Reconsidering the Hardware Kindle Interface
medium.com
medium.com
Likewise, it also wouldn't make any sense to have a single tap within a mobile browser bring up the dictionary definition of the word you tapped on. Does it save time? Sure, for one power user use case. But it pollutes your otherwise simple navigation paradigm with stuff popping up all over the place promoting text interaction. People hate stuff popping up all over the place unnecessarily. Better to build your navigation paradigm out of the way that 100% of people interact with the content; it's OK to have a few things buried one layer deeper, power users will find them anyways.
[0] I worked on these products at Amazon.
I originally had a huge footnote acknowledging that much of this is obvious and that the Kindle team is full of smart people who have data showing that maybe these aren't the best optimizations. I'm just describing my expectations from having used Kindles for ten (??!) years coupled with having worked on designing digital reading interfaces for a similar amount of time. I'm certainly an edge case user.
Having seen my mother (edit: and, more pertinently: myself) struggle with her Kindle, I do think the interaction model is one-degree unnecessarily complex — all of those hidden spaces.
You could distill my whole piece to: This is a single purpose device that's been designed like a multi-purpose device.
Page turn buttons + menu button would all but eliminate any interaction ambiguity. And could be done quite beautifully.
Although I don't have access to any data, I think there might be a subset of casual users who would prefer the screen to do nothing when touched.
Then we're in agreement! There are a TON of features/complexity in Kindle; combine that with e-ink being a clumsy display technology to combine with a touch screen and we find ourselves in the situation that we're in.
(Note that I totally understand why e-ink was combined with a touchscreen for Kindle. Give someone a screen these days and they'll try and touch it, for better or worse)
From some of the discussion here, it looks like the Kindle 3 was a pretty neat idea. (As the author suggests)
+1!
I loved my original non-touch Kindle. Newer paperwhite is nice, but touch screen is a disadvantage for me. I rarely interact with it and older Kindle with buttons was perfectly fine for those tasks. Yet it sucks when pages are scrolled or next is selected if I accidentally touch/hold screen in a wrong way.
I’m seriously considering spending extra $$$ to getter expensive version purely to get away from touch screen. But I’m worried that it wouldn’t allow me to lock the screen while reading with hardware button :(
Yes, the modern Kindle really suffers for this. I originally had a Kindle 3. It did everything I wanted except for the horrible, glaring oversight that the keyboard didn't have numbers, when better than 90% of my interactions with that keyboard were jumps to a numeric location.
I now have a Kindle Oasis, and in most respects other than that one the UI is a big step back. I can no longer remove dust from the screen by touching it. (Actually, I still do this, but it wastes a bunch of my time by unavoidably performing one to four page turns when I do.) Attempts to call up the menu frequently turn the page instead. Jumping to a location is now a ridiculously long workflow involving summoning the menu, selecting "go to", and then selecting "page or location", because the table of contents has been stuffed into the "go to" menu instead of being part of the book.
Normal functions should be easier to reach than rare functions, but not so easy that they happen constantly regardless of whether the user wanted them. The Oasis somehow manages to fail at both of those points.
How often do you struggle with the interface once you've learned it? I agree that the current Kindle interface isn't the most intuitive, but to me that's a non-issue. I've long since learned how to interact with the Kindle, and now that that initial learning is complete, the interface does an excellent job allowing me to do what I want.
Occasionally my Kindle jumps forward or backwards by a large number of pages, and I've yet to figure out why. It happens when I put it down to talk to someone, someone a shortcut of jump around gets activated. I am not sure how to quickly and rapidly jump around the text on purpose, but I do dread it happening by accident far too often.
I pull up the UI with the page preview and skim around using that, but obviously there is another interaction method that allows for the same thing. Rather than learning it, I want to disable it, since it causes me nothing but frustration.
If I were designing the Kindle, I think I would add a button that brings up the UI and have screen swipes turn the page and screen taps bring up something that makes sense for whatever was tapped on (like a dictionary or X-ray feature).
