The Problem With Touch Screens
We’re still in the era of iPhone enthusiasm, so at the moment this will probably sound like a contrarian stance, if not sour grapes. Regardless, here goes. I think touch screens are in most cases inferior to other input systems for computing devices.
Touch-screen input has many disadvantages, but the overwhelming problem is that you can’t see what you’re touching while you’re touching it. The most famous touch screen interface at the moment — the iPhone — has a user interface gets around some of this with some dodges that would be properly called “hacks” if they weren’t so visually attractive. But hacks they are. In order to input text, a virtual keyboard appears on the screen. Lacking the tactile feedback provided by real keys, you need o see which key you’re touching. You can’t see the key itself; it’s hidden by your fingers. So another key representation appears, this one offset far enough to be visible. But there’s a problem with this, too: you have to look. I’d bet that virtually every reader of this blog can send a text message blindfolded. Try that with any touch device.
Touch screens work pretty well when you have a large screen and very trivial levels of interaction such as moving the contents of the entire display or tapping one time on oversized virtual buttons. Personally, I hope S60 doesn’t pursue the fashion show in marching toward touch; it’s not based on good design.
I…sort of agree and sort of don’t. I completely understand the points made. The downside, though, is that when you’re *not* touching the screen, it’s only half as big, because the keypad takes up the other half of the fascia of your phone. Yes, there are slideable keypads and flip-open phones, but the idea of having one screen which is actually large enough to show a video is sort of compelling. Touch is awkward for typing, agreed, but the direct manipulation of things on-screen (zoom’s a perfect example here) is better than using the joystick to move a tiny mouse around, or scrolling through menus. There’s obviously no clear answer here…
You’re right that joysticks and scrolling menus are not good fits for mobile devices; they’re reasonable tools for desktop systems, but attempting to replicate them on mobile devices is another design decision I disagree with. I think a good portable-device interface could offer both a large screen and input systems that avoid both joysticks and touch screens in many cases — perhaps keeping one or both of those when they make the most sense.
I don’t know who, if anyone, is approaching mobile design from a completely clean sheet of paper. And finding a way for hardware, software, and design people to really work closely together.
I have to agree with the other posters here. Few people will argue that for typing, a real keyboad is preferable.
But your reasoning about typing on an iPhone can also be applied, in reverse, to web browsing on an S60 device. The Web as it is now has never been intended to be accessed via joystick driven devices. The Web Browser team at Nokia has made a fantastic job at trying to overcome the limitations of these devices in order to make it possible browse the web on them.
However, ultimately, what they came up with (soft “sticking” pointer, variable speed scrolling, pop-up menu…) are just hacks. Nice looking, clever hacks but hacks. And even with these hacks, doing any kind of serious web browsing on an S60 device remains a real pain in the arse. You can’t beat a touch screen for easy scrolling and clicking.
What I just don’t get is why so many people are trying to convince others (or themselves) that touchscreens are so much better than keyboards or that keyboards are so much better than touchscreen. It seems fairly obvious to me that neither touchscreen or keyboards are best suited for all the tasks you might want to carry out on a mobile device. Both input methods are required in order to make a smartphone truly easy to use. Obviously, this is easier said than done.
I do think however that, as it stands today, the S60 plateform is in the best position to become one of the first really hybrid plateform. The S60 system and software have been designed from the ground up to be used on keypad-driven devices. All the UIs has been designed for easy one-handed use. All that remains to be done is to add a touch-screen layer on top of that. This touchscreen would not replace the traditional input method of the device. It would simply provide another way to interact with it. For example, instead of using the joystick to select a field when creating a calendar entry, you could just type on the field to select it. Instead of moving the pointer around with the joystick in Web to click on a link, you could just click on the screen with your finger or a stylus. People willing to keep using their devices one-handed would be able to keep doing so and would not even notice the touchscreen. This is what many Windows Mobile devices have tried to do over the last few years but most have failed as they tried to adapt a touchscreen-driven interface to be used with a keyboard. That approach doesn’t work. You end up with UIs where half of the command can be accessed via both the keyboard and the touchscreen and the other half can only be accessed via the touchscreen. A real mess. I’m sure that S60 devices would make a much better job at combining both input method in a completely transparent way which would allow the user to use either input method depending on where they are and what they’re trying to do.
You’re totally right, vioccc.
Now, let’s hope that there will soon be an update to the Communicator line with full PIM category and notes support, a normal aspect ratio screen (800×600?) — and a touch screen.
.. And since this is a browser blog I’d like to see shortcuts for bookmarks a la Firefox/Opera as well.
