Law 2: Organize (Desktop Pattern)
Run for Your Life!
I guess the above title sounds suspiciously like the spam that litters your, and my, inbox. With all the excitement about Apple’s new iPhone it’s hard not to be pumped as well. However as I clicked through the online demo on Apple’s site, my first feeling was that it was doing too much for my own tastes. For me the high point of the demo was their solution to managing the task of typing on a small device.
The advantage of reduce is to reap the benefits of smallness in portability and perception of simplicity. But as anyone that daily types on little devices knows, it can get a bit tiring. I was wondering how Apple had resolved the problem of mating a touchscreen with a QWERTY keyboard and was happy to see their hover-expand behavior for the keys. Each key can remain small and within an orderly grid at first glance, then by hovering your finger the on-screen key is made bigger so that you can see it better. It’s a fairly simple idea and probably not brand new, but definitely a step forward in the awkward task of typing on a tiny virtual keyboard. Now let me see if I can find the teeny Publish button on this here blog system …
11 Responses to “On-Demand Largeness”
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The hover-enlarge keyboard sound similar to how you type things in on the Nintendo Wii (a model of simplicity itself.)
Karin, all the more reason to now get me a Wii. Thanks for the great excuse. -John
[…] John Maeda, author of The Laws of Simplicity, had the patience to watch the entire demo (or the keynote). The keyboard is part of the touch screen and reacts to hovering fingers. He calls it On-demand largeness. Pretty cool. […]
The hover-expand feature is very nice, indeed.
Looking at the keyboard, makes me wonder if the software allows customization of the layout. I can see the benefits of choosing a widely utilized and memorized layout like QWERTY. But typing with ten fingers is different from typing with one so there must be a better layout then QWERTY for one finger typing. Wouldn’t it awesome if customization of the keyboard layout is possible.
Typing on ten fingers versus typing on one; the fact that the soft keyboard permits the layout to be completely morphable. Mmmmmm. I like those thoughts. Thanks Huyen!
…it seems like the touchscreen is excusing faults…
see here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/some-hands-on-time-with-the-iphone/
Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.
Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted. Its best guess appears just under what you’ve typed; if it’s correct, you tap the Space bar to accept it and continue. I typed a couple of e-mail messages with lots of typos but eventually 100 percent accuracy, thanks to this auto-correct feature
cheers!
I agree with Guy that predictive typing can save a lot of keystrokes. My friend showed me his Blackberry Pearl — which at first I was a bit skeptical about due to the odd half-placement of keys. But the predictive typing is implemented extremely well.
In Japan they’ve had predictive typing systems for years due to the difficulty of inputting kanji from a normal ASCII keyboard. The one thing that struck me as special about that market is that there are different companies that make different predictive typing plug-ins. In Japan, systems like Windows and MacOS are designed to accommodate these various flavors of “frontend input processors (FIP)” because each person has a different preference for how they express themselves semantically.
I’ve read a bit about the Symbian platform and how there are similar efforts ongoing for cellphones to make more advanced typing frontends. For now, I guess I’m still doing, “The lazy dog jumps over the brown fox.”
[…] - the user interface, the user interaction design (on-demand largeness!)… All right, so it’s pretty. Now pick it up and make a call. A big friendly icon appears on that huge screen. Say a second call comes in while you’re talking. Another icon appears. Tap that second icon and you switch to the second call. Tap the big “merge calls” icon and you’ve got a three-way conference call. Pleasantly simple.(TIME) […]
hm…another apple hype though?
I think we all are happy that Apple entered this marked- whatever they design (and will be designing over the next years)- it will help the marked to develop further and drive usability.
BUT:
we all should not forget that there were iconic mobile products before Apple…
One of the most simple and reduced handsets (which the i-phone isn’t btw) was the SIMPLY range developed by Vodafone’s usability department together with Sagem.
Unfortunately these products aren’t available in the U.S. (yet?) but they are in Europe and are extremely successful and easy to use. For all those who just want a mobile phone, here it is:
http://visionmobile.com/blog/?p=27
Hello Guy, I’ve seen these phones in the airports in Europe. But they exist only as plastic dummy objects that cannot be used. Are they truly simple? John
Hi John. If you say “truly simple” i tend to say no, as i generally think most button-crowded handheld devices aren`t simple in themselves- especially mobile phones:
either they have more than 10 keys (or more) to dial any number or they are reduced to 2-3 keys, but then you need a special PC/Web interface to enter the numbers you might want to dial later on beforehand. Speech recognition is quite unuseful in public (think about Japan here
) - touchscreens might solve this issue- but by now are rather used for complex usecases, rather than offering a reduced but useful solution - besides that, touchscreens still lack the feedback- eventhough i am sur ethis could be easily solved (and price is another componenet here).
So let´s say: SIMPLY works easy, it´s simple but it might not be self-explanationary troughout all integrated usecases (and my mother in law would never gives hers away anymore)