With the introduction of iPhone I believe more people will think consciously about user-interface design on small screens. Rather than to talk about iPhone, I thought I’ll talk about a series of Microsoft Research projects by Daniel Robins. He has many interesting UI-related projects, including ZoneZoom, FaThumb, and TapGlance.
The first project, ZoneZoom, is based on two simple concepts. First, the screen is divided into nine segments and each is assigned to the corresponding number key. Second, the number keys support two actions: press and release, and press and hold. The former is for navigation, and the latter is for glance. That’s all. Simple, isn’t it?
Now let’s look at an example. Suppose you have a map application on your screen. Since the screen is divided into nine regions, pressing #3 allows you to zoom to that location (north-east). The zoomed screen will then be re-divided into nice regions for further navigation. If you press and hold #3, on the other hand, you’ll still zoom to that location, but upon releasing the key you’ll go back to the original screen. You can see a short demo here (58MB).
The second project is called FaThumb which incorporates the principles of ZoneZoom into search. Since typing is hard on a cell phone (especially if you’re in the wrong generation :), it is replaced by spacious navigation introduced by ZoneZoom. Navigation is done by several different aspects, such as category (eg, “restaurant”), distance, location, time, and price range. FaThumb is not meant to be a generic search engine, but rather one that is useful in specific scenarios, such as finding restaurants or shops. To see it in action, take a look at this introductory video.
The third project is called TapGlance, which applies ZoneZoom to the “home screen” of a smartphone. With TapGlance, you see nine applications (3 x 3) in the first screen, and a brief status of each app in each of the segment. For example, the Inbox segment may indicate the number of new messages, or the Windows Media Player segment may indicate the current song being played. You can then use the same navigation technique (press or hold) to navigate to or to glance each app in more detail. I believe this is a big improvement over Windows Mobile, which is essentially based on list (list of recent apps, list of programs, etc). TapGlance on the other hand takes advantage of your spacious memory. |