Comment by ruddct | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ruddct | Hacker News Reader

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Totally understand where the author is coming from, but the notion that text should be a 'first class' object to interact with does not match the reality of how people interact with long form text. Very few people interact with the text on a page, and 100% of people reading a book very frequently scroll/paginate [0]. People are used to swiping on content to see more of it, I don't know that it's as confusing as you might think.

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.

Author here. Thanks for your response. (I've had a few ex-Kindle folks reach out with either precisely similar or precisely opposite sentiments; I guess it's a big team.)

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.

> You could distill my whole piece to: This is a single purpose device that's been designed like a multi-purpose device. That just feels a little sideways.

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)

I’d say the touchscreen is essential if only for text input. You don’t need it as often as you do with a smartphone, but not having it when you want to type pretty much anything is a nightmare.

A qwerty keyboard made of physical buttons is a lot easier to type with than a touch screen.

From some of the discussion here, it looks like the Kindle 3 was a pretty neat idea. (As the author suggests)

Have you tried typing on a Kindle keyboard? As a Kindle DX user, it has always been a terrible experience and now the letters have rubbed off so it's even worse - the symbol and and number keys are accessed via a 'SYM' control key.

> 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.

+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 :(

> This is a single purpose device that's been designed like a multi-purpose device.

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.

>Having seen my mother (edit: and, more pertinently: myself) struggle with her Kindle, I do think the interaction model is one-degree unnecessarily complex

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.

> I've long since learned how to interact with the Kindle

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.

The goal of the interface should be to be intuitive. You shouldn't have to learn an awkward sequence. If there was a page forward and backward button on each side, I don't think people would have anything to learn

Don't people expect to be able to swipe on the screen these days? That seems more intuitive than indirectly controlling the screen via buttons.

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).

> Don't people expect to be able to swipe on the screen these days? That seems more intuitive than indirectly controlling the screen via buttons.

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.

I would be curious to see a user study on how people without training try to interact with eink screens. re: swipes vs taps.

Just with e-ink screens? Do you think the results would differ from users interacting with the Kindle app on a phone or tablet?

I think people will interact differently with an eink screen compared to a standard display.

I disagree. The goal of the interface should be to be ergonomic. In the case of the Kindle, there are a very small number of things that need to be memorized because they have no visual cues. The small number of actions coupled with the fact that any visual cue would distract from the primary purpose of the device (to display text) make the current interface more ergonomic than one with always-present visual cues IMO.

There is space on the bezels, that could be used without taking up space on the display.

The goal of the Kindle interface is to buy books

Sure... Though the goal of an industrial/UX/UI Designer should be to make the core function, reading books, as easy as possible. If it isn't good at that, no one will buy books for it.

> How often do you struggle with the interface once you've learned it?

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.

Vim's user interface is vastly more complex than the Kindle's. For 99.9% of my interaction with the Kindle, the only things I need to remember are "top=menu", "right=next page", and "left=prev page". These actions are not intuitive, but they are extremely easy to remember.

Memorization isn't the problem. It's intuition. What if the right side of the screen was "previous page" and the left side of the screen was "next page"? I bet you that when you sit down to read, your first tap would always be the wrong one. Then you'd remember and get it right, until it was time to put the kindle away. The next time you sat down to use the kindle, you'd tap the wrong side again. Repeat ad infinitum.

I've been through that cycle personally until I got so annoyed that I either fixed it or stopped using it.

I struggle with vi(m) and I've been on it for 35. There's a core commandset I can use, but in the back of my mind is the constant realization if I'd learned the other way, I'd type about five less keystrokes for some things.

I struggle with the interface all the time. I often keep accidentally changing the page, or quite frequently a large number of pages for reasons unbeknownst to me. I often have to dig things up in unintuitive menus (especially things that I dig up infrequently enough to forget the sequence). On top of that, the clumsiness of the e-ink display--text selection is abysmal enough on iPhones. I would love a kindle with physical buttons/keyboard.

The bigger problem to me is not even the note taking but that the touch screen for page turning is such a worse experience that I can't understand any reason for it beyond fad. A page turning button in the right place (on both side) means I can hold it in a nice grip throughout my reading and just press. Now I have to move the hand off the grip to the screen, press quickly cause I don't want to force a text action and move it back. It also means I can't really hold the kindle in a nice grip. For me turning a paper book was a more seamless experience than turning kindle. Now in terms of weight and holding a number of book and light kindle is of course a much better experience.

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