Tesmond's Useful Design

Photographer :  Cindy J Grady I have been lucky enough to experienced using keyboards on iOS, Android and Windows Phone (8 and 8.1) which has really shown me how important a good input method is in the mobile experience. Each keyboard has unique features which makes choosing the best keyboard a bit of a struggle. Until recently I had completely dismissed iOS keyboard for the following reasons 1. 4" display means that the keys are harder to press accurately 2. Selecting & deleting words is trickier than both Android and Windows Phone not just due to the smaller target area, but also the implementation requires a "long press" to activate the magnifying glass to achieve accurate cursor location. 3. Lack of swype / shape writing style input. While options 1 and 2 were of just minor inconvenience option 3 is a major issue. Swyping / Shape writing There are three great features of shape writing 1. It is a much faster input method on the whole than key p...

Reading Mikkel Bo Schmidt's article reminded me of how important the small details are, but not only that, how difficult it can be to make things better. Mikkel rather skimped on the details of the select element so I thought I would go further. The Good Perhaps the most obvious good part is that everyone recognises the select element, it has been around for so long that any regular computer user will know how to interact with it, and many are even aware of how to use the keyboard to skip alphabetically. The select element is a very compact way of displaying a range of options, it is just a single line and can even take up less width than the text of the options it contains, although this is not recommended as if you select a long option you will not be able to read it, reducing the usability. The other important benefit is that it works on every device no matter the spec or OS*. Developing a replacement is not a simple matter, does your solution work on every device? H...