Usable rants

Toggle button in ZugInfo

chatchavan — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:08:58 +0000

ZugInfo is an iPhone application for searching train time table in Germany. It is similar to bahn.de.

There is a UI glitch that cause misunderstandings for several times. Let’s have a look at the main screen.

There are many train types in Germany. In this screen, you can see them: ICE, IC, RE/RB, and S/bus. From this screen, can you tell which trains is going to be searched for?

The answer is RE/RB and S/bus. They use toggle buttons for the selection. The buttons that are not grayed are the selections.

This is a problem. Buttons on iPhone provide an affordance to be pushed, by the gradient direction and border. And my mental model is we should push a button to select it. Think of a switch on your computer or a key on your keyboard. However, when you push RE/RB button, you DEselect it.

The next problem is graying out buttons eliminate affordance of selecting them. Therefore, user may think that those options (ICE, IC) are not available.

iPhone Human Interface Guideline would recommend using a switch button like below:

I believe that the creator of ZugInfo avoid this in favor of making all options appear in one page. Nevertheless, I wonder why don’t they use checkboxes instead.

iPhone autocomplete/autocorrect

chatchavan — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:08:30 +0000

I am impressed of iPhone English and German keyboard. Although it misses haptic feedback, guys in Cupertino gives us a very nice substitute: autocorrect/complete. It works like this:

1. When you type something, there will be a small pop-up window suggesting a word.

2. If you continue typing, the word may change or may still be the same.

3. When there is a suggesting word, it means that you want to use the suggested word.

4. If you don’t want the suggested word, you must tap at the suggested word once.

5. If you type a word and erase some letters. When you continue typing that word, the suggestion will never appear again.

It seems that the suggestion concerns not only the dictionary, but the locality of keys. I still have no words in mind to test it though.

I want to rant about the position of the suggestion. It is fine that the tips is shown at the word. However, when I type, my locus is around the keyboard, not the word. I often didn’t notice that the word is changed once I press space bar. This cause a lot of typos, especially when I typed a correct word which is not match the suggestion.

How about adding another alpha-blended overlay above spacebar when a suggestion is made?

iPhoto silently doesn’t upload video

chatchavan — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:50:19 +0000

iPhoto’09 have Flickr/Facebook integration. You can publish your photos to those services and your photos will be shown as an album in iPhoto.

But while videos are also shown, it is uploaded as a photo on Facebook, and doesn’t uploaded at all to Flickr.

Normal user would misunderstood that the video has been properly uploaded. If it is not online, it shouldn’t be shown in the album.

Apple bug report #7256812