One handed mode

[niming]

Hi

I frequently use Pleco by reading with a book or iPad in one hand and searching Pleco with the other (I'm not sure whether this is a fairly common way of using the dictionary during intensive study, but I would think so.) More generally, having the ability to search the dictionary one handed is often convenient. However, having switched recently to using an iPhone 6 I can't help but notice searching with one hand is now somewhat more awkward. It's not a huge problem (though might be a bigger one for iPhone 6 Plus) and overall it is still a more pleasant experience on the larger screen, however, when you are looking up a lot of words over time it can slow you down. Obviously the iPhone has its Reachability mode, but because the screen jumps back up within a few seconds you generally have to use it multiple times within a single search (e.g. hit search delete button to clear current search field contents, wait for screen to move up in order to access keyboard, enter search contents, double touch to bring the first result within reach, from dictionary entry double touch again to press the back to Search button/add to flashcards). In essence, the positioning of high use buttons (Search field delete button, <Search, add to flashcards +) at the very top of the screen seems to make less sense of a large screen device than on previous smaller screen versions of iPhone, particularly when so much of the space below is being used up by low frequency dictionary entries.

This got me thinking, it would be really convenient to have a one handed feature that could be switched on to bring the search field and the first few search results within one handed reach, and to stay there until switched off again. For example, moving the search box to just above the keyboard (with dictionary search results ascending from below in order of frequency) and the <Search and + options to the button of the screen in dictionary entries, would make one handed use significantly easier. Alternatively, the search field could move down as it does currently with Reachability mode, but without hiding the keyboard. Although this would chop out quite a lot of the search results, this doesn't seem a big problem given the accuracy of Pleco's frequency based search results.

Anyway, I'm not a coder and there could be well be coding or design issues with these suggestions. And of course, issues regarding the use of Pleco on larger screen devices would not be unfamiliar territory since large screen Android devices have been around for ages. However, perhaps given a large number of iPhone users are going to be increasingly moving onto larger screen phones, one handed functionality, or at least the option for it, might be something that's worth considering (and in a sense, worth preserving, given it was not an issue on previous iPhones).

Keep up the amazing work!

 

[JD]

Although it ended up being a bit of a nasty exchange, there was a discussion of one handed use and Mike gave some good info in this post for the Android platform. Here's the link: http://www.plecoforums.com/threads/one-handability-and-user-interface-bloat.4139/

 

[mikelove]

The biggest question for me on this at the moment is exactly *which* functions we have to make accessible one-handed, and how accessible they have to be. I can recognize the need for one to be able to look up a word with one hand, but I think the addition of our new keyboard open button pretty much suffices for that - everything you need to enter a Pinyin or English search (open keyboard, delete what's already in the search field, enter something else, close keyboard) is now within easy reach of the bottom of the screen. (you also can access the < button one-handed now, that's a system gesture - just swipe the left edge of the screen)

But I'm not sure whether or not we need to move beyond that, and how far if so - it kind of feels to me like a lot of the talk of one-handed use right now is coming from people who had gotten used to a certain way of doing things on smaller-screened phones and aren't yet ready to start doing things a different way on larger ones. I'm skeptical as to whether it will ever really be possible to use a large-screen phone satisfyingly with one hand - many apps (anything involving random selection from a large list, say) are inherently almost impossible to large-screen-optimize, and most of the remaining ones probably won't bother, either because they care more about onboarding than ergonomics (so clustering everything at the bottom of the screen is a no-no as it'll confuse the heck out of new users) or because they simply don't think it's worth the effort. So I think users may end up adapting to two-handed use more readily than apps will adapt to one-handed use.

In any event, being a rather specialized product I don't think it makes a lot of sense for us to jump out ahead on this - the one-handed question is going to be hashed out extensively by other developers with much bigger audiences (not to mention Apple and Google) over the next year or two, and I'd rather have a better sense of how things are shaping up in that larger universe before committing a lot of development time to it at Pleco.

On iOS specifically, the OS generally lags behind new hardware by about a year - iOS 5 was the first really Retina-optimized design, iOS 7 the first to address the one-handed issues presented by the iPhone 5's taller screen (by adding that swipe back gesture), and iOS 8 the first to take advantage of Touch ID, so I'm expecting Apple will introduce a lot of new ideas for how to make effective use of larger screens in apps in iOS 9 and I think that will give us a lot of guidance about what we can / should do with them in Pleco.

 

[Taichi]

In my case I often holds a pencil with my right hand, thus have to use pleco with my left hand.
I'm quite satisfied with vertical two pane mode as I dont't need to tap the result at all.
However two-pane mode on smaller phones makes definition pane too small. It might be cool if scrolling the definition pane pushes result pane up.
As for the + button, I think evernote-like floating + button helps a lot altough feel too fancy.

 

[mikelove]

We have thought about doing something akin to a lot of other dictionary app UIs where the search results are essentially just an 'overlay' of the definition - tap on the search bar and a list pops up, tap on an item in the list and the list vanishes (but the search bar stays up) and the new definition is revealed. My biggest concern with this is that unlike in an English dictionary, with a Pinyin search it's quite possible that you'll have to flip through half a dozen results or more before you get to the one you want, so a mode that makes the list less visible would be somewhat inconvenient.

For +, I think I'd rather stick that in the Favorites bar (optional menu that swipes out from the right side of the screen). It's currently iOS-only, as the two biggest justifications for adding it (toggling simplified/traditional and day/night mode) we were able to handle a different way on Android (with those two buttons that appear at the top of the screen when you open up the sidebar menu), but there's no reason we can't support it on Android too once we have a good reason to. Letting people put whatever commands they want arranged in whatever way they want in that screen would be a whole lot easier programming-wise than going through and adding a lot of screen-specific optional one-handed buttons / toolbars / etc, and a lot cleaner UI-wise too.

 

[Taichi]

I see, that make sense.

I tried the favorites bar on ipad version and think very nice. But for the phones, doesn't it make sense to marge it to the left side for the easier access?

 

[mikelove]

The left menu is already pretty cluttered on phones - I'd rather not make it worse. Also, if you're right-handed then if anything the bar on the right should be easier to access than the bar on the left.