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Better PDA Interaction

18 Jul 2003 by Ryan Singer

Newer PDAs are faster and more featureful but they’re still a pain to use thanks to small buttons on small screens. It’s time to make common tasks more comfortable by enlarging the points of interaction.

Here’s one solution, a better Address Book that uses smart zooming and broad stylus gestures. These two ingredients could make it possible to forget about screen size and keep that PDA away from your face.

Address Book screenshot

We start with the standard Palm Address Book, held a comfortable distance away. To see an address, we tap anywhere and hold.

Address Book screenshot

The entry zooms up, Mac OS X Dock style, and the neighboring entries are proportionally zoomed.

Address Book screenshot

Dragging vertically scrolls the list and moves the “zoom focus” up or down.

Address Book screenshot

Release the stylus to select an entry. The most important data appears at the top in large type.

Address Book screenshot

Drag the data itself up or down (as with Photoshop’s hand tool) to move it within the viewing window, or tap the large Back button to start over.

Who else is tired of peering into that little box? Other ideas?

31 comments so far (Post a Comment)

18 Jul 2003 | Steve said...

I'm not so convinced that's a better approach. I find using my stylus too scroll to be very tedious. I always use the thumb buttons. This approach wouldn't work so well with that approach, or using the scroll arrows.

Releasing the stylus to open an item could be rather problematic. I'm guessing I'm far from alone in the fact that my contact list takes up several screens. What am I supposed to do when my stylus hits the bottom of the display, and I need to pick it up to resume scrolling? Oops - now I have an address opened that I didn't want to open.

Personally, I haven't really looked at this and found it lacking. There are other things about the Palm OS that bug me from time to time, but this isn't one of them.

18 Jul 2003 | Dan said...

This kind of zooming might make it easier to see the text, but I don't think it actually increases the "clickable area" of the item. At least that's my experience with the zoom feature on the OSX dock. If you have the same number of items on the screen they're still going to have the same share of screen space. The item under the mouse looks bigger, but because of the way it moves, the clickable area is the same as before.

19 Jul 2003 | RS said...

What am I supposed to do when my stylus hits the bottom of the display, and I need to pick it up to resume scrolling?

Wouldn't you just drag up to scroll in the opposite direction?

19 Jul 2003 | RightHand said...

Great idea. Really. I could see this being a huge benefit. No more squinting and pulling the Palm up to your nose to see the what feels like 7 point type. Very smart solution.

19 Jul 2003 | Matthew Oliphant said...

Let's do some usability!

I recently turned off the zoom on the Dock. I have the dock at the smallest it can get (considering I have an "old" iMac, I want the screen real estate), and I found it difficult to target what I wanted to open.

Given that the OS pops up a 12-14 pt font to tell me what I am hovering over, I really don't miss the zoom. It was cool at first, but became annoying.

19 Jul 2003 | Mike said...

Shumin Zhai, an IBM Research Staff Member, has been doing some really great work lately building on Fitts' Law, deriving new laws for bivariate pointing tasks (ie: finding a "Submit" button), crossing tasks (ie: PDA-stylus interaction), path tracing tasks (ie: finding an entry in the Windows Start menu), etc.

One of his recent papers, "Human On-Line Response to Target Expansion" (PDF) investigates the advantage (or lack of advantage) provided by the OS X dock icon expansion, and proposes a way to actually make it helpful.

Definitely worth reading.

19 Jul 2003 | benry said...

Interesting piece. My main gripe though is with the Palm OS (and other OS's as well) is that you can't better manage the address book and the format of the address.

First, say you know a couple who don't use the same last name. This means you need to keep two separate entries. Why can't you have two names associated with a contact. Another example of this is a company with two key contacts you deal with via one single point of contact -- still requires to address book entries.

Second, you can't associate a work address and a home address with a contact.

Third, you can't expand the available fields beyond those available. Try inputting a name with an home phone, work phone, e-mail, mobile phone, fax machine and then add another e-mail address to the mix -- there are just not enough fields.

20 Jul 2003 | Dan said...

Thanks for posting that article, Mike. It says more clearly what I was trying to say about zooming in the MacOSX dock:

"Even though the fisheye view does enlarge targets in display space, it makes no difference in motor space."

I'm not sure I understand the article's alternative suggestion for the dock. I think he's suggesting that the icons be magnified based on which part of the dock you initially target, and that the magnification "stick" until you move your cursor away from the dock. Whether this fits the way people actually use the dock remains to be seen, but I don't think this stickier zoom would be helpful in the Palm interface example.