Nope. I hate swiping. I expect my e-ink screens to be free of ugly, distracting fingerprints, and I generally find physical buttons to be more accurate, precise, and intuitive than swiping and other gestures.
You must not be a VIM user. I've been using VIM for about 10 years now and I still make mistakes where I think I'm in one mode, but I'm actually in another. Just because you've "learned" an interface doesn't make it easy to use.
I've been through that cycle personally until I got so annoyed that I either fixed it or stopped using it.
Sadly, it seems I am the minority. Most people prefer no buttons (but ooh look how beautiful the device is as I take it out of the box the first time). Even worse, most people seem to prefer tedious manual scrolling over page turns (slide the text up with your finger, carefully watching as not to scroll too far, and then try to find your place in the text again).
I think these fads will pass, though, and we will eventually regain our collective sanity.
Touch screen just sucks for an e-reader, the way all of the ones I've ever used since function, because you can only read right-handed with it, if you want to use just one hand. You're have to either tap on the right side of the screen to advance the pages, or worse, have to try doing a swiping motion that all too often gets misinterpreted as a tap.
I do hope this fad is coming to the end. Point in case - Garmin cycling computers are back to buttons.
The current model allows you to mostly interact with the Kindle as you would a book - a light touch anywhere on the visual field (i.e. the page) flips in that direction. However, you can also leverage the added functionality that the Kindle provides, which is indeed the text interaction.
However, I mainly use this for looking up unfamiliar words, rather than for highlighting. I agree that the current system is unsuitable for highly-interactive reading, such as by jotting notes in the margins, highlighting passages, circling words, and so on. On the other hand, I suspect that this type of highly-engaged reading is the exception, not the rule, and that for most of the Kindle's audience, they would no more "interact" with the text of their book than they would if it were printed.
If the primary argument is on the "surprising-ness" of the UI, that could be handled in the same way that Nook did when they first switched to a touchscreen, by overlaying regions on the screen to teach users where to tap. Then, once they were familiar with the behavior, they could turn it off. This is not ideal, as it reduces the legibility of the text, which I'm sure is why this is probably not the default.
Anyway, an engaging read nonetheless, and I'm certainly ready to be proven wrong by a new interaction model that works better. This could definitely be a case of "I want a faster horse" behavior on my part.
So it would seem strange to optimize for the active note-taker over the presumably more prevalent passive reader.
That said, having some sort of active note-taking mode would make a lot of sense. Satisfy the niche, and let the very occasional use of it be available for the person who rarely needs to take bursts of notes.
Amazon seems to be experimenting a little with making the screen less active while reading -- they added the ability to disable the touchscreen and /only/ have the buttons on the Oasis 2[0].
[0]: http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2017/12/14/heres-how-to-dis...
I just want to read a book, except not have it be so heavy, have a built in bookstore, and not need a reading lamp.
The Kindle accomplishes all that quite admirably. More ability to interact with the text or graphical elements would make the experience significantly worse.
I'm not sure I agree. The keyboard is secondary to the reading experience, you only need it when you're searching on the online store or making notes.
I've owned a Kindle 2, a Keyboard and an Oasis (first generation) and I feel the Oasis is the best out of all of them - it's so much more portable.
> Since then it feels like a cascade of misguided optimizations — thinner (and yet wider; the Oasis fits into almost no pocket, can’t really be held easily in one hand), fake buttons (the weird non-buttons of the old Voyage), beautiful leather cases with too-weak magnets that don’t stay attached, etcetera.
Being a long-term Oasis user, I totally disagree with this part, unless the Oasis has changed drastically in its second generation. This has not been my experience with the Oasis at all.
This feels a bit like the posts that show up after a Facebook redesign to be honest.
But I completely disagree about the dictionary - that's exactly the right level of functionality I want my reader to have - yet also disagree with the author about the touchscreen functionality. I've had a Keyboard, a Paperwhite, and an Oasis, and my only UX complaint is "add the physical page turn buttons to the Paperwhite too."
