Google now forces designers to make huge interfaces on mobile. Tap targets smaller than 54px get a “tap target too small” penalty applied to the sites usability score. This score in turn can hurt your rankings for mobile searches. Which can in turn damage your business. So what are we to do?
The 48x48px touch target is estimated to be ~9mm. That's tiny for touching by finger, since you can't see through your finger to aim (styluses could do it). For mobile, look for UX patterns that don't hinge on my big thumb hitting a tiny patch of screen. For example, gestures like swipe to either side to expose actions for item. Most of the things talked about in this thread are not mobile UIs, and are not limited by…
Yeah, I have really big fingers as well. However for web forms, this rule really does make everything look too big IMHO. There are cascading impacts of these decisions as well, a field which is 48px tall must have a significant amount of padding around it as well, to look balanced with the field size. Typically the rule of thumb i've seen designers use is 50% of the field height. When you factor in field label sitting above the field things get even bigger. I did however recently find a pretty nice solution which moves the field label inside the field, allowing for a slightly more compact layout while still hitting the tap target size requirements.
https://m2.material.io/components/text-fields#filled-text-fi...