20 Jul 2003 | ek said...

It appears as though the soon to be released Samsung i500, which runs the Palm OS, will include zoom functionality very much along the lines of what Ryan is talking about.

Here's a snippet from an article by David Pogue in this past week's Circuits section:

The 160-by-240-pixel screen shows as much as a normal Palm screen, but it's been reduced slightly, as though it shrank in the wash. You'd complain about the tiny size of the type that results, except that Samsung has added a clever Magnify feature that automatically enlarges any text you're writing or editing.

The i500 should be available any day now via SprintPCS.

This feature on Samsung's other new PDA phone, the i700, which is PocketPC-based (or Windows Mobile bla, bla, bla to be precise):

On the i700, though, you'll probably have to dial that way [using the virtual keypad on the PDA's screen] only rarely, thanks to a spectacular, all-too-rare feature: numeric dialing. That's where you say into the phone, "Three five nine, six one one five," or whatever. Better yet, you can speak the name of anyone in your Outlook address book (which you've synchronized with a Windows PC) to voice dial, without having to train each name first, as you do on the i500. Every cellphone on earth ought to offer this feature, if only to save lives on the road.

Unfortunately the i700 is huge (by modern phone standards) and both the i500 and i700 are quite expensive.

20 Jul 2003 | ek said...

Oops, meant to write "This feature on Samsung's other new PDA phone, the i700, which is PocketPC-based (or Windows Mobile bla, bla, bla to be precise) also sounds cool:"

20 Jul 2003 | Mike said...

Dan -- I took that section of Zhai's article to imply that if the system could determine which target the user is moving towards (for example, by plotting a vector based on movement and intent to target the dock by acceleration) then the target could be expanded so that as you move towards it there's less chance of missing.

Not so useful for the Palm interface, no, but an interesting idea for OS X, as long as the prediction mechanisms can properly differentiate between a movement towards the dock and just general downwards mouse movement.

21 Jul 2003 | Must be said...

Speaking of PDAs: does anyone know an overview of Internet-enabled devices?

21 Jul 2003 | Mike said...

Must be:

An overview of WiFi (802.11b) devices, or dialup/wireless internet devices that have their own ISP?

21 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

zooming like that tends to be confusing as much as it is helpful. Granted, I assume this would be a option that you can either have on or off.

Do note that with the Palm OS, there is no way for the OS to know where you are moving the 'cursor' too, as it is a purely tap-based interface. Unlike a mouse that tracks the pointer before clicking, the Palm OS can only register the click...not the tracking.

21 Jul 2003 | Must be said...

Mike:

An overview of WiFi (802.11b) devices, or dialup/wireless internet devices that have their own ISP?

Actually, the overview of client-side devices that can connect to the Internet. Be it cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, game consoles, interactive TVs, set top boxes.
I'd like to know screen sizes, operating systems, browser types, etc. A designer's quick reference so to speak...

21 Jul 2003 | HP said...

This is an interesting approach to the issue at hand. Speaking of OS X analogy, I think that the feature allowing automatic zooming of text is more appropriate for this purpose as it basically increases the size of the text being viewed (in this case highlighted using stylus). Perhaps, combination if this feature and a popup list of options (as in OS X Dock) allowing user to, in this case, view, edit or delete a record would be one way to address this.

21 Jul 2003 | Steve said...

Wouldn't you just drag up to scroll in the opposite direction?

No. Because, as I mentioned, my address book takes up multiple screens. Many, many multiple screens. I'm not going to get to them all by scrolling down the length of the screen once with the stylus, and scrolling back up isn't going to do me any good, unless I never again want to look up contact info for anyone whose surname begins with a letter greater than C. Because releasing the stylus opens whatever the active contact is, I don't see how I would ever get to someone by the name of Reynolds.

21 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

is more appropriate for this purpose as it basically increases the size of the text being viewed (in this case highlighted using stylus).

Let's try this again: you can't 'hightlight' text in the palm OS without registering it as a tap. So, you end up turning a one-step process (look at text, tap) into a multi-step process (look at text, highlight it, see it grow, decide if it is what you want, if not tap on another name, etc, until you find what you want, then double-tap?)

It's an interesting idea, but if screen legibility is the issue, I say it's more of a hardware limitation. The Palm OS and UI is elegantly simple and light. I wouldn't want to add too much to it less it becomes more like Pocket PC.

ALL THAT said, the sony Clie's do have an interesting scroll interface for Palm OS that would probably fit this concept nicely.

21 Jul 2003 | ek said...

Darrel, I think it zooms the text as soon as you tap it -- sans highlighting.

