Reconsidering the Hardware Kindle Interface

https://medium.com/@craigmod/reconsidering-the-hardware-kindle-interface-3c54088bed9e

by mhb • 8 years ago

83 69 8 years ago

thomas• 8 years ago

Great read, but how to you get to the front page with 3 votes?

chatmasta2• 8 years ago

Pretty sure the ranking algorithm includes points / time. In my experience a story that gets 3+ votes in the first 60 minutes will appear on the front page with a short half life that extends as it gets more votes.

devnonymous• 8 years ago

Doesn't that penalise long articles (assuming people would vote after reading)?

gervase• 8 years ago

I see the author's viewpoint, but I'm not sure I agree. When I touch the page of a book, I'm interacting with the book, not the text; the exception is if I'm using some kind of writing instrument (pencil, highlighter, etc).

The current model allows you to mostly interact with the Kindle as you would a book - a light touch anywhere on the visual field (i.e. the page) flips in that direction. However, you can also leverage the added functionality that the Kindle provides, which is indeed the text interaction.

However, I mainly use this for looking up unfamiliar words, rather than for highlighting. I agree that the current system is unsuitable for highly-interactive reading, such as by jotting notes in the margins, highlighting passages, circling words, and so on. On the other hand, I suspect that this type of highly-engaged reading is the exception, not the rule, and that for most of the Kindle's audience, they would no more "interact" with the text of their book than they would if it were printed.

If the primary argument is on the "surprising-ness" of the UI, that could be handled in the same way that Nook did when they first switched to a touchscreen, by overlaying regions on the screen to teach users where to tap. Then, once they were familiar with the behavior, they could turn it off. This is not ideal, as it reduces the legibility of the text, which I'm sure is why this is probably not the default.

Anyway, an engaging read nonetheless, and I'm certainly ready to be proven wrong by a new interaction model that works better. This could definitely be a case of "I want a faster horse" behavior on my part.

cmod2• 8 years ago

I think there is a subset of users who interact with text far more than others. I find I can't read without a pen in hand — if I am not marking up the text or taking marginal notes then I feel like I'm only receiving a narrow sliver of what I consider a "full" reading experience. (This is true for novels as much, if not more, as it is for non-fiction.) My suggestions were to bring to the Kindle something akin to the experience of reading paper with a pen in hand.

kemayo3• 8 years ago

Not disagreeing with the existence of this subset of the market, but I almost never see someone reading this way outside of "reading for a class" situations where note-taking is mandated. Could be a selection bias, and how often does one really see other people reading and pay attention to it, but...

So it would seem strange to optimize for the active note-taker over the presumably more prevalent passive reader.

That said, having some sort of active note-taking mode would make a lot of sense. Satisfy the niche, and let the very occasional use of it be available for the person who rarely needs to take bursts of notes.

Amazon seems to be experimenting a little with making the screen less active while reading -- they added the ability to disable the touchscreen and /only/ have the buttons on the Oasis 2[0].

[0] http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2017/12/14/heres-how-to-dis...

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

Wouldn't a tablet be a better interface for that style of reading? e-ink doesn't have the best of refresh rates.

criddell3• 8 years ago

Librarians must hate you.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

What is the iOS Kindle interaction model? The iOS Kindle model is the “hidden spaces” model. That is, all active interface elements are invisible. This “hidden spaces” model of interaction is supremely user antagonistic. [0]
There are no affordances to the taps. No edges to the active areas. Nothing to hint at what might happen. This creates what I call a “brittle” interface — where one wrong tap sends you careening in an unknown direction, without knowing why or how you got there.

When I'm using an e-book reader app, I want the entire screen to be taken up with the text of the book I am reading. I quite like having tap zones to turn the pages and access a menu when I need it. I'd rather a tap than a swipe, actually. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the quote above, I don't find this to be antagonistic in any way at all.

mhb• 8 years ago

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding

My ideal Kindle model is as follows.

Hardware buttons:

    Page forward

    Page back

    Menu

    (Power/Sleep)*

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woadwarrior01• 8 years ago

Incidentally, that’s precisely the set of hardware buttons on the Remarkable e-ink tablet.

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kbutler• 8 years ago

I think the "antagonistic" is the lack of visual "affordances" - indications of what an action will do. Like door handles that give no indication of whether to "pull" or "push".

I'd say at most that it is not "new user friendly", rather than antagonistic to all users.

I'm only an occasional Kindle user, but I rarely make a wrong action using the hardware interface, and when I do, it's an unintentional long tap, and I have to cancel an unintended highlight.

