Ham? Maybe.

Wine? Quite possibly.

Limited strenuous exercise? Almost certainly.

There are a number of reasons why my fingers might feel fatter in 2010, that’s “twenty ten”  people, not “two thousand and ten”. Stop wasting good syllables. A problem shared is a problem halved, so I decided to discuss my condition with a few close friends. Turns out a number of the folks I surveyed were also suffering from podgy digit disorder. After much contemplation we uncovered a common factor in the way we all behaved over the Christmas holidays.

We had all spent more time playing with our iPhones. From DoodleJump to Tweetie we’d all been tapping, swiping and pinching far more than your average working week and it was starting to have physical effects. Or so we thought. Why else would we be tapping a back link when we were trying to hit the search field?

Leave enough space between action taps - One of Bill's "8 Rules of Thumb" (source: How People really use the iPhone - Bill Westerman)

It wasn’t until I stumbled across Bill Westerman’s presentation – How People Really Use the iPhone that I started to think maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was my phone, or more specifically the application’s user interface design. Maybe all of my additional holiday usage was starting to uncover flaws in the way some iPhone apps were designed. Turns out Bill’s study uncovered a number of common usability issues experienced by people when trying to navigate a series of common apps.

These common issues have formed Bill’s “8 rules of thumb” a great checklist for iPhone application planners and developers.  Just as no serious web project would be undertaken without a strong planning, prototyping and testing cycle neither should the brave new world of phone based application development.