90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Wow, first sequence shortened, now we also have steps removed in the new UK app store ad. What next?

The ad isn’t on youtube yet, but when it does appear it’ll be interesting to find out exactly which steps Apple removed from the walkthrough.

I’ve been chatting to Kevin Arthur of Touch Usability (and Usability Dude at Synaptics in California), who has been filling me in about some of the new developments in tactile feedback. The little rant I was having about “before the act” tactile feedback is actually something that researchers in the field are very aware of and working on. There’s some really interesting research in the CHI’08 paper shown below, which is written by a Glasgow University research group (Hogaan, Brewster & Johnston). Check out page 3 where they talk about “tactons” (tactile icons) and fingertip-over, -click and -slip events. Kevin has pointed out that this approach can’t really be bolted on to the iPhone keyboard UI given the predictive text / hit area adjustment technique it uses. Interesting stuff.

Quite a few new handsets are offering tactile feedback on their touchscreens, like the Blackberry Thunder, pictured above. I can’t help thinking that because the manufacturers can’t do multitouch properly, they are opting to enrich their feature lists in other ways.
Is it really a valuable feature? In concept, tactile feedback is wonderful. It is the reason that real keyboards are way easier to use than on a touchscreen. However, the execution is quite different. Consider the micro-interaction of pushing your finger down on a key on a real keyboard or keypad:

1. You line your finger up as best you can
2. The tactile landscape of the device tells you whether you have lined up your finger properly or if you are overlapping with other keys
3. As your finger presses down, you get a satisfying ‘click’, letting you know that it worked.

In other words, you get tactile feedback before the act as well as after the act. Most important is the feedback beforehand, since it allows you to adjust your action accordingly. The reason why all these new handsets are missing the point is that they only give after the act feedback. It’s a vague confirmation. Essentially it’s saying “Yeah, you pressed a key. You wont know which one, though, until you look at the screen.”

So, what should they be doing instead? Concentrating on honing the primary features. Adding enhancements that offer deep, lasting value rather than just an additional bullet point on the promotional materials.

Some passing thoughts:

Wouldn’t it be so useful if you could have group SMS conversations via a “reply to all” feature, just like you can with email? Imagine how much more profit the mobile operators could be making. What a lost opportunity!

By the way, if you like mulling over half-baked ideas, you should check out halfbakery.com. It used to be a favourite of mine a few years ago. Ideas on it tend to be quite fun in a brainstormy outside-the-box kind of way. Good for creative thinking.

Oh, and another thing about SMS. Did you know how ridiculously easy it is to send a spoofed SMS these days? It’s scary.

Some stunningly awful usage of the evil asterisk by three.co.uk for their X-series package (The UK mobile operator) –

Actually, if you dig into the Ts & Cs, the limit is 1GB a month. This is a big difference from unlimited, but not unreasonable since it’s an ok price. Why not just be honest and say it?

Actually, you have 5000 minutes of skype-to-skype calls. This isn’t bad, but they don’t make it clear that they mean skype calls only (no skype out, i.e. no calls to real phones included).

Actually, you have a hard limit of 10,000 messages a month. This is plenty, but by this point, you are likely to feel very suspicious of the asterisk. What’s silly here is that the X-Series package is a pretty nice deal by UK standards. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger stuff. Good, honest simplicity would get them a lot further.

This is a pretty interesting presentation from Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s Executive Vice President (4/12/07). He says, fairly bluntly:

• Right now, the Nokia Handset User Experience has scope for improvement
• There are inconsistency problems between applications.
• Discoverability can be a problem (apps and content can feel ‘hidden’)
• Syncing and storage is currently difficult

Admitting there’s a problem, as they say, is the first step towards a cure. With a message like this coming from the top, we can expect some pretty radical improvements coming soon.

The iPhone isn’t mentioned, but I can’t help thinking that it’s spurred on a user-experience supremacy race. Great news for end-users.

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