Tips for Design Wave

Give your audience some room

Design Wave wants a little distance between you and the people watching. This is the single biggest thing you can do to make your message readable.

Five or six meters — roughly 20 feet — is plenty, and more is fine. At that kind of range the message comes together easily, wherever your audience happens to be looking.

Distance works because it slows the message down as the eye sees it. Standing right next to you, the message whips past too quickly to assemble. A few steps back and that same wave drifts by at a comfortable pace.

Up close it is a much harder trick. If you are checking your own design in Mirror Mode from a few feet away, you are looking at the hardest case there is — so don't be discouraged if it reads better to your audience than it does to you.

Don't wave too fast

This is the tip people get wrong most often, because it is the opposite of what the app looks like it wants.

What Design Wave does has a name: anorthoscopic perception — showing you a thin sliver of the message at a time, and letting your eye and brain put the whole thing together as it travels.

That's not what a light-up wand does. A wand draws its whole picture on your eye in an instant, and has to move fast to do it. Design Wave works the other way around: the message is assembled in your mind over a moment or two, and rushing it doesn't sharpen the message — it breaks it up.

Take at least a full second for each pass, from one side to the other. That's the fastest you should go, not the goal. Slow waves work beautifully, and taking four or five seconds per pass is perfectly fine. When in doubt, slow down.

The commonest way to get this wrong is a quick little burst — a few seconds of brisk back-and-forth. It feels like the energetic thing to do, but nearly every pass in a burst like that goes by in well under a second. If your wave feels snappy, it's too quick.

Keep your arm straight

Wave from the shoulder, high overhead, with your arm as stiff as you can hold it. Try not to bend your wrist or your elbow.

The app follows where the phone is in the air to decide which part of your design to show. One smooth, wide arc gives it the clearest picture of your motion. A flick of the wrist adds movement that isn't part of the sweep.

Waving from the shoulder also keeps your swing about the same size each time, which helps the app stay tuned to you — see the next tip.

The first wave is a warm-up

Design Wave pays attention to how your arm swings, and uses that to work out how much of your design to show at any one moment. It starts from a sensible guess and tunes itself to you as you go.

So the very first wave — on a new phone, or the first time you ever use the app — can come out looking a little stretched or a little squashed. Nothing is broken. Keep waving, and it settles, usually within a wave or two.

It reads whatever you happen to be doing at the time, too. A long sweep from the shoulder and a quick flick of the forearm move your hand through very different amounts of space, so if you switch from one to the other, give it a wave to catch up.

Keep messages under about 30 characters

This one is physical, not a matter of taste. Every character needs its own share of the arc your arm swings through. Past about 30 characters, the message needs more than a half circle to fit — which is more than you can comfortably swing.

Shorter messages sit easily within a natural arc. If a message feels like it is running off the end of your reach, it is.

Go easy on stacking designs

Any single design runs smoothly on its own. It's combining several at once that gets expensive — an animation, a shading, and an effects layer all redrawing together many times a second.

If the display looks like it's stuttering or tearing while you wave, especially on an older phone, take one design off rather than trying to work out which one is at fault. Wormhole is the heaviest single design, so it's the first one to try removing — but the stutter usually comes from the combination, not from any one of them.

Wave from a fixed spot, facing one way

Pick a direction, stand still, and keep facing that way for the whole wave. Walking around while you wave makes it easy to drift off-direction without noticing.

When you're getting ready, watch the thin colored line around the message field. It turns red if you're facing the wrong way, then flashes green once you're lined up. As long as it's showing green, you're good — start whenever you're ready, no rush.

Changed your mind about which way to face? Just turn and wait until it goes green again.

Use Speed Bumps to feel your form

Speed Bumps, on by default, pulses the phone as it passes over the design — off the edges, the pulses stop, so you can feel where your sweep begins and ends.

The pulses also reveal your speed: waved too fast, they blur together into one continuous buzz instead of distinct taps. If the taps aren't separating, slow down.

Grip matters

Be sure to grip your device tightly while waving. A phone grip — like a collapsible pop-out grip — can make waving much easier and more secure.