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comex• 8 years ago

In the iOS Kindle app, you can turn pages by tapping on the sides of the screen, but you can also just touch down anywhere and swipe to the left or right. It works like any other horizontal pagination on mobile, like the iOS home screen or photo gallery: as you drag, the view follows your finger, revealing the previous and next page lined up on either side; when you let go, if you scrolled more than a short distance to the left or right, the corresponding adjacent page quickly animates (slides) into full view.

Oddly, swiping is considerably faster than tapping. When you tap, there’s a brief delay before the screen starts scrolling – which is artificial, not just lag, because a quick swipe gesture (just brushing your finger against the screen) starts the same scrolling animation with no delay. Thus I’ve effectively been trained to always swipe.

As strange as this is, at least I wouldn’t call it antagonistic to new users, since the most efficient page-turning interaction is also the most intuitive one: most users will already be familiar with the swipe gesture from the rest of the OS, and will try to do it even without a visual affordance. (It’s also physically intuitive, even if the physical object being simulated is very different from an actual book.)

Of course, you can’t do fluid scrolling animations on an eInk display, so eInk Kindles lack the swipe gesture, leaving only the relatively-dubious tap regions criticized in the article. I agree that hardware buttons would be better there.

On the other hand, on iOS, Kindle is my favorite reading app for the sole reason that none of the others I’ve tried offer equivalent swiping functionality. Either they only offer a “page curl” transition style (iBooks), which looks cool but is more visually distracting, or they support swipe-to-slide but only as an atomic gesture: you do a complete swipe, and then the screen scrolls, without it letting you actually drag the page around first. (That just feels unnatural.)

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isoprophlex• 8 years ago

I love my older gen kindle, with flip backwards/forwards buttons and a menu/4-axis selector. But, one of the backwards buttons is intermittently failing, and sometimes the menu button hangs.

Maybe these touch-only interfaces are chosen to reduce the number of failure points?

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gtsteve• 8 years ago

They nailed it with the slate keyboard edition.

I'm not sure I agree. The keyboard is secondary to the reading experience, you only need it when you're searching on the online store or making notes.

I've owned a Kindle 2, a Keyboard and an Oasis (first generation) and I feel the Oasis is the best out of all of them - it's so much more portable.

Since then it feels like a cascade of misguided optimizations — thinner (and yet wider; the Oasis fits into almost no pocket, can’t really be held easily in one hand), fake buttons (the weird non-buttons of the old Voyage), beautiful leather cases with too-weak magnets that don’t stay attached, etcetera.

Being a long-term Oasis user, I totally disagree with this part, unless the Oasis has changed drastically in its second generation. This has not been my experience with the Oasis at all.

This feels a bit like the posts that show up after a Facebook redesign to be honest.

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peteri• 8 years ago

I have a second gen Oasis which has a bigger screen (7" vs 6") but still with two page turn buttons. I like it but then in my case it's replacing a 2nd gen Kindle with keyboard and no touch screen.

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mantas3• 8 years ago

How does screen work with the hardware buttons? Any chance to lock screen from accidental interaction and use buttons exclusively?

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jwr• 8 years ago

I still miss the hardware page turn buttons that were present on the Kindle 4. I got the Voyage, which has the kinda-buttonish thingies with vibration feedback, and these are nowhere as nice and reliable as physical buttons were.

Sadly, it seems I am the minority. Most people prefer no buttons (but ooh look how beautiful the device is as I take it out of the box the first time). Even worse, most people seem to prefer tedious manual scrolling over page turns (slide the text up with your finger, carefully watching as not to scroll too far, and then try to find your place in the text again).

I think these fads will pass, though, and we will eventually regain our collective sanity.

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KevanM• 8 years ago

I agree, the hardware buttons were perfect and then touch screen ruined the whole experience for me. They recognised this as a luxury people would pay for by reintroducing them to the awful looking Oasis.

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majormajor2• 8 years ago

"Awful looking" is a curious complaint about the Oasis because the unbalanced look actually makes it a wonderful in-hand experience, IMO. It's my favorite Kindle to read on in bed - whether lying on my side or on my back - ever because of that nice big side with those nice buttons.

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mantas3• 8 years ago

Totally with you there. I’d buy Kindle with proper hardware button and ability to lock screen from extra interaction in no time.

I do hope this fad is coming to the end. Point in case - Garmin cycling computers are back to buttons.

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kemayo3• 8 years ago

You can totally get that now. Oasis 2 lets you disable the touchscreen: http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2017/12/14/heres-how-to-dis...

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Singletoned• 8 years ago

I fully agree. I still have my Kindle with hardware buttons and look after it very carefully because I'm praying I don't have to switch at somepoint.

