7 ms·

This isn't really true. Your sense of proprioception is engaged with physical buttons yet bypassed entirely with touchscreens. You can walk down the street typi

This isn't really true. Your sense of proprioception is engaged with physical buttons yet bypassed entirely with touchscreens. You can walk down the street typing without looking at the screen if you have a real physical keyboard. Memorizing... No, you just can't. You can't reliably hit the same key with your thumb or finger (blindfolded) when it's a touchscreen, but you can easily do so with a real keyboard. Physical cues are really important: you can orient with the little bumps on the home row, or find your way from the edge. This is not going to be a popular statement, but there's a reason why texting while driving is a problem now everyone has a touchscreen keyboard than back when we all had T9 and real buttons.

robotresearcher 9y ago
On a touchscreen you find your way without looking from the edges and corners of the device. You don't need anchor points everywhere. Violins don't have frets but experts can hit the notes. I like buttons better too, but there's no need to exaggerate or claim impossibility.
- metaphor 9y ago
  >> Violins don't have frets but experts can hit the notes. I posit that a fretless violin is more akin to a physical keypad than any traditional touch UI. I'm not a violinist, but I'd imagine these physical subtleties would take the form of neck taper, neck thickness, string pitch, string tension, etc. There's an equivalent feedback loop that stern advocates of the physical keypad simply can't discard, whereas traditional touch UIs are deadly efficient at "quantizing" such physical subtleties away. As an aside, violinists generally don't have a day-to-day multitasking dilemma, say, serenading while driving. Johnny Lee best explained[1] that the UX pays a cost whenever a UI fails to capture intent...and it's a cost that we often ignore when adopting new tech. Perhaps this cost may be insignicant to the typical low stakes consumer, but to a professional who spends much time corresponding over mobile, retaining a high level of confidence without visual verification or reducing the average number of errors per stroke or quickly adjusting to a new interface based on its tactile nuances is often all the justification that's needed to make the physical keypad an imperative. [1] http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-mouse.html http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-m...
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    Just consider the difference between a fretted and non-fretted stringed instrument and the analogy is pretty clear.
    - scrumper 9y ago
      It absolutely isn't. Sense of touch is very important in fretless instruments, but the real kicker is that you have the infallible feedback mechanism of your ears to help you fine tune pitch by rolling and bending your fingers. It doesn't compare at all to touchscreen keyboards which have no feedback mechanism at all other than sight.
metaphor 9y ago
>> ...there's a reason why texting while driving is a problem now everyone has a touchscreen keyboard than back when we all had T9 and real buttons. This. Texting while driving is still a risk any way you slice it, but my experience is that it's a manageable one, akin to eating a burger on the road. I habitually text and drive. It's at least a 45 minute drive to the office on the best traffic-free days. To this day (knock on wood), I have neither been in a texting-induced collision nor can I recall being in any close calls as a consequence of texting. I've never owned a phone which didn't have a physical keypad either, thanks to the market offerings of Palm (if that's any indication of longevity) and BlackBerry. My current phone is a Priv. I feel the most dangerous part of texting on the road with it is the second I have to look down to press send on the touchscreen...it's always at the same position on the screen, but I have to move my right hand out of texting position to reliably touch it, which means I need to look.

robotresearcher 9y ago

On a touchscreen you find your way without looking from the edges and corners of the device. You don't need anchor points everywhere. Violins don't have frets but experts can hit the notes. I like buttons better too, but there's no need to exaggerate or claim impossibility.

metaphor 9y ago
>> Violins don't have frets but experts can hit the notes. I posit that a fretless violin is more akin to a physical keypad than any traditional touch UI. I'm not a violinist, but I'd imagine these physical subtleties would take the form of neck taper, neck thickness, string pitch, string tension, etc. There's an equivalent feedback loop that stern advocates of the physical keypad simply can't discard, whereas traditional touch UIs are deadly efficient at "quantizing" such physical subtleties away. As an aside, violinists generally don't have a day-to-day multitasking dilemma, say, serenading while driving. Johnny Lee best explained[1] that the UX pays a cost whenever a UI fails to capture intent...and it's a cost that we often ignore when adopting new tech. Perhaps this cost may be insignicant to the typical low stakes consumer, but to a professional who spends much time corresponding over mobile, retaining a high level of confidence without visual verification or reducing the average number of errors per stroke or quickly adjusting to a new interface based on its tactile nuances is often all the justification that's needed to make the physical keypad an imperative. [1] http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-mouse.html http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-m...
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  Just consider the difference between a fretted and non-fretted stringed instrument and the analogy is pretty clear.
  - scrumper 9y ago
    It absolutely isn't. Sense of touch is very important in fretless instruments, but the real kicker is that you have the infallible feedback mechanism of your ears to help you fine tune pitch by rolling and bending your fingers. It doesn't compare at all to touchscreen keyboards which have no feedback mechanism at all other than sight.

metaphor 9y ago

>> ...there's a reason why texting while driving is a problem now everyone has a touchscreen keyboard than back when we all had T9 and real buttons. This. Texting while driving is still a risk any way you slice it, but my experience is that it's a manageable one, akin to eating a burger on the road. I habitually text and drive. It's at least a 45 minute drive to the office on the best traffic-free days. To this day (knock on wood), I have neither been in a texting-induced collision nor can I recall being in any close calls as a consequence of texting. I've never owned a phone which didn't have a physical keypad either, thanks to the market offerings of Palm (if that's any indication of longevity) and BlackBerry. My current phone is a Priv. I feel the most dangerous part of texting on the road with it is the second I have to look down to press send on the touchscreen...it's always at the same position on the screen, but I have to move my right hand out of texting position to reliably touch it, which means I need to look.