Given the size of the i500's screen something like this really isn't an option, but a necessity.

22 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

Darrel, I think it zooms the text as soon as you tap it -- sans highlighting.

A tap is a 'click'. So, again, this is a two step process. Tap to zoom, tap to select. I can see all sorts of problems with people accidently double-tapping the wrong item (oops...I wanted the one just below, but missed because the first one I tapped zoomed it out of the way). (anyone using a slightly slower Mac where the dock get's 'stuck' in a zoom now and then will know the frustration of clicking in one spot and not hitting what you wanted due to the annoying zooming).

The reality is that a small screen is just that. You really can't 'fix' a small screen with the zoom feature. If you need to zoom the text to see it, then all of the text, for the most part, needs to be zoomed, and, at that point, the fact is that you simply have a screen that is too small for the information you are trying to cram into it.

22 Jul 2003 | ek said...

Well, given the current state of technology that's the tradeoff you have to make if you want a Palm phone the size of a small mobile phone. There are options out there with bigger screens, but they also come attached to necessarily bigger bodies.

>>The reality is that a small screen is just that. You really can't 'fix' a small screen with the zoom feature.

I don't quite understand what you're saying. Would it have been better in your mind for the folks at Samsung to have done nothing and made no attempt to improve the experience given the physical constraints of the device? They could have made the screen bigger, but that would have obviated the device's entire reason for being -- namely ultraportability in a Palm phone.

There are other choices out there if a bigger screen is a priority. No one is saying that this is the be all end all device.

22 Jul 2003 | JF said...

Yes! The EK and Darrel battles are back! ;)

22 Jul 2003 | ek said...

Don't go there! ;-)

I'm going to keep it civil this time around. My extended fishing trip has calmed me.

22 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

There are other choices out there if a bigger screen is a priority. No one is saying that this is the be all end all device.

I'm saying if the screen is too small to convey the information, the two first-step questions to ask should be:

1) Can the device use a bigger screen with out sacrificing other aspects of the device?

2) Can we better segment the information so it makes sense when presented on such a small screen? (ie less information per screen can be rendered larger).

I'm taking the Tufte route, because, well, I completely agree with him. You can only stick so much information on a particular device with a particular information resolution.

The original zooming example, while interesting, just adds more work for the end-user in terms of manipulating the interface. It's much easier for the end-user to just move the screen closer to their face.

And, EK...I missed the samsung reference. It sounds like the samsung method...where it is enlarging the text you are editing is a fine solution, as it doesn't interfere with the normal operations of the Palm GUI.

22 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

Oh, and for what it's worth, I have great respect for all of the 37Signals crew. I just love a good argument. ;o)

22 Jul 2003 | Joe said...

Perhaps this is an ancillary point, but what about multimodality? Specifically, do you think a combination of voice and stylus-based interaction would help matters? In the scenario you describe, scrolling could (theoretically) be eliminated by a spoken command or command fragment like first/last name, which could function as a search tool, displaying only those contacts that match. This wouldn't forego the usefulness of zooming focus, but would rather work in concert with it.

Of course not every context would allow for discreet voice interaction (for example, yelling out "Joe" in a board meeting), but I can think of several that would benefit greatly from stylus-free interactions, searching or otherwise.

22 Jul 2003 | RS said...

I don't think this scrolling thing is much of an issue. If scroll speed is proportional to distance dragged from the center of the screen, it should be no problem to zip from top to bottom, or carefully tick up and down.

23 Jul 2003 | Steve said...

I still see a flaw in the scrolling issue, even with those approaches, RS. Since moving the stylus is activating the scroll or the zoom, and releasing it opens an item, you have one of two problems. Either I cannot scroll past the last zoomed item without opening it, or, if moving the stylus scrolls the screen, I'm going to have to exhibit very fine motor skills to get my stylus over the right item - while the screen is scrolling since it scrolls based on my stylus movement and position. Either way, it's a pain in the ass.

Maybe I'm just not understanding how you envision this. Maybe you're not understanding the flaw i'm pointing out. But, from what I see, combining stylus-activated scrolling and stylus-release item activation, instead of the usual tap, creates an uworkable interface.

23 Jul 2003 | Darrel said...

Yes. What steve said. I think it's a misunderstanding of the Palm OS's interface and interaction standards.

The idea, itself, is great, but can't effectively be applied to the way one interacts with the Palm OS using a stylus.

26 Jul 2003 | Andyed said...

More context for fisheye menulists and expanding targets at http://surfmind.com/lab/exscade/

01 Feb 2005 | online pharmacy said...

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