What has two thumbs and can type on a 10” Tablet?
Dan Moren had it right: typing is the key*. A tablet computer must get text entry right to win the hearts of the people.
The iPhone had a unique problem to solve: how to convey lots of information in a tiny screen. And it solved the problem in a unique way, giving us multitouch to take the tiny screen’s tiny real estate and slide around in it. The solution to the problem of sharing a tiny space between screen and interaction was that the screen itself became the interaction. Very smart stuff, and the new standard for mobile.
But the Tablet’s quandary, and the quandary of all tablets before it, is not how to touch it, but how to hold it. So we look to how we pick up and hold a tablet. Both hands? A hand and a forearm? A surface? (The answer is not a surface, by the way.) Holding becomes a problem because interaction with the screen requires reach. On the iPhone, holding and reach were never a problem because you hold the screen in your hand, and you reach it with your thumb.
Even typing on a virtual keyboard, an interaction that requires precision, was made possible and comfortable by virtue of the iPhone’s size, a constraint that imposes that either of the keyboard’s two fixed positions is never out of reach of the thumbs. I can hold the iPhone in my hands and reach any point on the screen with my thumbs pivoting on a single axis. On a Tablet, this is not so.
And the answer is not to simply scale up the iPhone keyboard because at no point will every key on a scaled up keyboard be within reach. An iPhone keyboard scaled up to tablet proportions will not be comfortable because the connection is too tenuous between the moving parts of the hand and the glass screen. A hardware keyboard works because every key is within reach and each key is distinguished so as to remove anxiety. A glass surface, no matter the visual feedback or autocorrection, will not provide enough certainty of intention.
The iPhone keyboard is the right proportion for our fingers on glass with non-distinct keys. So I had an idea: that the iPhone keyboard could be transposed to the greater real estate of the Tablet’s screen, allowing our hands to remain stable where they hold and support the Tablet.
Here, you see a crude mockup** of an idea for such a transposition (larger version here). You may think I’m a gigantic idiot for suggesting that each thumb have its own set of keys. You are probably right, and the solution is far too inelegant to ever show up in an Apple product. But I am suggesting that this is a feasible way for a user to comfortably interact with a keyboard on a larger screen.
Dan mentions in his piece that something like splitting the keyboard has a higher chance of showing up in the Tablet, but I suggest that there’s not much lost in duplicating the keyboard for each thumb and letting the user decide. And on a more robust device like the Tablet, the user will have more chances to decide than on the tiny iPhone. For instance, you see by the circled X in the mockup that I’ve given the user the option to remove one of the keyboards. Furthermore, because there is real estate for the smaller keyboards to live, repositioning them to taste would not be out of the question.
Will this be it? No. But I see a design challenge and I took an opportunity to come up with a (not the) solution.
Try this: go here for the large version of the dual keyboard mockup. Put your hands up to the screen as if you’re holding it. Don’t touch, your fingers are all greasy. Or, if you have two iPhones/iPod touch devices, hold one in each hand and imagine typing on both. It’s actually easier than it might seem.
If you’ve got a better idea, don’t be shy. Mock it up, fella.
*If that isn’t on a poster hanging in a junior high computer lab, someone is missing out on a million dollars.
** I borrowed the Tablet body from Chris Messina’s 2007 mockup. Otherwise, it’s very crude, and is meant to illustrate a point, so just shut up.
