Comment by quicklywilliam
4 days ago
I love this question. Most eink UIs feel like they just took interaction patterns from smartphones and crammed them in. I would love to see more innovation on eink UI patterns that works from first principles given the nature and limitations of eink!
For example, I consider dragging operations an anti-pattern on eink devices. Both latency and touch precision are just not at the levels we expect from years of using phones, leading to an experience that is prone to errors and frustration. A particularly common problem is messing up your state just as you lift your finger. I can't tell you the number of times I have carefully highlighted a passage only to have it jump to the wrong words as I release. Dragging is also just an inherently physically awkward maneuver, especially when performed prone.
I think a better pattern would be to use discrete mode changes with modal controls for refining state. As a simple example, highlighting could work like this: 1. Touch and briefly hold to enter selection mode. 2. Selection mode brings up large buttons around the current selection to refine it. Refinement happens via taps, not drags. 3. Selection mode is exited via another button tap. Confirmation is explicit, not implicit. This feels like it would be a lot more relaxing and less error prone.
I could also see a hybridized approach for interactions (like highlighting) where refining exclusively via button taps might be tedious. In this case you could use drag gestures while in selection mode to quickly add/remove large sections to/from the current selection state. This would give you a shortcut for highlighting large sections quickly, which could then be detail-refined via button taps. Having it be modal would also allow you to undo any accidents.
A further refinement for this interaction pattern would be to offer intelligent controls that give the user context-inferred options for their refinement. For example, if you have part of a paragraph highlighted, a button could appear to highlight the rest of it, and subsequently buttons could appear to highlight the adjacent paragraphs. This could even be combined with the hybrid drag gestures idea - after quickly dragging over a rough area, the system could offer multiple proposed selections if there is ambiguity what the user may have intended.
Most eink UIs feel like they just took interaction patterns from smartphones and crammed them in.
Many e-ink devices are Android (or Android-based), so there's a pretty strong technical reason for that inheritance.
Having used both Android tablets and Android e-ink tablets, as well as Android smartphones, my experience is that:
- Android is smartphone first. As phone formats have expanded, the size-constraint bias is less prominent, but still present.
- Tablets suffer from poor real-estate usage relative to phones.
- E-ink suffers from poor suitability to display capabilities and limitations: much slower response, limited (or no) colour / greyscale palette, ghosting, and abominable results from scroll, pan, or animation-heavy design.
On touch precision: many e-ink devices support a stylus, and I find that this is far superior to finger-based interaction, though generally the more I use tough interfaces the more I hate them.
Highlighting / selection is a problem on all touch interfaces. My solution is to install a soft keyboard (e.g., Hacker's Keyboard) or use a bluetooth keyboard which permit content selection using cursor keys or shift + modifier.