This is the most popular size of devices on the market. At the time of this writing, a good example is the Samsung Galaxy SIII, 5.4g n 2.8g, with a 4.8-inch diagonal screen size. The screen resolution is purposefully not mentioned. Actually, in doing mobile UX research, the way the device is used has little to do with screen resolution and more to do with the size, dimensions, and weight of the device.
If the resolution is too low to display the required set of touch icons across the screen, then the behavior changes. However, for most modern devices the reso-lution is already adequate. Adding more pixels improves the picture and makes for great marketing campaigns that motivate people to buy a new gadget; it has little effect on the customers' behavior after they acquire it. The one distinguish-ing factor behind the mobile phones is that they tend to be light enough and small enough to be used one-handed. The hot zone for a full-size phone in a right-handed grip is shown in Figure 3.2.
Figure 3.2: This is the hot zone for a right-hand grip on a full-size mobile phone, Samsung Galaxy SIII.
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As the right-hand hot zone in Figure 3.2 shows, the bottom action bar is easily accessible, however the ergonomics of accessing the top action bar don’t quite work out: Most customers need to use their left hands to tap the controls on the top of the device or have to reposition the device and stretch their fingers awkwardly.
This is especially true for women and teens, or customers with smaller hands.
Another drawback of commands on top of the screen is you have to cover the screen to reach them. This is not exactly toeing the Android “Party Line” because, unfortunately, the top action bar is where the Android guidelines recommend placing most of the key functions. Indeed, that’s where the key functions reside in the majority of the Google Android apps as of the date of this writing.
In the United States, the Android phones tend to come in larger, literally pocket-bursting sizes. This is partly due to the current market penetration of the Apple iOS iPhone. It helps marketing campaigns define differentiation if the Android devices have a visibly larger screen, so the full-size Android mobile phones tend to be larger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. Although this is a strong trend, larger size is not always the case. As already mentioned, in Europe slightly
smaller and less expensive Android phones made by Sony are about the size of the iPhone 4. Anything smaller than the size of the iPhone 4 can safely be considered to be a compact phone and treated accordingly.
On these smaller Android phones that have the 3.5-inch screens, it is much easier to reach the top action bar; although it still requires awkward juggling. The result is that features such as the Drawer navigation in the Google Plus and Facebook apps are actually hard to reach. As discussed in Chapter 1, “Design for Android:
A Case Study,” one workaround is to use the left-to-right swipe gesture to bring out the navigation drawer, as indicated by the bevel on the left side of the screen.
Chapter 13 discusses using bottom corners for immersive Swiss-Army-Knife navigation that are more easily accessible than the top corners. Keep this in mind as you design your own apps. Also consider using gestures like the C-Swipe that's discussed in Chapter 14, “Tablet Patterns.” As this book is being written, these gestures are not part of the Android 4.0 guidelines, but they do work in the real world.
Until recently, a differentiating factor for many Android phones was a slide-out hardware keyboard. This was mainly a marketing push designed to entice would-be iPhone users who were skeptical about the usability of on-screen typing as well as current Blackberry users unwilling to part with their hardware keyboards.
In the current device lineup, however, the keyboards are generally absent, except for a handful of models from manufacturers such as Motorola. This trend reflects the general acceptance of the soft keyboards by the market, but also the larger
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screen sizes that are more forgiving of fat fingers, as well as software- driven keyboard input improvements such as predictive text, Swype, ShapeWriter, SlideIT, and so on. You can find more information about these in the Android Forums at http://androidforums.com/android-applications/
50081-swype-vs-slideit-vs-shapewriter.html.
tablet-Phone hybrids
Tablet-phone hybrids such as the Galaxy Note are a conundrum. For most apps, visibly, there is no improvement in the screen resolution, so the person using the awkward device gets the same on-screen experience as the full-size mobile phone customer. However, bringing one of these giant hybrid phones (roughly one-inch taller and one-half an inch wider than the big full-size mobile phones) to one’s ear for making a phone call is rather awkward, to put it mildly. Yet as the success of the Galaxy Note has proven, people are actually rather interested in these devices. Part of the appeal is the larger screen that enables comfortable e-book reading and mobile web surfing.
Hybrid phone customers find that for the vast majority of tasks, the use of the device is a dedicated two-handed affair. Although it’s possible to easily hold Galaxy Note in one hand, even if you have Niccolò Paganini’s legendary long fingers, it is almost impossible to use that same hand to reach and operate the top action bar functions.
As shown in the hot zone in the Figure 3.3, one hand is not enough to reach all the functions of the tablet-phone hybrid, which forces an asymmetric one-handed grip with one hand holding the device while the other hand does the tapping.
Figure 3.3: The Samsung Galaxy Note’s limited one-handed hot zone forces the customer to use a two-handed grip.
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Most of the apps on the device are not customized to take full advantage of the larger screen size; some apps, most notably the Calendar, offer additional fea-tures such as slide-out tabs, which are interesting interface approaches but can still be rather awkward to use. My recommendation for these devices is not to customize the native app experience unless a large percentage of the app's cus-tomers are using one of these hybrids, or you are designing a native app specifi-cally customized for this device class.
Gesture-based menu interactions, like the slide-out drawers and C-Swipe men-tioned earlier, would actually enable one-handed use because these hybrid devices are light enough and compact enough to be held comfortably in one hand.
This is because the device’s center of gravity still falls comfortably within the reach of the fingers of one hand. Most of the issues of one-handed use come from the inability to reach the navigation components, not the device size or weight distribu-tion, as is the case for true tablets.