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I was slightly surprised by the author’s example experiments. Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common editing task to me and I think i

I was slightly surprised by the author’s example experiments. Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common editing task to me and I think it would be much more common to just select the whole word and retype it. If that means the UI is more optimised for other interactions than deleting letters from the middle of words, I think that’s fine. It seems pretty important to have the tests be realistic or their results won’t relate much to the real world. It is possible to connect a keyboard to a phone though obviously this is a bit silly. But it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience. And iPhones tried being better at text editing and apple dropped those changes, so it does seem they at least didn’t feel the change was worth it: - you used to be able to select a word and pressing shift would toggle the suggested correction between regular, capitalised, and uppercase. That feature was dropped - with the pressure-sensitivity feature, you could press on the keyboard to turn it into a kind of touch-pad for moving the cursor, this meant your finger didn’t get in the way of the text so you could see where the cursor was going. You could press harder to begin a word-by-word selection then move to select more or press harder to upgrade to sentence/paragraph selection. Apple got rid of the pressure-sensitive screens in newer phones and give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection (as far as I know) and makes it hard to move the cursor down.

mitemte 3y ago
I just realised you can long press space to enable moving the cursor, then tap the keyboard with another finger to toggle selection mode on.
zimpenfish 3y ago
> give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection If you put a second finger on the keyboard when you're doing long-press-space, it'll do selection but it'll stop when you lift your finger off space (if you've run out of display when selecting downwards) and won't pick up where you left off - you have to move to the little selection handles instead. Handy for small selections, I guess?
scottjenson 3y ago
Deleting an 'x' was MEANT to be hard (and not typical) the whole point was to see how easy it was to target. As to your "it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience" You are exactly the type of person that I'm trying to get through to! As I said in the post, for most social media tasks, text editing isn't a problem. However, if you believe that mobile will replace desktop, then you've got a problem as sophisticated text composition is quite hard on mobile.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  There is this website, nngroup.com that used to be a popular reference on UX matters. They wrote lots of articles about how they tested using computers by mouse instead of keyboard and that mousing was loads better and had wide-ranging conclusions about UX from this. But the studies turned out to have actually been things like ‘replace all letter ‘e’s in this sentence with ‘|’ symbols’ and using the keyboard meant arrow keys and backspace rather than using a find-and-replace function. So sure, mice are better than cursor keys at selecting lots of letter ‘e’s and editing them, but one would hope that such a description is not representative of actual computer use and so not a good foundation on which to base general UX conclusions. It is in this sense that I worry about the test scenario described being unrealistic. If one is measuring (and so implicitly optimising for) things that don’t matter, one is potentially rejecting solutions that would improve things that do matter without helping things that don’t. More realistic scenarios could be: - successfully format 10 lines or so of haskell into a hacker news comment. Obviously this is not relevant to most people but I give it as a more realistic scenario where typical mobile text-input mechanisms struggle. - edit a misspelled name in an email of a few paragraphs. - reorder two paragraphs in an email then edit for clarity. - add full stops to a bulleted list (struggling with this right now). I am sad that text editing on mobile is hard. But it does seem that efforts to make it better were not appreciated. My reading of the 3d-touch thing and other comments on this article is that the problem was appreciated by Apple but people didn’t particularly care[1] when Apple then dropped 3d-touch, for which improved text editing was its ‘killer app’. [1] I have seen people complain about the loss of this online but I think the complaint is quite niche.
bluGill 3y ago
As a bad speller I can assure you deleting from the middle of a word is a very common task.

mitemte 3y ago

I just realised you can long press space to enable moving the cursor, then tap the keyboard with another finger to toggle selection mode on.

zimpenfish 3y ago

> give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection If you put a second finger on the keyboard when you're doing long-press-space, it'll do selection but it'll stop when you lift your finger off space (if you've run out of display when selecting downwards) and won't pick up where you left off - you have to move to the little selection handles instead. Handy for small selections, I guess?

scottjenson 3y ago

Deleting an 'x' was MEANT to be hard (and not typical) the whole point was to see how easy it was to target. As to your "it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience" You are exactly the type of person that I'm trying to get through to! As I said in the post, for most social media tasks, text editing isn't a problem. However, if you believe that mobile will replace desktop, then you've got a problem as sophisticated text composition is quite hard on mobile.

dan-robertson 3y ago
There is this website, nngroup.com that used to be a popular reference on UX matters. They wrote lots of articles about how they tested using computers by mouse instead of keyboard and that mousing was loads better and had wide-ranging conclusions about UX from this. But the studies turned out to have actually been things like ‘replace all letter ‘e’s in this sentence with ‘|’ symbols’ and using the keyboard meant arrow keys and backspace rather than using a find-and-replace function. So sure, mice are better than cursor keys at selecting lots of letter ‘e’s and editing them, but one would hope that such a description is not representative of actual computer use and so not a good foundation on which to base general UX conclusions. It is in this sense that I worry about the test scenario described being unrealistic. If one is measuring (and so implicitly optimising for) things that don’t matter, one is potentially rejecting solutions that would improve things that do matter without helping things that don’t. More realistic scenarios could be: - successfully format 10 lines or so of haskell into a hacker news comment. Obviously this is not relevant to most people but I give it as a more realistic scenario where typical mobile text-input mechanisms struggle. - edit a misspelled name in an email of a few paragraphs. - reorder two paragraphs in an email then edit for clarity. - add full stops to a bulleted list (struggling with this right now). I am sad that text editing on mobile is hard. But it does seem that efforts to make it better were not appreciated. My reading of the 3d-touch thing and other comments on this article is that the problem was appreciated by Apple but people didn’t particularly care[1] when Apple then dropped 3d-touch, for which improved text editing was its ‘killer app’. [1] I have seen people complain about the loss of this online but I think the complaint is quite niche.

bluGill 3y ago

As a bad speller I can assure you deleting from the middle of a word is a very common task.