Dan Moren, Macworld:
Apple popularized the onscreen keyboard with the launch of the first iPhone, deciding to eschew the hardware keyboards that were de rigueur on smartphones at the time.
And:
That was great in 2007. But 12 years later, we’ve all largely adapted to touchscreen keyboards, and some of those smart technologies are starting to look and feel, well, not so smart. It’s time for an A-to-Z overhaul of text entry on iOS.
Dan digs into several virtual keyboard areas where there’s room for improvement. Take the time to read his article, not a long read.
I do think there’s plenty of room for improvements here. In my mind, one core problem is the blind dependence on machine learning to drive predictive text suggestions.
Here’s an example:
I brought up Twitter, and started composing a new tweet. I typed the letters “proc”, which led the keyboard to make the center prediction of the word “process”. Perfect, exactly what I was going for.
But then I typed “e”, the next letter in process. And that center suggestion was changed to another word. This happens a lot.
But the point is, when I am typing, and I see the word I want in a specific box, if I type one more letter in that word and then reach to tap the word, it should not move. I frequently find myself typing, reaching to tap the word I’m typing, and by the time my finger gets to the box, the word has changed to another word.
If my eye is on the target, and I continue to type the target word as already identified, the target word should stay the same. Until I type a letter that does not match the currently identified target word.
My sense of this is, machine learning has priority over straight logic.
I’d love to speak with someone on the keyboard team about this, and other related issues. I wonder if the team is not seeing these sorts of issues themselves.
Well, there’s rumors that apple is already testing it’s own swipe-keyboard for ios 13.
i got confused by my mothers 2017 ipad last week, which had a different keyboard layout than my ipad air 2 – and i wasn’t able to figure out, why.
also, i’d welcome a landscape-orientation-keyboard on the iphone, that uses the whole screen. the current one is pretty ridiculous.
@dave-mark, you bring up a UX problem that is _rife_ in macOS and iOS both. Another example: bring up AirPlay and wait a moment. When you see the person you want to share to, you’d better hope their icon doesn’t shift as more AirPlay candidates are found, otherwise you’ve just initiated a send to a stranger. UI should not shift under the user! The rule of thumb is always build to the right, never populate in a way that shifts items around. Similarly: using ⌘-tab to Quit apps is problematic, since your highlight will actually move—without your input—after each app quits, so if you’re quitting things in rapid succession you’ll almost always quit an unintended app.
It’s almost as if Apple is forgetting some very basic interaction tenets. (Disclosure: I’m a UI designer.)
If only you were typing in a language that does not support suggestions yet, but does inline autocomplete…
No syntax, no grammar, not a drop of intelligence there.
“Another example: bring up AirPlay and wait a moment. When you see the person you want to share to, you’d better hope their icon doesn’t shift as more AirPlay candidates are found, otherwise you’ve just initiated a send to a stranger. UI should not shift under the user!”
This a thousand times!
Kind of embarrassing that their competitor Google implemented all of these, on iOS, a couple years ago.