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Comment by mrisoli | Hacker News Reader

How about phones below 6"? The Nexus 6P or 5X for instance, a common use case I see is people trying to do quick things on their phone with one hand using the thumb for interacting with the screen, which if you have a phone in the 5-6" ballpark it is not easy to reach the top edges.

This is where solid design comes into play, Tinder's ease of motion and placement of control buttons makes it easy to use with a single hand which means increased usage, thus creating a habit-forming loop, this is critical to Tinder's success.

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The best software can’t fix broken hardware.

Any phone above 4.5, maybe 5" device diagonal (not screen diagonal) is basically unusable single-handed.

And this means that on such devices, people interact entirely different with UI. Which results in different UI paradigms.

I’d have to either compromise my UI for users of smaller devices, or for users of larger devices. But in either case, users of larger devices will never get a truly awesome UI, as that’s simply not possible. (Either you waste space, or parts of the UI are just not reachable).

Making part of the UI display-only is not wasting space.

The problem with these phones is the insistence to push UI elements to the corners on touch screens even though original the UX motivation for putting important things in corners was that they're the easiest mouse targets.

It’s not that simple.

The usable space on a screen doesn’t grow much between a 4" and a 6" phone, because you hold your thumb further over the screen, and more parts are unreachable.

And while one could move the content into the top-left or top-right (depending on handedness of the user), the result is so ugly users preferred a UI with less real estate over it in tests.

With a 4" phone, the best reachable areas are the top and the left. Which is why Android 4.0 – which was right around the time when 4-5" phones became popular – moved all these actions into the top and left edges with the Action Bar and Navigation Drawer.

With a 6" phone, those areas are unreachable, the bottom and the right are obscured by your hand, and the only area left for controls is the center – but you can’t really break up content around the controls either.

The only solution that works partially are gestures, but those are very limited in what you can do, and are very inaccurate.

If you have a better solution for a chat client in which a user might have 400+ channels open than using a navigation drawer (with search) on the left, content in the middle, and input at the bottom, then please present some.

But currently, only for a small handful of apps the 6" problem is solved, and I believe that for many apps, it might never be solved.

> best reachable areas are the top and the left.

Which makes it pretty much impossible to use _in_ your right hand while manipulating UI elements with your thumb.

On a 4" phone, it’s perfectly possible.

I have relatively small hands, but here’s a few photos: https://imgur.com/a/YIRAj – 100% of the screen is reachable, and on all below 4.9" also with a firm grip.

In contrast, on the 5.2" Nexus 5X, only with a loose grip is the left or upper part reachable, and the action bar’s up button is generally unreachable while holding the phone in a firm grip.

On larger devices, such as the Nexus 6P (currently none here, so I can’t take photos), it gets far worse.

Phone UI is designed for 4-5" devices, if you use larger, you have to live with that, but that’s your decision.

Yes. Phones that are switched off are easily reachable almost anywhere.

They also happen to have no active UI elements on the screen. Or visual feedback.If you'd switch it on, on that photo you you'd be long-pressing the (bottom-right) "back" key, and possibly generating word salad in any focused text input field.

Almost nobody has issues holding a phone with the active display switched off.

I can also hold them for you while switched on without issue. I photographed them switched off because it was faster to do it this way, as otherwise I’d first have to power them on and set them up.

But notice the Moto G (2014) in the album, which is on, and doesn’t show interference.

Or,look at this helpful graphic Scott Hurf made http://scotthurff.com/images/posts/thumb-zone-2/thumb-zones-...

Your hands are not that small. My hands are not that small, and they're smaller than yours.

I'm a woman with about average or small hands compared to my friends and colleagues, so compared to the average man hand, they should be quite small.

I'm a man whose hands are about 1/8" shorter than the average, and with your 5" phone, you're able to hit more with your tight grip than I can hit with my loose grip. With my loose grip, I can only comfortably hit about 1/4 of the screen. Maybe it has to do with the relative size of the palm to the fingers. It's actually one of the reasons that I'm a fan of big bezels on the top and bottom - it gives me something to grip if I need to use the top or bottom of the screen.

what are you talking about? I have a Samsung S4, which the sort of "4-5 inch" (translation: 10-13 cm) phone you're talking about, yes?

If I'm holding it in my right hand, about the only part I can't reach with my thumb is the top-left and the very top. Which is about the opposite of what you describe. I'm really confused about just about any statements you made following that, can you explain?

Also, how do you imagine the hand obscuring any parts of the screen without firing touch events all over the place? Placing your hand on the screen will make any app go haywire (yea and we should fix that, challenging but not impossible).

BTW I'm not talking about text-input, just about accessing larger elements of a touch UI. I have kind of shaky hands, I've tried a lot of different ways to hold it and I think that I just can't do the two-thumb typing cause I'm unable to hold it steady in that position, or at least not in a way that's healthy to keep your hands in for frequent stretches.

Also, what is your background in UX? I don't mean a formal education, but any introductory background reading? I often wonder this in discussions like these. Similar to -say- typography, it's not a really hard topic to grasp the basics of. But just reading some intro stuff about it will provide you with: terminology, fundamental concepts, and a few rules of thumb (hahaha did you get that I'm hilarious). Things that you won't be able to intuit or figure out by just being smart-thinking and opinionated.

I'm asking because not only do you not point out any potential solutions, you even assume these might never be solved by anyone else either, for no good reason (and yet write a rather long and authorative-sounding post about it).

> Also, what is your background in UX?

I’m studying compsci, took several classes on the topic, and have previously also participated in courses outside of university where we did UX work more practically.

> what are you talking about? I have a Samsung S4, which the sort of "4-5 inch" (translation: 10-13 cm) phone you're talking about, yes?

Scott Hurf made this helpful graphic: http://scotthurff.com/images/posts/thumb-zone-2/thumb-zones-...

> I'm asking because not only do you not point out any potential solutions, you even assume these might never be solved by anyone else either, for no good reason

I’m saying it’s very problematic to solve this, because the real estate that is reachable and therefore usable for controls on modern devices has significantly shifted to an area where it’s hard to place controls.

The unreachable zone at the top is the reason why Google has started moving all their controls to the bottom of the screen, with bottom navigation and bottom search bar – except, now you get into the bottom-right problematic zone.

Of course you can solve it – but, as I mentioned above, with current UI paradigms you’d need to waste more space. And by the time we might have solved our current UX problem, our phones will have changed already again, so the solution is irrelevant. Just like today’s top bar and left navigation started to become popular right before today’s oversized phones got popular.

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