Or maybe mobile is not the correct platform for editing? This sounds like arguing that a hammer makes a terrible screwdriver.
"maybe mobile is not the correct platform for web browsing"
Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
251–260 of 693 posts
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#252Nothing on mobile is okay. I know everyone loves their smart phones but they really are terrible computers in every way except for portability. Use a computer when you actually want to do things. Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer.
Reductive argument.
Smartphones are way better platforms for something like TikTok or Twitter than desktop. Or an alarm clock app
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#253The author almost saw the fix for this, but didn't. Here's how you fix this:
Buttons.
Modern phones are horrifying examples of UX, largely because they don't have buttons. You get two buttons for volume, even though volume accounts for probably 1/10,000th of the UX of the user. You get one button for power, because how else do you turn it on? And if you're lucky you get a button where the fingerprint reader is. You also increasingly get an "assistant" button, which can often only be used for activating a shitty voice assistant specific to the make of phone you have.
Navigating text editing requires buttons. You can try to use touch tricks, but they're complicated, clunky and inaccurate. For ease of use you need buttons specific to editing. A mouse and keyboard have buttons and shortcuts for editing because a person needs specific functionality for specific use cases. So the phone needs more buttons to make this work.
For physical buttons used for editing, nothing I've seen has ever surpassed the clickwheel. It worked for iPod, it worked for Blackberry. You can open menus, scroll with precision, and select items. And a flat layout allows use as arrow keys, compared to the side-mounted version that only has two dimensions. You can emulate this on-screen, though it'll be inferior as haptic feedback is one of the important aspects of the precision of a clickwheel.
Arrow keys are another important button layout. They allow precise navigation within a text field so you can get to the place you want to make a specific change in, without the clumsy finger-tapping that never works right. On-screen these need to be dedicated buttons, as a virtual clickwheel can't easily differentiate between just clicking on the top of the clickwheel versus using the arrow functionality, and the UX suffers.
Another important button is the delete key, as opposed to backspace. You should be able to delete things in front of the cursor as well as behind it.
And then there's the "select characters" cursor modifier. You should be able to start selecting text where the cursor is, navigate using your arrow keys, and then stop the selection, and then click one of the modifiers for copy/cut/paste or just start writing to replace it.
And of course we need an undo button, in addition to buttons for cut/copy/paste so we don't need to long-finger-press to show an editing menu.
Basically all the buttons I've mentioned could easily fit within an editing box at the bottom of the screen, with the text in the top screen. Having the buttons right there for the entirety of the editing session is the right UX. It's actually faster than keyboard shortcuts, it's more intuitive, and more accurate, with less precision required for the user.
Maybe one day these stupid hardware vendors will get off their obsession with chasing Apple and finally introduce some useful buttons on the device again. Until then, fake buttons in an editing modal is the best choice.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then because on screen keyboards suck so bad we had to make phones BIGGER which meant they needed to be THINNER which meant cameras needed to stick out, and here we are, in a world where an iPhone Pro Max takes up the full height of my jeans pocket and digs into my hip when I sit down. Yeyyy.
iPhone mini was a thing for a while. It still has the stuck out camera but otherwise only a bit larger than the iPhone 5 from 9 years earlier. I wish they hadn’t ended it on the 13, because I also feel phones are getting too large.
Or, there just isn't the market for a current gen mini and an SE.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#255I typed 55wpm on my blackberry without looking. The fact that you have to constantly look at the screen keyboard and correct it is a huge attention suck and kills my input speed On blackberry, a mistake was one wrong character. On screen keyboards with swipe and autocorrect, a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words Screen keyboard doesn't work in the rain while we're griping: - on an older android device the bu…
Typing is a separate problem. And if you want a physical keyboard on a mobile device you can actually have one. But that still won’t solve editing . Editing on your blackberry was even clunkier than the touch affordances that this post is about - just cursor keys, right? Now, you might argue that if you can type fluently you won’t need to edit as much - but the point here is about enabling mobile devices to be much m…
Though in fairness to awinter-py, given that text entry is a simpler task than text editing, if typing support is already insufficient, editing won't be any better.
I'm typing this at a hardware keyboard on a desktop computer. I've had to make multiple short edits, mostly backspace/retype, as I enter this short comment. The fact that I can look at the screen rather than have my attention focused on the keyboard is itself a huge benefit to writing.
Using a touchscreen literally makes me dumber in ways I cannot afford. Previously noted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521911>.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#2561000% agree with this post, wow. I can’t believe this is controversial.. it’s a disaster. I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more than a grocery list. The problem is the target audience for this is business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market. ICs aren’t up and down as much between meetings and can largely stick to their desktop se…
The moment I opened the article and started reading an idea came to me before reaching the authors solution. Imagine if you could just double tap a word and suddenly it becomes focused and enlargened while slightly blurring the rest of the text. The word in question now has easily targetable tap targets that you can modify quickly, swipe up to delete, rearrange, select etc like a sliding puzzle game. Like everyone I'…
An especially sucky part of editing text is changing tense or plurality. Changing "run" or "ran" or "running" is a exercise in frustration because the editor could easily change it for you by reading what you're typing.
Eg I have "bottles are falling" typed out, but I go back and edit it to say "bottle are falling", and then the editor offers to update "are" to "is" for me.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#257This is absolutely a problem, but I'm not convinced the author has found a solution. I'd have to try it to know for sure, but from the description, it still sounds finicky.
I believe touch screens are fundamentally a bad interface for productivity. Consider the range of actions provided by a mouse: You can hover without clicking, you can left click, or you can right click, all with nearly pixel-level precision. Add in a keyboard and your options expand even further.
A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse and an abnormally large, irregularly shaped cursor, where can never be sure which part of the cursor indicates your actual click target. Software on this computer is not aware of the cursor's location until after the mouse has been clicked, and portions of the screen are blacked out when you move the mouse to certain positions. Your keyboard only works when you bring up an on-screen overlay which takes up ~35% of your screen real-estate, on a monitor which is abnormally small to begin with.
Could any amount of well-designed software make text entry efficient on this machine?
This is a hardware problem, not a software problem.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#258I hate my phone for any sort of editing. I just always bring a laptop. Tablets are nearly useless. I remember dreaming of the days of ubiquitous computing. Now we live in it and user experience sucks.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is where speech to text models like Whisper and LLMs can make a real difference.
Just to be clear, the problem here isn’t entering text, but with editing it. With better keyboards, voice transcription, and physical keyboards on many tablets, getting text into a device is not the problem it used to be. However, you will always want to edit your words afterwards. From TFA.
“Rewrite this sentence to be more concise”
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#260Yes text editing on mobile is really bad. But at least on Android, the OpenBoard keyboard helps a lot. Movement from the cursor and backspace.