(2023-06-23) On "user-friendliness", part 2: input methods
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We're surrounded by legacy, whether we want it or not. Sometimes, this legacy
is bordering with absurd-grade obsolescence. And, although I'm not a fan of
touchscreen devices at all, they are a perfect example of such a case. Look,
you have a capacitive touchscreen which is (at least supposedly) better
suited for direct finger input than the resistive one. You no longer have
physical keys the user has to press. Why in the mother of fuck did you need
to implement QWERTY as the primary input method there in the first place?!
Oh, because of Blackberries and Nokia Eseries and other similar devices with
physical QWERTY keyboards that were popular right before the capacitive
touchscreen invasion? Were they sure that their audience intersected with
the audience of later smartphones? Are they sure that whatever works for
physical keyboards also works for virtual ones? Not to mention those
physical keyboards were not comfortable to use by everyone, just because of
their size: for mobile devices, the traditional 12-key layout is much
better, with or without T9. With that layout, people can operate the phone
with a single hand, and they, once again, convinced them that it wasn't
necessary. But if you definitely need to type with one hand, here's "swipe
input" for ya: gesture-based prediction method that amazes with its
awkwardness, privacy invasion and inaccuracy. It's a rusty technological
crutch for the "solution" that has been inherently lame since day one.
No, I get that the traditional 12-key layout doesn't make much sense on
touchscreens either. But the world doesn't stop at these two options.
Recently, I switched both Androids I'm actively using (a smartphone and a
tablet) to the Thumb-Key keyboard. It's FOSS (and available on F-Droid if
anyone is interested), supports all the languages I currently need and
combines the sparseness of 12-key layout with the features that only
capacitive touchscreen can offer. In short, any letter of the alphabet of
your choice is available with a single tap or a swipe gesture, but there is
almost no room for mistyping (except the wrong swiping angle) and one can
get used to it very quickly in a day or two. What's more important to me
(besides the fact that it collects no user data) is that you can position it
to the left or right of the screen and adjust the key size, which lets you
operate it one-handed with the maximum efficiency for the size of your
thumb. You can also left it centered and operate it with two hands, or train
each hand independently. For each language, the layout is adjusted to not
require any swipes for the 9 most commonly used letters of that language,
and a single swipe for all the others. And the selection of the 9 most
frequent letters doesn't only consider their usage in dictionary words, but
also in the most frequent letter clusters of the language. That's why the
layouts you see there might not look so obvious at the first glance, but
then, as you use it more and more, you start to understand why the letters
are placed the way they are.
This application, as well as some others, also features some layouts
specifically tailored for two-thumb typing. Not quite comfortable for me but
I understand when it could be useful too. By the way, similar input methods
are very popular among the Japanese. Because, if we think about it, there
really is no better way to enter kana on touchscreens. But this is in fact
true for any other language: once you are trained, this is lightyears ahead
of QWERTY with any swipe crutches. Now, a more interesting quesion is: how
could we possibly improve the physical 12-key input on normal phones with
keypads? Especially that we know how bad T9 itself can be.
After what I have told you, I think the idea is on the surface: just use two
fast presses of adjacent keys as a "swipe" gesture, and leave a tap as a
tap. This is simple and straightforward to program (and even more
straightforward would be to just make any keypress twice, that would avoid
having to use an internal timer). If the keypad itself is well-built, the
experience is going to be as smooth as on the touchscreen and definitely
faster than writing with the usual ABC1 method. To get familiar with the
method, one might still need some on-screen hints to indicate which
characters are available after the first press at which digits. This way,
for example, English layout (as in Thumb-Key v4) would map to:
Just imagine how the cellphone industry might develop if such a method
appeared about 25 years ago and became the mainstream not only in Japan but
around the globe. Maybe I'll try developing my own input method for KaiOS
that implements this, but can't promise anything at this point. What I'm
trying to say is that, from time to time, it's useful to start thinking out
of the box to make you more productive in the most basic day-to-day tasks.
