I always liked stylus’s, when Steve Jobs announced the iphone would not have a stylus, I balked at the ignorance.
Even as I was writing this, I misspelled “announced” and struggled with the touch screen to move the cursor to where I could correct it.
Design choices like snapping in line selections to words or sentences, instead of following direct user input have been a real pain for me.
Especially the way the keys on the keyboard predictively resize their hitbox has led me to make so many typing errors. Often the same over and over as a key becomes essentially unresponsive.
Rejecting user input for automated presumptions is a design decision that has never sat well with me. And one born directly from the stylus vs touchscreen era of compromises.
It makes sense to make a bozzo version, something simple and goof proof for grandma or the inebriated.
But to settle for that as the lowest common denominator is why the android market has so much appeal.
To make it so it can’t be turned off. To not allow the user to ever have a more precision power user experience is a mistake.
Accessibility settings are just categorically the wrong way to structurally organize feature toggles.
I really wish the key resizing could be turned off. And that the taps landed where you places them instead of snapping all over. Menus popping up directly beneath a held finger is also bad design. Sometimes those get pressed on accident because they popped up right under the finger.
Problems we did no have in the stylus and keyboard era.
The little bumps of physical keys made typing really swift. Were they worth the screen real estate?
Edge to edge Screen real estate is nice, but it also led to design constraints, the phone dimensions became standardized around 16x9 movie aspect ratio.
The apps all designed around that too, making many corner placed buttons challenging to reach. A real hit to ergonomics.
Here we find ourselves making a device to fit a pair of jeans and a movie theater screen and I can’t even type on it satisfactorily. It actually hurts me, my phone hurts me in my delicate little fingers as I struggle to reach it’s corners.
The apps basically have no in app menus. Routing through system settings for every app. Something a small set of stylus selected buttons once brought up. A monumental loss of choice and customization.
A stylus would be great, but they exist best in systems designed for them. My ipad may have an apple pencil, but ios isn’t really built for them, the way something like Palm OS was built for a stylus.
So it will be interesting to see how the architecture of ios bends to facilitate more user input devices such as mice and stylus. And how much we can recognize the path-flow-dependency of previous design choices made in that first era of touch design compromise.
Sooner or later the entire way ios and macOS work will enter into an entire structural overhaul. Which may catch allot of people off guard who felt the old ways were immutably and innately perfected, ignorant to the compromises intrinsic to all design.
