Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Not necessarily. Human fingers (or at least, MY human fingers) are too big and clumsy to be able to accurately and reliably select text on a touch screen. On my Sony PRS-350 (which uses exactly the same kind of touch screen that both the new nook and Kobo devices have) I'm constantly ending up with the wrong word selected when I try to look up a word in the dictionary, and highlight text for the purposes of annotation. The Kindle's word selection cursor which you move around with a 5-way controller just works a lot better for me. A low-tech interface, yes, but it works WAY better for me.
|
Your preference and experience will always outweigh the trade offs in interface design. My statement was that touch interfaces test
better for usability not that they work better for everyone. All interfaces are a series of trade offs, usability testing just helps to point to what works for the majority. NOTHING works better for everyone.
I am not one of those that equates low tech with bad tech, low tech solutions are often the best for the purpose at hand. The virtual keyboard is a perfect example, it is high tech but hard to use, people accept it and get proficient with it because it is the trade off for a thinner phone with all the other usability enhancements they want.
If the average reader did a ton of note taking. even though the NST keyboard is good it would not compare to a physical one, the tactile feedback is better for usability. The trade off is that most folks do not take notes while reading, they just read, so B&N made the correct trade off for the market place IMO.