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Scott Jenson Sep 22, 2023

Whenever I explain my #research at Google into mobile text editing, I'm usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile "Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What's the problem?"

Text editing on mobile isn't ok. It's actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. I wrote this post so you can understand why it's so important.
https://jenson.org/text
#UXDesign #UX

The invisible problem – Scott Jenson

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Scott Jenson Sep 22, 2023

Here is a short demo of Eloquent, a new text editing prototype I was working on at Google that attempts to fix this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9YPm0EghvU

Eloquent: Improving Text Editing on Mobile

YouTube

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Ian Bicking Sep 22, 2023

@scottjenson a few thoughts/questions:

- The single extended gesture (tap, hold, flick) seems hard to back out of. What's required at each step to cancel out of any change?
- A general tension I feel is how x and y are treated equivalently even though they are very different in text, where y movement causes sudden large movement and x is fine grained and localized
- This keeps a very character-centric approach, which makes editing fiddly; like deleting a word and leaving two spaces

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Ian Bicking Sep 22, 2023

@scottjenson
- What would a language-oriented editing flow look like? We're getting there in steps with grammar and spell check. If you are rethinking things why stick with characters as a primary editing approach?
- The common user behavior of delete-and-retype feels to me like a desire to take this language approach
- Cursors in general feel like they are ignoring the qualitative difference between revising and appending. Or producing and repairing

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Ozzie D, NP-hard

@ianbicking @scottjenson For me, composing an extended, nuanced text involves writing and moving idea fragments around until they form a cohesive block, as a paragraph or set of bullet points. It's pretty difficult to do this on Android now, with its imprecise selection control, without losing fragments as I go (it hasn't really felt easier on a tablet's larger screen). Eloquent's approach seems like it would help with precision and speed, and less likely interrupt the flow of thought, since It has fewer disparate modes for selecting and operating on text than the default UI. A seamless multi-entry clipboard would help make sure ideas aren't lost (although I don't know how you can smoothly expose all the entries already saved to the clipboard).