Kirigami design question (iOS users, please read)

Thomas Pfeiffer thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org
Sat Apr 2 14:46:23 PDT 2016


On Samstag, 2. April 2016 21:09:08 CEST you wrote:
> Gentlemen,

Hi Robert,

> 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.

Since you're mentioning iPads: One of the underlying assumptions of the 
Kirigami design [1] is "Convergence is the goal, but each device gets its 
optimized UI", and this also applies to smartphone vs. tablet.
They not only differ in size, but tablets are also more often used in 
landscape mode than phones, and they are often used in different contexts.

Therefore, the same user interface (just "blown up" to a different size) 
cannot be great for both phones and tablets. That is why we'd recommend to 
create separate user interfaces specifically optimized for tablets if they are 
a relevant target device class (no need for a separate binary, though, because 
QtQuick allows to hot-swap UI files based on the context).

That said, in their current status, Kirigami Components are optimized only for 
smartphones. Tablets (and desktops/laptops) are planned future targets, but 
well, we had to start /somewhere/.

So yes, your observation that Subsurface with its smartphone-optimized user 
interface using the smartphone-optimized Kirigami Components does not really 
work well on tablets is to be expected.

> 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.

The very existence of that feature does show that Apple recognizes the 
placement of controls at the top can be problematic for a significant number of 
users with today's bigger phones.
 
> 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've seen this hand position for others as well, but I'm surprised that after 
your experience with the dropped iPhone still hold it like that, given that it 
makes it easier to slip out of your hand.

I can imagine that iOS' strong reliance on top-positioned controls makes it 
more likely for people to hold iPhones that way, though.

> 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.

Have you tried holding the phone in the palm of your hand? Does it feel less 
comfortable ergonomically than holding it on your fingers?
 
> 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.

Indeed it is very hard to please everyone with the same UI, and my own user 
tests show that the experience with Kirigami-based applications does vary 
depending on how the phone is held.

For that reason, we are actually considering different "modes" for different 
hand positions, between which users can choose. The components would then 
adapt in a way that the same code would produce optimal experiences for 
different ways of holding the phone. In an ideal world we'd detect the hand 
position automatically, but that is certainly even further into the future.

This is still only in the planning stages because we want to focus on one 
position first (and we chose the "phone in palm" position as the first target 
because it offers a good compromise between phone safety and comfort), but 
we're still hoping to make this work one day.

Thank you for your valuable input,
Thomas



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