[IxDA Discuss] iPhone, who's buying...

[Tim Barkow]

I'm in love with the gestures, myself. Whenever I show someone the phone, 
I immediately tell them "it's all about the flick". And usually that gets 
them hooked. :)

The finger flick is such a natural motion, and it works really well in the 
context of scrolling -- the harder you flick, the further you scroll. Also, 
as an imperfect motion -- each flick is a little different -- discovering 
how to scroll short or far is pretty intuitive. A quick tap on the screen 
immediately halts the scroll -- just like stopping a spinning wheel.

What's been a bit difficult?

Reorienting my perception of the touch point (where my finger touches the 
screen) vs the tip of my finger (what I'm pointing at). The keyboard massages 
this difference by popping the key label up, but nowhere else does this adjustment 
happen.  

Often I miss the target when playing/pausing music, even though that target 
is relatively large. This may be partly because those buttons have no clearly 
defined boundaries, making it harder for me to judge where to press.

Also, the delete gesture in mail. I first thought this was great -- slide 
your finger left to right, horizontally, over a message and the delete button 
appears -- no need to read junk mail or already read mail. But I've had some 
trouble entering in a "correct" horizontal gesture. After 3 or 4 tries, it 
can get frustrating. A little more wiggle room would be nice. 


All in all, I'm still having fun. :)  


- Tim





> What works? What doesn't work from an HCI and IxD perspective?
> 
> For example, gestures. There aren't a lot used (so far) in the
> iPhone but the few that I have played with--pinching for zooming, and
> sliding for delete--are really interesting to look at. Please, don't
> go into the whole, "But we saw this at CHI1991 so what is so new
> here?" The reality is that this is the first hand-held device on the
> market geared towards the consumer that has these interactions and
> thus it is the first opportunity to explore their behavior in a REAL
> context of use.
> 
> For example, pinching/zoom:
> There are a lot of quirks here, but I think it still works overall
> for people like myself who have patience with bad execution. For
> people w/o that patience I think there are going to be too many
> issues for them.
> 
> One thing that happens for me on execution is that I don't life my
> fingers off the screen at the same exact time and after the zoom I
> then end up panning the map away from where I wanted to zoom. The
> tolerances of the screen don't account for this very human behavior.
> I face this in other apps where I am constantly lifting off the  key
> when trying to copy an element in Illustrator or Fireworks before I
> mouseup meaning after all the work I just did I ended up doing a move
> instead of a copy and now I have to undo. The iPhone has a similar
> synchronization and choreography issue.
>