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Comment by sharpercoder | Hacker News Reader

I really like the thumb-reach heatmaps. This has been my personal experience on larger phones as well: I should be able to "thumb the numbers".

I don't like a redesign because it's simply too ingrained. It's a sailed ship.

Note that our screens are big enough to waste space to nothing, at least for a phone dial screen. So we can redesign it to:

    ___________________________
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |                         |
    |        1    2    3      |
    |                         |
    |        4    5    6      |
    |                         |
    |        7    8    9      |
    |                         |
    |             0           |
    |                         |
    |_________________________|

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As a left handed user... I fucking despise the idea of thumb-reach heatmaps geared solely towards right handed use.

As a side note, we make up ~10 percent of all users. If you design to the thumb reach of right handed users by default, you're fucking over a lot of people.

Add on that ~19 percent of the population has some form of disability, and a solid chunk of that involves hand/limb usages, making the head-up-ass assumption that a right handed thumb map is the "ideal" approach is... well you've shoved your head up your ass.

----

edit: I want to add, I'm not attacking you so much as the general premise of the article. I come off as fairly hostile on this since it's such a common day to day inconvenience for a broad swath of the population.

I'm right handed, but somehow I hold the phone and dial with the left hand. I don't think I'm alone, so this is not only a left-handedness problem.

I am right-handed, and I also hold the phone in my left hand. It goes in my left pocket.

Now that you mention it, it's also in my left pocket.

Going to guess: your keys for your car are in your right pocket because that way they are in your right hand when you go to start it.

Hah, yep. Wallet and keys in right pocket, phone in left... as a right-handed person.

I'm left handed. Keys are in the right pocket, since most cars have key holes on the right of the steering column.

I'm right handed and put my car keys in the left pocket, just because I use them less than my phone!

It's the opposite for me. I'm left handed but use my phone with my right hand.

Also left handed. I feel your hostility 100%. So many apps are subtly designed for right-handed people that I simply have grown accustomed to fumbling around with my right hand when using my phone.

Don't even get me started on various other items designed for right-handed people. Like this popcorn scooper I found at a nearby convenience store: http://a.co/jjanj7H I've even run in to butter spreading knives that are impossible to use left-handed.

Being left-handed is already a UX nightmare. Please don't make it worse.

Also a lefty, I like to think of the right-handedness of the world as a dexterity challenge, when the other stressors of life aren't grinding me down.

Totally agree.

Aside: I discovered touching a navbar button often doesn't work for a left hander, whereas it does work for a right handed person.

This left vs right handed UX flaw occurred with the navbar button at top left on an iPhone (e.g. back or hamburger).

A left finger comes in at an angle that makes the capacitive touchscreen register the touch as occurring at the extreme left edge of the screen. A right index finger registers the touch more correctly within the navbar button. Some navbar buttons don't extend the touch hit area to the edge, so a left finger fails to click it, whereas a right finger works...

Would love to see phone in the future be able to detect which hang is holding the device and provide the correct layout for different apps.

An interesting thought, but there's some other factors at play. Navigating through views typically proceeds from left to right, which is why the back button is on the left side. I suppose you could change the direction of the animations, too. That seems unnatural in the context of a left-to-right language though.

Right-handed privilege.

But still, the thumbs are probably the least "handed" element of the body. I mix right and left thumb use based on whatever I need to be doing with my other hand.

Couldn’t the device simply have a setting for left handed vs right handed for the new layout type?

Assuming the hearmap is the mirror image for left handed folks.

Hi, I totally agree, the thumb reach map does show it as a right hand usage diagram, but the flipped view holds true for left handed users too. Also inn my proposed alternatives, I should have mentioned that the should have preference for left handed users to flip the diagram.

As a right-handed user, I encounter trouble frequently when I grab my phone with my left hand, and find touches no longer register reliably. It seems right-focused is a reasonable default for a vast majority of the population, but there needs to be a way to alter to a left-focused scheme via settings or something. It is maddeningly frustrating when I occasionally realize, “Oh, fuck. It’s doing that stupid ignore-my-left-hand thing.” Were that happening constantly, because I’m left-handed, I’d be feeling pretty damn salty.

calm down there buddy, its a software rendered keypad... easy enough to flip it 180 for lefties with a setting

Which no developer will actually implement. During the reign of touch scrollbars, before Apple obsoleted them, it was extremely rare to have an option to place them on the left side to avoid hand occlusion.

Right / left, or rtl/ltr is not flipping 180 or mirroring.

You want eventually the navbar mirrored, but you surely don’t want to read 321, 654, 987 on your number pad. Being lefty doesn’t make your brain read rtl.

There is no quick wins there.

So... a checkbox in Settings, then?

Wait.. which hand do you use? I'm right-handed but I use the phone with my left. (and it goes in my left pocket, because my car and house keys are in the right, per other comments).

>As a left handed user... I fucking despise the idea of thumb-reach heatmaps geared solely towards right handed use.

Hold your horses!

Just use the left side of the keyboard as a toggle button...

when you click it once... the keyboard switches over to a left handed position and stays there until someone else switches it back to the right handed position!

I had an Oppo F1S for a few weeks, it had a gesture whereby you could swipe and reduce the screen size to something like 60%[1] (guessing) thereby enabling one thumb reach.

My daily driver is an iPhone SE, I have average / medium sized hands and can reach the whole screen well enough.

1. http://androidaustralia-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/u...

iOS has had the half size screen gesture for a while, on my 6+ it's double touching the home button (not pressing it, just a light touch)

Yes thats true, but did you try to do that gesture on a phone number dial screen? If you do that, it only shows numbers 1 to 9, rest gets hidden and is out of screen area. It would be nice if they managed to show all digits while the gesture brings the screen down.

Same for Huawei (swipe on the menu bar at the bottom).

Just get rid of the dialpad and let us use the keyboard to dial numbers. Google Keyboard already has a dialpad-style layout and you can choose to centre it or move it to the left or right thumbzone.

We already use the keyboard to type numbers and it works much better than a full screen dial pad.

>I don't like a redesign because it's simply too ingrained. It's a sailed ship.

I think you're probably right, but i'm glad somebody is taking the time to experiment anyways.

wow, had to come here and figure out what the last part of this comment is (being read aloud) was like "what is up with this long delay between numbers/underscore) hmm

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