play — where the user experience is enhanced by using touch to interact with the application.
Bluehill Universal was built to clear that bar. Every element of the interface — from the size and spacing of touchpoints to the gestures supported by the software — was designed with the touch user in mind, tested through multiple revisions, and refined based on real user feedback. The result is software that does not just respond to touch, but is genuinely intuitive to use that way — because in a busy testing lab, the less time an operator spends thinking about the software, the more time they can spend on the work that matters.