Sure; the S60 browser UI has as many hacks as the iPhone Safari. But vioccc, I say you can beat a touch screen for scrolling and clicking — when the screen is mobile-sized.
There are a great many issues surrounding hardware design; for one thing it’s expensive, and for another it takes a long time. And S60 was never designed with browsing in mind as a primary use case. Nevertheless, browsing is becoming recognized as more important, and that may just begin to make a difference.
Dear Peter,
Are you saying this because Nokia’s 1st touch-enabled version platform is still months away ?
Ouch! No, I’m saying it because I think touch-screen interfaces for handheld devices are not the best solution. I actually have some history with touch-screen products; I was on the Newton team at Apple for a while, another touch product that Apple never released, and so on. I’m not at all impressed with the potential of small touch screens no matter who produces them.
I absolutelly agree on this.
The main disadvantage of the touch-screens is that you cannot easily control your device just by one hand without having to watch the display preciselly. One example: If you are standing in a bus or subway, your suitcase in one hand and you suddenly remember about an important meeting that should be added to your calendar. It’s a second to do it via Nokia keyboard enabled device only by using one hand. Try to do it with iPhone. You will either have to put your luggage on the floor, use both hands and you will risk to fall down when the bus turns or stops. Or you will try to handle this simple task by one hand which will probably cause your lovelly iPhone to slip away from your hand very quickly…
Personally, I don’t really like a device which requires both hands to be used.
I absolutelly agree on this.
The main disadvantage of the touch-screens is that you cannot easily control your device just by one hand without having to watch the display preciselly. One example: If you are standing in a bus or subway, your suitcase in one hand and you suddenly remember about an important meeting that should be added to your calendar. It’s a second to do it via Nokia keyboard enabled device only by using one hand. Try to do it with iPhone. You will either have to put your luggage on the floor, use both hands and you will risk to fall down when the bus turns or stops. Or you will try to handle this simple task by one hand which will probably cause your lovelly iPhone to slip away from your hand very quickly…
Personally, I don’t really like a device which requires both hands to be used.
I completely agree on the fact that. so far, small touchscreen-driven mobile devices haven’t been convincing. I still think however that there is potential for touch screens in mobile devices.
In my opinion. the reason why touchscreen-driven mobile devices today aren’t that good is that they have been designed as touchscreen-driven devices right from the start. As I said in my previous post, we’ve all seen that this approach seems to fail pretty much everytime for the very simple reason that there are far too many situations in which you need to be able to use your device one-handed. In these cases, the touchscreen just gets in your way.
But what about taking a different approach? What about taking non-touchscreen device designed to be used one handed and add a touchscreen layer that would simply provide an alternative way of doing simple things like scrolling and selecting? The device’s design would remain a one-handed design. The UI would remain designed for one-handed non-touchsceen use. But the touchscreen would allow users to perform some actions a lot more easily than with a joystick. The key here is that users would be able to *choose* whenever they want to use the touchscreen. They would never be forced to use. In fact, many users would keep using their device one-handed as they always did without even knowing that there is a touchscreen.
Of course, in order for such a system to work, third party application devlopers should not be allowed to design their applications with touchscreen in mind. In fact, I think that the touchscreen should be handled exclusively by the operating system and that applications should not even be aware that there is a touchscreen. That would probably be difficult to implement in S60 given the way the S60 UI API works. But that would be my dream UI.
Obviously, this touchscreen layer would only be present in devices where it makes sense. It doesn’t make much sense to have a touchscreen in an N80 for example. The screen is just too tiny. But devices such as teh E61 or E90 would be an awful lot more usable if you could tap on the screen to select a field or click a link. I keep getting so frustrated whenever I try to browser the web on my E61 and have to fiddle with this godawful joystick, it’s not funny.
Sorry about all the typos. Is there anybody at S60 looking at a way to implement a system that would allow us to edit our comments on these blogs? It can’t be that difficult to do.
About the typos, I don’t know but I’ll ask.
About the touch screen as secondary input — yes, that would probably work. The thing is, I don’t think you want to be limited to the touchscreen.
The predecessor to Symbian was Epoc, an OS that supported touch screens. The Psion MX5 was a PDA that had a QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen, and integrated the two pretty well. I was quite impressed by the MX5 software — and equally disappointed with the hardware!
Another factor that hasn’t come up in this discussion is using a stylus to interact with a touch screen. A stylus-oriented touch screen can be pretty useful, but then of course you have to keep track of the dratted stylus. This was another source of my Psion annoyance; the stylus stowed in a spring-loaded scabbard in the device — but on mine the spring broke!
Well. you are absolutely right. i hope that these problems will be removed soon. check it this site for Mobile Accessories.