We All Know It, But We Rarely Follow It
Experimenting with a basic principle
The illustration below is well known in the design community. It’s one of the first things you learn as a beginner, and one of the few things you don’t forget along the way. It’s been described in a few different ways: thumb-zone, reachability, one-hand usage, etc. I prefer the classic ergonomics. It wouldn’t be a classic if the word wouldn’t mean much more (check out anthropometric data), but let’s be glad that we’re at least scratching the surface. We’ve all seen it, in different forms, we all know it, we all experience it on a daily basis. Still…our products don’t follow it.
There were quite a few articles describing potentially generic ways of moving main UI elements in the green areas of a hand held device. I wouldn’t dare looking for a generic solution, that would probably require studying hundreds of use cases, scenarios and other buzzwords. I simply tried to apply this principle to a few products and see how they would look and feel.
Leftmost is original.
Obviously I did not go beyond a single screen for each product. I do have a full time job and games to play. I did not notice the double search present (below) on the screen until I moved the upped one in the lower area.
There is clearly a disadvantage to this, at least in these few examples. Main actions may not be scanned as quickly, but then one would only need to scan these a few times ? Scrolling might become more difficult too, if the bottom area becomes too large in height.
In the end, I’ve spend around 30 minutes, simply cropping and moving a few UI elements around. I’m sure these companies, especially the big ones, can find enough time to design ergonomically sound interfaces.
