The other day I attended a meeting with a consulting company who is in the business of keeping their clients aware of "consumer movements, trends and market facts." They showed some interesting Web sites that highlighted trends toward visualization of products and social shopping. No ah-ha moments, but they seemed grounded at least. And then I asked them to comment on how they thought multi-touch interfaces such as those on iPhone and Surface would affect visualization and social shopping.
Yeah, they were grounded all right. Buried even. Too deep to see the horizon.
Apple, they said, was taking a big chance by having a virtual keyboard on the iPhone. But this consulting company thought that it was a matter of necessity, since "Apple is working with a mobile device that has very limited screen space."
Are you kidding me? This isn't about what Apple is doing or why. It's about how.
To say that Apple's big gamble is the virtual keyboard, as even the NY Times said today, is to say that a phone with a physical keyboard is a sure bet. That must mean that my current phone, which has TWO keyboards/pads, is the cat's meow. Actually, a hyena's laugh is what comes to my mind.
If we must talk about the keyboard tree and totally miss the multi-touch forest, may I please make this request? Dear Steve, if you haven't thought of it already, would you please make the keyboard configurable? I would like to drag the backspace key and the return key to the spot where they make the most sense to me.
This is the phone I lived with for two years. In all that time, I never did get used to the location of the return key and constantly deleted the last character I'd typed every time I meant to start a new paragraph.
Now, I must admit that my jaw dropped upon hearing the response of this trend-watching consulting company, but I did put it back in place to give them a second chance. "So let's move away from a small screen, then. Can you please give me your opinion about the same question as it relates to Surface?"
Did they recover? Hardly. Microsoft, in their opinion, was essentially doing Surface because they could. There was no reason to grab a window with your fingers to resize it when a mouse could do that with no problem.
Maybe I should give them a break because they didn't see the same video I saw when I worked at Microsoft: time after time, users in a usability lab could not double-click. Dragging was a little more of a drag than you'd think. Mousin' ain't all that easy for some folks. But really, even the Times article that started off so poorly had a clue:
"It may teach a new generation of technology users to use their fingers rather than a mouse — a four-decade-old technology — as a pointing and command device."
My big gamble is to go out on a limb (pun intended, try the veal) and claim that most people have a reasonable command of their fingers. I bet they'll do just fine.
