Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

Thomas Wood thomas at openedhand.com
Mon Mar 10 23:46:12 CET 2008


On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 10:53 -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:27 AM, Thomas Wood <thomas at openedhand.com> wrote:
> >  The icons in the bar at the top of the screen should not be interactive,
> >  as they are too small to use with a finger. This means all the top icons
> >  should not respond to clicks and it should be used for displaying status
> >  only.
> 
> This is contrary to expectations, based on having used other phones.
> 
> IMO if you click in that area, it should open a quickie little control
> panel from which you can change all the most important settings (power
> on/off the GSM/GPS/Bluetooth, make BT discoverable, set the ring
> "profile", maybe others but I think those are the important ones)
> That way you don't have to click on a specific status icon: touching
> anywhere in the right 1/3 or so of the status bar would bring up the
> same panel.

My main point here was that the status icons are unusable in any useful
way without a stylus. Allowing that area to bring up a "control panel"
type screen seems like a good idea.

> 
> >  They keyboard should only pop-up when a user explicitly requests it.
> >  Usually this is most conveniently done by popping up the keyboard when a
> >  user taps inside an entry field. Eventually it would also be nice to be
> >  able to switch between different types of keyboard, but the multi-tap
> >  should be enough for now.
> 
> Since entry methods have generated so much discussion, I think the
> switching between different types is actually important, and the
> affordance to do so needs to be designed in already, even if
> implementing them will come later.

Absolutely agree. If a stylus is available, then full keyboard or
handwriting input method should be available. The technical problem is
switching between the multi-tap and traditional input methods, which we
currently don't have a solution for. Theoretically there are easy ways
to implement this, but I don't think any one has time to do so in the
next few months.

> 
> Your other suggestions sound like good ones.
> 

Great! Any more comments about issues I've missed or looked over would
be appreciated too.

Regards,

Thomas

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