Mint Usability

RETYPE is a new concept for text input in touchscreen phones/devices. Instead of that huge QWERTY keyboard, which wastes massive amounts of valuable screen estate from your small screen, it relies heavily on gestures. Each key can be used to enter three letters; tap, swipe up and swipe down. It also seems that they have done some optimization regarding the letter positions, the most common letters you can simply tap, the not so common letters you have to swipe.

One potential problem with the concept though: whenever optimized letter positions come to play, the whole keyboard becomes heavily language specific. Now, of course you could optimize the layout for every language but it’s a quite big amount of work. Nevertheless, it’s a intriquing concept.

Check the video from full post

Continue reading “RETYPE the text in your iPhone”

This time around, though, it’s supposedly complete application platform, the g-speak by Oblong Industries. It’s definately the most impressive video I’ve seen, since the platform seems like complete solution, not just some weird hack, and the hand tracking seems to work flawlessly. The downside being that you need to wear stylish gloves from the future to use it, I guess they could use some consumer style hand tracking.

When the dust settles and all awesomeness is placed aside, I still fail to see how that is actually anything but cool toy (could appear at CNN, though). Compared to display+mouse+keyboard that is just awkward and slow, the traditional combination beating the G-Talk, 10 to 0. 

Check the video from full post.

Continue reading “Yet another Minority Report UI, this time it’s awesome”

The video itself is quite old, circa 2007 (old in internet time and/or in multi-touch time), but I wanted still to post it since it illustrates nicely the way how at the moment multi-touch seems to be more of an evolutionary hit and miss than actually a step forward. The video in question is quite nice project, from couple of students from India, their aim is to create whole new Operating System based on multi-touch. Now, that’s quite a goal, and all the respect for that, but it seems that in the same time it’s also the downfall of the project. At least when looking it from the perspective of usability .

Head on forward for video and more analysis

Continue reading “State of the Union – Multi-touch, Independence Day (the movie) of usability”

It seems that the Saturday Night Live agrees with my earlier post (Multitouch is useless, dead) and proceeds to ridicule the awesome benefits of multi-touch that we enjoy today. Check the video from the full post.

Continue reading “Multitouch is dead, SNL agrees”

The spanking new iriver SPINN

I’m not talking about just GUI (Graphical User Interface) but of UI as a whole or HMI even, which involves more than just tapping the screen. Just look at how many times the user has to reposition his hands while using the brand-spanking-new wheel/roll thing. The movement is so limited that with one spin you can scroll only couple of menu items.

Check out the video from followup.

Engadget

Continue reading “Video of new iriver SPINN UI – Complicated and slow”

Students(?) of Maryland and Berkeley have whipped up interesting concept of e-book reader: dual displays linked together to form book-like structure. Although the concept of using dual screens as pages of the book is nothing new in the idea apartment, the actual realization in question seems rather interesting. One can flip pages by performing flip gestures by either of the book covers, the displays can also be.. um.. un-linked so that they form their own, individual, papers, which is rather neat when working with multiple documents.

Whitepaper (PDF)

Check the video in full post

New Scientist
Continue reading “Dual-display E-book reader concept”

HP has realeased this all-new kitchen/media/whatever everything-but-kitchensink computer which you should be able to handle with touch only. That’s touch, as a singular, no multi-touch for this one.

Doesn’t look like surefire to me. Yes, it’s a nice concept and the user interface looks nice. Actually it looks like Windows Media Center with Vista treatment, meaning everything is black. And lots of gloss of course as the trends today dictate.

However, it seems to have usability problems which are bound to cause irritation, like pictures that look like thumbnails that you can open and but, a-ha, you can’t. Touch panel response seems to be another issue. as the device fails to act for every third input, which kinda.. well, sucks.

Though, I must admit, I’m somewhat interested how this will cope up the true world, since I’ve designed, as part of UI design course, somewhat similiar device with touch-only inputs. Maybe I throw in some screenshots of it, at some point. Although, they aren’t too polished, specially when you compare them to device like this. (If I just can find them somewhere, that is. Seem to have misplaced the whole project somewhere.)

Video after the jump, with TouchSmart 2 presentation video, or just head straight to CrunchGear to see more.

Video after the jump.

Read it all from CrunchGear

Continue reading “HP TouchSmart 2 caught on video”