Kirigami design question (iOS users, please read)

[Robert Helling]

Gentlemen,

> On 01.04.2016, at 23:24, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> 
>> These assumptions are obviously not 100% compatible with those behind the iOS
>> HIG. Furthermore, given that Android is a more important ecosystem for KDE
>> (since it's more "open source friendly", and far more Plasma users have
>> Android then iOS devices), our design is closer to Android's than iOS' (which
>> also lead to your Android testers being - after some initial getting used to
>> the new things - much more positive about Kirigami in Subsurface-mobile than
>> the iOS testers).
> 
> This is one thing you notice when living in the US. Here iPhones are
> SIGNIFICANTLY more common than Android. On this dive trip I paid attention
> to the devices people used. I saw one single Android phone (besides
> Linus'). And about two dozen people with iPhones (and two with iPads) on
> the boat. Yes, in Europe and especially in Germany Android devices are
> significantly more common. In the US they definitely are not. Certainly
> not among divers, apparently.
> 
> The install base numbers will tell eventually (right now our iOS version
> is not in the iTunes store while the Android app is), but my assumption is
> that as long as we don't mess things up we'll get a significant share of
> iOS users.

I am just picking this bit of your very interesting conversation to comment with my own observations: I don’t own a (operational) Android device, I have used those only occasionally with friends and family and — as an iOS user of about five years — always felt a bit like in a foreign country where people have different customs. Customs which by themselves make pretty much sense as well but are just different from what I am used to. So my only experience with subsurface on android was when it ran on my desktop (and I was using it with a mouse and a keyboard). And then all your explanations of „have all the important stuff to touch in the bottom of the screen“ made a lot of sense to me.

But now there is the iOS version of subsurface and I have played around a bit with it and I realized that some things turned out to be more complicated or not as intuitive as expected. And then I tried to analyze how this comes about and realized it depends on how you are used to hold your device.

My main phone is an iPhone 6plus which is admittedly a large phone (and I to the „grandmother, why are your hands so big? so I can hold my phone“ all the time). Even though I have sufficiently big hands, I cannot really use it with one hand (in particular since I dropped it once and not only broke the glass but needed a replacement phone since apple said it was beyond repair). So I  always hold it in my left hand and use the right on the touch display:


In this mode, my fingers are naturally at the center of the screen and the bottom is as easy to read as the top (and btw pinching is easy as well). I have not tried subsurface on an iPad (our iPad2 is not used a lot anymore since its battery is almost dead and also it has wifi problems) but I would assume this way of holding the device also applied to tablets. For this phone, starting the list in the middle of the screen is nothing but a waste of space.

I should also mention that for the bigger screens introduced the „double click on home button“ to move the upper half of the screen to the bottom so it can be reached by a smaller finger but I never use that.

Then there is my second phone, which is a 4S with a much smaller screen. That I indeed use with only my right hand. But I am used to hold it on my fingers (and not the palm of the hand) so the natural position for the tip of my thumb which is the main finger used for touching is in the upper half of the screen:

I shift it up a bit when the keyboard comes out, but the very bottom where Kirigami has its buttons is actually the hardest place to reach. And that’s why I felt uncomfortable.

Then I discussed this with my wife (owner of a 5plus which she claims has a screen a bit too big) and it turns out, she does hold her phone the way you people suggest and likes the buttons on the bottom:



Why am I writing all this? Probably just to say it is very hard to please everybody but one should be careful when generalizing one’s own usage patterns.

Best
Robert


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