January 14, 2010

Qwerted

When I wrote about virtual keyboards, I mentioned that the iPhone dynamically resizes the «touchable» area of each key based on the probability of that letter being the next letter in the word you’re typing. Moritz Haarmann’s Qwerted is a virtual keyboard which implements this feature for Android phones. Unlike the iPhone, Qwerted visibly resizes the actual key, which results in a rather striking effect:

I suspect that visibly changing the size of the keys may be more confusing than helpful. Moritz Haarmann is currently doing field tests, and I’ll publish an update as test results become available. Regardless of whether it’s a good idea, I think it looks pretty cool.

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designed_for_use_small

If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.

You can find out more about it (and order it directly, printed or as a DRM-free ebook) on the Pragmatic Programmers website.