The Touch

On another topic, I picked up an Apple iPod Touch, the one with the big touch screen and a cousin to the iPhone. Man, that is a nice piece of engineering. The user interface is very interesting. I have not really used touch devices before, but I can see that user interfaces will not translate to mobile touch devices very well at all.

Consider these…

Screen real estate is at a premium. The balance between being efficient and being rich without being cluttered is very narrow, and they have done a good job at the user interface.

One of the fun user interfaces involves scrolling through lists (think of artist/album lists). As a user, you think of pressing your finger on the list and flicking it in a direction. This sends the list rolling in the direction your finger directed. The fun thing is that the faster you flick, the faster the list scrolls. And the list has friction! Its velocity decays over time. And if you hit the end of the list, it kind of compresses a bit then rebounds, kind of like its made of rubber. I’m ashamed to admit that even after having the Touch a week, I still sometimes play around with flick-scrolling.

One thing that I ran into was the lack of tool tips. With a mouse-based interface, you can linger over items to get a hint to pop up as to the function of the widget. But with touch screens, there is no lingering. You press on a button with a finger. That’s it. I missed the ability to browse the functionality that tool tips provide. A possible compromise might be to have a tool tip pop up while the press down occurs. A user might move off a widget without releasing, hence restoring the viewing of tool tips without activating the widget.

Another slight surprise was how much your finger actually obscures. Apple did a good job of averaging a hotspot to represent the center point of your finger, so I rarely missed items, even as a newbie user. But your finger tip is quite large. When you click say on a small keyboard, or a small control, its nice to know what you hit. This happens with several forms of feedback. If you hit a lone control and pick your finger up, you often see the control glow for a couple of seconds, indicating that is was hit. This is a “nice touch” (sorry, I couldn’t resist). When clicking on a virtual keyboard, when you click the letter, a larger representation of that letter jumps up above your finger while it is pressed, allowing visual confirmation of your choice.

One of the really glitzy user interface features is controlling zooming. The Touch uses the Safari web browser. When you navigate to a page, you see the whole page (usually as you’d see it rendered on your computer screen) only shrunk down to fit the mobile screen. This makes actually using this sized page dubious. Most users will zoom in and then move around by dragging the screen with their finger tip. The zooming is what’s interesting. If you want to blow up a screen, you put two fingers on the screen and spread them out. The screen zooms bigger in real time in proportion to how much you spread your fingers. Zooming back out is the opposite; use two fingers and squeeze them together. Very, very slick. The obvious usability defect I ran into was that the zooming factor was not preserved when jumping to a new page. This means you keep having to zoom in every time you follow a link.

The Touch also has real orientation sensor. (Please pardon my printer jargon to follow.) If you are viewing a web page in portrait mode, and you rotate the Touch to landscape mode, the screen will reorient itself so you are no longer looking at it sideways! That one is a real crowd pleaser. Some applications take advantage of this; for example, the drawing programs allow you to erase a screen by shaking the Touch. Ah, that takes me back to the old Etch-a-sketch days. I ran into an interesting usability issue with this feature. I took the Touch to the gym, where I primarily listen to music (you know, to keep the old forty-something body going). The Touch would not deactivate the screen (to save power) because I was doing sit-ups, causing the screen to switch between portrait and landscape mode with each grunt of effort. Thankfully once it went into screen deactivate, no amount of sit-ups would reactivate the screen (there is a separate gesture to wake it up).

I guess the moral of the story is that even a multi-billion dollar company that thrives on slick user interfaces makes usability mistakes. The second moral of the story is that touch-based interfaces are a new challenge to those of us who create mouse-based applications. The final moral of the story is to go out and get an iPod Touch – now.