Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

Excellent article. I have long thought that mobile has horrible UX, especially for typing. I don't know how other people aren't more annoyed. For me it's because I can touch type relatively fast on a real keyboard, and can switch between a mouse and a keyboard very fast. It's sooo frustrating not having the same speed on mobile while editing.

For writing prose, gboard is bad, but it's the least bad solution, its sliding gestures and predictions are good enough.

I use unexpected keyboard for programming on the go. Free and open source, originally developed for termux. It has arrow keys and modifiers, and undo also works (ctrl z). TBH it's not perfect for me as it doesn't have predictive text and its arrow keys are fiddly, so I use it sparingly.

As a bad speller I can assure you deleting from the middle of a word is a very common task.

They are better for taking photographs simply because they're smaller, but for every other aspect of photo viewing, management, and editing, they are worse. They have a tiny screen, insufficient local storage and compute, and no keyboard or mouse.

They're not better music players. Sound quality can be identical because phones support USB DACs, but again, everything else is worse. On a real computer I can easily search my library just by typing. There's no way to find specific tracks that fast on mobile.

The problem is far from invisible (to me at least). A few months ago on HN I used text editing as an example of how iOS wasn't ready for "business" use. I can't find the comment now, but my memory is that I listed several of the issues listed in this post and said something like "Text creation/editing is core to the 'business', non-content-consumer use case. Apple needs to either acknowledge these problems and work to solve them, or admit they cannot solve them and stop pushing this narrative." It's especially telling that the author references Apple's 3D Touch as being an enabling technology here, when Apple shipped it without thinking of a valid use case for it, and then discontinued it after several years of still not thinking of a valid use case for it.

It's interesting to me that Google had Tablet Tuesdays. One of the things I've said many times is that it's obvious when a company actually does the thing they're pressing users to do. Google obviously uses gmail, and just as clearly never used any of the social products they released. But I think Tablet Tuesdays doesn't accomplish the thing they hoped it would: if you can use a regular computer 4 days out of 5 -- or maybe 5 out of 6 :-( then you can limp along on that one day and not have enough incentive to actually solve the problems. "Tablet Tuesdays" should have been "Tablet Teams" -- whole groups of people forced to use nothing but a tablet, with no way to hide from the problems that caused.

Eloquent seems like an excellent existence proof that better is possible. Personally, I would try multi-touch gestures to solve some of the problems. It might be (okay, likely is) too complex a solution, but Apple (at least) can detect up to ten(?) separate touchpoints. That would be absurd, but I'd be curious to try copy/paste with multi-touch shortcuts. And it seems that selection might benefit from multi-touch as opposed to the (admittedly clever) pressure hack Eloquent is using.

One of the most important watersheds in my career, was reading Jenson's The Simplicity Shift[0], many moons ago.

It was written pre-iPhone, and talked about the brutal necessity of reducing mobile UX to the very barest essentials.

I find that I am revisiting a lot of this stuff, when writing Apple Watch apps.

[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (Downloads the entire booklet as a PDF)