![]() Over half of the user population may prefer hardware input. Surveys indicate that users have a significant preference for hardware keyboards. While statistics on mobile devices are closely held, it seems that around half of all Android devices-for which there are relatively broad form-factor choices-have a physical keyboard of some sort. Often, rather than a touch-screen keyboard, other mobile devices have different types of keyboards for data entry. ![]() … Surveys indicate that users have a significant preference for hardware keyboards.įirst, all of you iOS fans must recognize that not all of your customers have an iPhone, and you must respect their choice. Many Different Types of Keyboards Often, rather than a touch-screen keyboard, other mobile devices have different types of keyboards for data entry. Figure 2-Alphabetic entry mode is all too often the default for a numeric field In this case, although flight number is always a number, the developers forgot to tell the field that, so on a touch-screen device that has a virtual keyboard, the keyboard always opens in the default, alphabetic entry mode, requiring me to manually switch to numeric entry, every time. Or, apps don’t automatically switch to the proper input mode, as in the example shown in Figure 2. Figure 1-Samsung Galaxy S, with a slide-out keyboard And as many as half of Android devices, like the Samsung Galaxy S shown in Figure 1, have a hardware keyboard. This doesn’t make a lot of sense for the slide-out keyboard I want to use. But the app insists that I view the search results in a vertical list. For example, when I want to browse a list of movies on my DVR, I must first type a search string. Many apps don’t rotate, so work in only one orientation, at least on some screens. Īlmost every mobile app that I use-and this applies to a lesser degree to the mobile Web-fails me in a few common, often-repeated ways. But anecdotes, fanaticism, or even conspiracy theories about why your favorite platform is the best really do not help. On development discussion forums, some developers say they’ve “never owned anything other than a touch-screen phone”-and of course, all of their friends have touch-screen smartphones, too. I’m referring to the presumption that everyone has a touch-screen smartphone. Perhaps more troubling is that their personal preferences and rumors sometimes supplant data regarding the kinds of actual experiences that exist out in the world. Yes, they know that users don’t have a mouse, but there’s still an unstated assumption that all desktop Web input widgets will work. One key area that surprises a lot of designers and developers that I have worked with is input methods. With the massive scale of mobile device usage, most of these assumptions are becoming a bit of a problem. I often say that desktop computing-and especially the desktop Web-made the practice of interaction design lazy, by promulgating assumptions that are not always true outside of this narrow domain.
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