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 such concerns.
And finally, information density can be separate from available action density.
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...
> 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.
My podcast app shows a list of episodes etc as just rows with only subtle horizontal lines separating them (no "cards"). There's 3-4 lines of text with just a little bit of whitespace inside each block, a button on the right, and dragging the row left/right shows more buttons. Below the Android-global-convention top nav there's room for 7 episodes on my phone's screen size. I genuinely wouldn't want the text to be any smaller. The screen is not wide enough to use a multi-column grid without wrapping episode title text like crazy. Thus, the only way to compact that more vertically would be not showing as much metadata (date, download size etc seem unnecessary; maybe pinch-zoom to expand details of a single row when wanted). I could accept that, but even then given my not-great eyesight, the icon and episode title take up as much vertical space as the button. As long as it displays a recognizable icon, a two-line title, and duration and current offset, the button will fit just fine.
Mobile just has inherent limitations, both because of small screen size and because of inaccurate pointing.
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 such concerns.
And finally, information density can be separate from available action density.