[IxDA Discuss] Phone Inbox UI: Dynamic Scroll or Paging

[Barbara Ballard]

With the caveat that how Engineering makes this happen (keeping stuff
in cache, etc.) is irrelevant, and that you said "native" not
"downloaded", I would try the following strategies:

1.  Use volume up/down to allow page scrolling - a nice feature for
experts with no cost to novices

2.  Provide a text entry box at the top of the screen.  Push - hard -
to get your Engineering team to provide dynamically updated results.
Now you have to figure out whether to provide all JKL results, or just
J results upon single press of the 5 button.

3.  In applications that do not have obvious web-based (to the user)
fetch operations, avoid next/previous.  Address books that are
synchronized with some remote data are likely to be LARGE, and you'll
need to support those users (unless your users are different than
typical phone users).  Going through those 5 or 10 at a time will not
encourage use.  Scroll instead, with the understanding that scrolling
is not going to be the primary access for users with larger address
books.



On 10/27/06, Amnon Dekel <amnoid at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am in the midst of an argument with my Engineering department about how to
> implement an inbox in a cell phone based application. On the web version we
> are implementing a page based inbox- (the standard i.e. see the first N
> entries. To see more click on Next). I am fine with that.
> On the phone, I want them to implement it differently: show me the current N
> entries (depending on the phone- between 5 and 10 lines), but keep the next
> and previous N entries in cache, so that the user can "scroll" continuously
> (phone based scrolling is not really scrolling- it is done by multiple
> clicks on the down or up key) and not force them to click on a next page
> button (which will steal valuable real estate and make their experience
> choppy). I feel that paging on the phone is not standard and is different
> from what users already know (i.e. their SMS inbox). One thing to remember-
> this is a native phone app, not a browser based experience.

-- 
Barbara Ballard
barbara at littlespringsdesign.com 1-785-550-3650