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Apple, Google: Why do I have to move my thumb so much

2 points by knoke ↗ HN
Wouldn't it be easier and more beautiful if the screen was arranged bottom right to top left instead of top left to bottom right - the way my thumb moves, my most important input thingy?

Just order all icons that way and nudge app developers to put important buttons in thumb's reach - and not as far away as possible as it's being done almost always today.

3 comments

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DiabloD3
Isn't that largely the point of the Material action menu, so you have a thing in the lower right corner (near the usual resting position of your thumb), that either does the new or add function, or spills out frequent actions used in that app?
knoke
for me it really starts with the home screens and most of the apps are arranged: the lower third of the mobile screen is underused while the top third is full of interesting things that I can hardly reach.

But you're right, of course. There are more and more action menues in the bottom right. But take a typical Apple app like Mail.app. In the bottom right there is only one action: write a new mail. The next step, after clicking it, is entering some information that in many cases will involve clicking something in the header field in the top third of the screen. Even send is at the very top right corner. Oh, the thumb movements...

DiabloD3
I will agree with you on this. Apple is slowly trying to integrate typically Android ways of doing things (check the iOS 10 preview stuff they recently showed off, very Materialistic in certain places compared to what it used to look like), but they don't do any usability testing.

What pisses me off isn't specific cases like yours, what pisses me off is app developers don't ask themselves, in general, if what they're doing in the UX makes legitimate sense.

As in, eat your goddamned dog food, people.