Touch-enhanced text editing
Visual essay exploring potential gestural interactions for core functions in text formatting and note-taking apps.
Category
Digital interfaces
Topics
User Experience, Research
Motivations
Screen touch combinations can effectively address the limitation of the lack of option command keys on compact devices. These combinations have been widely explored, with some gestures, like pinch-to-zoom, becoming universally recognized. However, there is still much potential to be explored in the realm of text formatting. Currently, changing the style or formatting of text often requires a supporting menu, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Remember when zooming into a picture required activating a zoom mode? That has become a thing of the past. Similarly, key combinations and shortcuts are well-known for a variety of actions; for example, holding the volume up and power button to take a screenshot, and employing the *tap-and-hold* gesture to prompt an option menu, akin to a right-click on a laptop where the command/control key + B styles text to bold.
In these brief visual concepts, I present a set of gestures with potential applications in mobile notes and text processing apps. These gestures aim to enhance the writing experience on mobile devices by facilitating and expediting actions such as text formatting, styling, highlighting, searching, and marginalia contextual zooming. The designs leverage widely adopted gesture patterns across device platforms to create more streamlined writing environments, reducing the need for navigating through menus and making gestures a natural extension of the software.
Preserve fluidity
Enhancing text formatting with intuitive tapping sequences aligned to natural graphic hierarchy.
Specific tap patterns enable easy switching between different text formats. A single tap applies Heading 1, a double tap applies Heading 2, and a triple tap reverts to Body text. This method streamlines and accelerates the formatting process, removing the need for traditional menus.
Text style on tap
Select, hold and tap to switch between bold, italic, underlined and regular text styles.
When a text segment is selected, holding and tapping changes the text styling. For instance, a single tap makes the text bold, a double tap applies italic, and a triple tap underlines the text. This approach mimics the command/control + B/I/U key combinations for text styling, simplifying the process and eliminating the need for traditional formatting menus.
Tap & hold as a command
The command mode enabled by Tap & Hold can be combined with various gestures, such as swiping across text to highlight.
When the command mode is activated by holding the tap, swiping across the text with another finger highlights the selected portion. This natural, gesture-based interaction simplifies the highlighting process, which typically involves selecting the text, opening an option menu, and choosing the highlight option or selecting the highlight tool from the toolbar. Integrating this action into a gesture streamlines the process, avoids the use of modals, and saves screen space.
Scaled navigation
Introducing a streamlined scale-pan navigation model that enables previewing targeted searches and user-generated content, such as annotations, with minimal disruption to the visual space throughout the document.
Pinching out anywhere on the screen slightly reduces the text scale, creating an additional margin on the right side of the display and revealing a toolbox for word search and bookmark visualisation. Drawing on a simplified application of spacial zooming framework (Furnas and Bederson, 1995), this approach is designed to facilitate navigation within the page’s multi-layered information structure. It enables users to preview all instances of a searched word and provides an overview of text annotations as visual cues along the scroll tab column. This method aims to enhance navigation by offering specific visual cues, allowing users to locate relevant content while preserving the overall visual context to maintain orientation.
What's next
My initial motivation was to propose the Hold & Tap pattern as a shortcut for command key functions on mobile touch screens. As I delved deeper into this concept, other usability questions inevitably emerged, which I attempted to explore without losing sight of the original scope. For instance, how might we better utilize the vertical screen to aid in easily locating and orienting the user within a page by integrating annotations, bookmarks, and highlights? This exploration led me to consider the broader applicability of these principles in addressing similar challenges in more complex writing environments. Ultimately, the question became: How might we create digital interventions that not only support seamless real-time navigation and interaction but, most importantly, help us think more effectively?