3 ms·

I think the "antagonistic" is the lack of visual "affordances" - indications of what an action will do. Like door handles that give no indication of whether to

I think the "antagonistic" is the lack of visual "affordances" - indications of what an action will do. Like door handles that give no indication of whether to "pull" or "push". I'd say at most that it is not "new user friendly", rather than antagonistic to all users. I'm only an occasional Kindle user, but I rarely make a wrong action using the hardware interface, and when I do, it's an unintentional long tap, and I have to cancel an unintended highlight.

comex 9y ago
In the iOS Kindle app, you can turn pages by tapping on the sides of the screen, but you can also just touch down anywhere and swipe to the left or right. It works like any other horizontal pagination on mobile, like the iOS home screen or photo gallery: as you drag, the view follows your finger, revealing the previous and next page lined up on either side; when you let go, if you scrolled more than a short distance to the left or right, the corresponding adjacent page quickly animates (slides) into full view. Oddly, swiping is considerably faster than tapping. When you tap, there’s a brief delay before the screen starts scrolling – which is artificial, not just lag, because a quick swipe gesture (just brushing your finger against the screen) starts the same scrolling animation with no delay. Thus I’ve effectively been trained to always swipe. As strange as this is, at least I wouldn’t call it antagonistic to new users, since the most efficient page-turning interaction is also the most intuitive one: most users will already be familiar with the swipe gesture from the rest of the OS, and will try to do it even without a visual affordance. (It’s also physically intuitive, even if the physical object being simulated is very different from an actual book.) Of course, you can’t do fluid scrolling animations on an eInk display, so eInk Kindles lack the swipe gesture, leaving only the relatively-dubious tap regions criticized in the article. I agree that hardware buttons would be better there. On the other hand, on iOS, Kindle is my favorite reading app for the sole reason that none of the others I’ve tried offer equivalent swiping functionality. Either they only offer a “page curl” transition style (iBooks), which looks cool but is more visually distracting, or they support swipe-to-slide but only as an atomic gesture: you do a complete swipe, and then the screen scrolls, without it letting you actually drag the page around first. (That just feels unnatural.)

comex 9y ago

In the iOS Kindle app, you can turn pages by tapping on the sides of the screen, but you can also just touch down anywhere and swipe to the left or right. It works like any other horizontal pagination on mobile, like the iOS home screen or photo gallery: as you drag, the view follows your finger, revealing the previous and next page lined up on either side; when you let go, if you scrolled more than a short distance to the left or right, the corresponding adjacent page quickly animates (slides) into full view. Oddly, swiping is considerably faster than tapping. When you tap, there’s a brief delay before the screen starts scrolling – which is artificial, not just lag, because a quick swipe gesture (just brushing your finger against the screen) starts the same scrolling animation with no delay. Thus I’ve effectively been trained to always swipe. As strange as this is, at least I wouldn’t call it antagonistic to new users, since the most efficient page-turning interaction is also the most intuitive one: most users will already be familiar with the swipe gesture from the rest of the OS, and will try to do it even without a visual affordance. (It’s also physically intuitive, even if the physical object being simulated is very different from an actual book.) Of course, you can’t do fluid scrolling animations on an eInk display, so eInk Kindles lack the swipe gesture, leaving only the relatively-dubious tap regions criticized in the article. I agree that hardware buttons would be better there. On the other hand, on iOS, Kindle is my favorite reading app for the sole reason that none of the others I’ve tried offer equivalent swiping functionality. Either they only offer a “page curl” transition style (iBooks), which looks cool but is more visually distracting, or they support swipe-to-slide but only as an atomic gesture: you do a complete swipe, and then the screen scrolls, without it letting you actually drag the page around first. (That just feels unnatural.)