I like the two layers of tapping.
>There are no affordances to the taps. No edges to the active areas. Nothing to hint at what might happen. This creates what I call a “brittle” interface — where one wrong tap sends you careening in an unknown direction, without knowing why or how you got there.
When I'm using an e-book reader app, I want the entire screen to be taken up with the text of the book I am reading. I quite like having tap zones to turn the pages and access a menu when I need it. I'd rather a tap than a swipe, actually. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the quote above, I don't find this to be antagonistic in any way at all.
I'd say at most that it is not "new user friendly", rather than antagonistic to all users.
I'm only an occasional Kindle user, but I rarely make a wrong action using the hardware interface, and when I do, it's an unintentional long tap, and I have to cancel an unintended highlight.
Oddly, swiping is considerably faster than tapping. When you tap, there’s a brief delay before the screen starts scrolling – which is artificial, not just lag, because a quick swipe gesture (just brushing your finger against the screen) starts the same scrolling animation with no delay. Thus I’ve effectively been trained to always swipe.
As strange as this is, at least I wouldn’t call it antagonistic to new users, since the most efficient page-turning interaction is also the most intuitive one: most users will already be familiar with the swipe gesture from the rest of the OS, and will try to do it even without a visual affordance. (It’s also physically intuitive, even if the physical object being simulated is very different from an actual book.)
Of course, you can’t do fluid scrolling animations on an eInk display, so eInk Kindles lack the swipe gesture, leaving only the relatively-dubious tap regions criticized in the article. I agree that hardware buttons would be better there.
On the other hand, on iOS, Kindle is my favorite reading app for the sole reason that none of the others I’ve tried offer equivalent swiping functionality. Either they only offer a “page curl” transition style (iBooks), which looks cool but is more visually distracting, or they support swipe-to-slide but only as an atomic gesture: you do a complete swipe, and then the screen scrolls, without it letting you actually drag the page around first. (That just feels unnatural.)
My ideal Kindle model is as follows.
Hardware buttons:
Page forward
Page back
Menu
(Power/Sleep)*The problem is this makes page turning hard. I would love a small bluetooth page turning device that I can hold in my hand and press to turn the page. Anyone seen something like this or maybe even reverse engineered the kindle to make it possible?
EDIT: Looks like someone managed to do it with a jailbroken kindle and a presentation remote! http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2016/09/30/remote-control-h...
Is it just me, or have smartphone interfaces gotten both more and less brittle over the years? I've noticed that very mature apps tend to be very non-brittle, and new apps (or revamps of mature apps) made by newer developers tend to be very brittle.
For some reason, I've noticed this conditional brittleness particularly with maps apps. Fancy "3D" features in maps apps exhibit this, as well as badly timed alternative route features, which present a button, then yank it away bullfighter style.
It's like being in a car: Your primary focus should be on the road, and the controls tactile enough to be used without changing that focus. Touch screens don't make sense in this context (coughTeslacough).
Ditto, Kindle. Reading should be the primary focus. And after a while you develop the muscle memory twitch for turning the page. Moving your entire arm and hand to swipe pulls you out of the moment, and you're focused on the device and not the content.
It is for this reason that I get all of my Nooks and Kindles at Goodwill. Fortunately, they are plentiful. With the added bonus of being able to read a dead guy's library.
Older gadgets and programs exposed more settings - either through UI and access to the system files. Many cheap phones even had themes - something now impossible without root on the Android phones. The power users could improve productivity or appearance. It often came at the cost of less polished design for some settings and higher UI complexity.
My ideal next Kindle would come with hardware buttons and touch screen controls that have good defaults for the average user and can be configured.
The number of times my kindle has died because it was displaying an ad forever because it takes 4seconds to turn off... pretty much makes the long battery life feature useless.
Maybe these touch-only interfaces are chosen to reduce the number of failure points?
Kind of an interesting exercise but overlooks the important fact that one person can't change an incredibly complicated system they're not remotely familiar with.