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megaman22• 8 years ago

The best thing about the first Kindle I had - second generation, maybe? - was that it had the physical forward and back paddle buttons on both sides in just the right place for it to be comfortable to hit with your thumb.

Touch screen just sucks for an e-reader, the way all of the ones I've ever used since function, because you can only read right-handed with it, if you want to use just one hand. You're have to either tap on the right side of the screen to advance the pages, or worse, have to try doing a swiping motion that all too often gets misinterpreted as a tap.

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Super_Jambo• 8 years ago

I and several friends are buying old kindle 4s so we don't have to deal with the modern ones (which largely seem designed to be little tablets allowing Amazon to advertise more at you).

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fenwick67• 8 years ago

Nah. The primary functions for reading a book are turning a page. A kindle isn't a web browser or a tablet, it's meant to be a book. This is why the primary interactions are turning the page. This is what you do 99% of the time.

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ruddct2• 8 years ago

Totally understand where the author is coming from, but the notion that text should be a 'first class' object to interact with does not match the reality of how people interact with long form text. Very few people interact with the text on a page, and 100% of people reading a book very frequently scroll/paginate [0]. People are used to swiping on content to see more of it, I don't know that it's as confusing as you might think.

Likewise, it also wouldn't make any sense to have a single tap within a mobile browser bring up the dictionary definition of the word you tapped on. Does it save time? Sure, for one power user use case. But it pollutes your otherwise simple navigation paradigm with stuff popping up all over the place promoting text interaction. People hate stuff popping up all over the place unnecessarily. Better to build your navigation paradigm out of the way that 100% of people interact with the content; it's OK to have a few things buried one layer deeper, power users will find them anyways.

[0] I worked on these products at Amazon.

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cmod2• 8 years ago

Author here. Thanks for your response. (I've had a few ex-Kindle folks reach out with either precisely similar or precisely opposite sentiments; I guess it's a big team.)

I originally had a huge footnote acknowledging that much of this is obvious and that the Kindle team is full of smart people who have data showing that maybe these aren't the best optimizations. I'm just describing my expectations from having used Kindles for ten (??!) years coupled with having worked on designing digital reading interfaces for a similar amount of time. I'm certainly an edge case user.

Having seen my mother (edit: and, more pertinently: myself) struggle with her Kindle, I do think the interaction model is one-degree unnecessarily complex — all of those hidden spaces.

You could distill my whole piece to: This is a single purpose device that's been designed like a multi-purpose device.

Page turn buttons + menu button would all but eliminate any interaction ambiguity. And could be done quite beautifully.

Although I don't have access to any data, I think there might be a subset of casual users who would prefer the screen to do nothing when touched.

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ruddct2• 8 years ago

You could distill my whole piece to: This is a single purpose device that's been designed like a multi-purpose device. That just feels a little sideways.

Then we're in agreement! There are a TON of features/complexity in Kindle; combine that with e-ink being a clumsy display technology to combine with a touch screen and we find ourselves in the situation that we're in.

(Note that I totally understand why e-ink was combined with a touchscreen for Kindle. Give someone a screen these days and they'll try and touch it, for better or worse)

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mantas3• 8 years ago

Although I don't have access to any data, I think there might be a subset of casual users who would prefer the screen to do nothing when touched.

+1!

I loved my original non-touch Kindle. Newer paperwhite is nice, but touch screen is a disadvantage for me. I rarely interact with it and older Kindle with buttons was perfectly fine for those tasks. Yet it sucks when pages are scrolled or next is selected if I accidentally touch/hold screen in a wrong way.

I’m seriously considering spending extra $$$ to getter expensive version purely to get away from touch screen. But I’m worried that it wouldn’t allow me to lock the screen while reading with hardware button :(

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0xffff23• 8 years ago

Having seen my mother (edit: and, more pertinently: myself) struggle with her Kindle, I do think the interaction model is one-degree unnecessarily complex

How often do you struggle with the interface once you've learned it? I agree that the current Kindle interface isn't the most intuitive, but to me that's a non-issue. I've long since learned how to interact with the Kindle, and now that that initial learning is complete, the interface does an excellent job allowing me to do what I want.

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thaumasiotes• 8 years ago

This is a single purpose device that's been designed like a multi-purpose device.

Yes, the modern Kindle really suffers for this. I originally had a Kindle 3. It did everything I wanted except for the horrible, glaring oversight that the keyboard didn't have numbers, when better than 90% of my interactions with that keyboard were jumps to a numeric location.

I now have a Kindle Oasis, and in most respects other than that one the UI is a big step back. I can no longer remove dust from the screen by touching it. (Actually, I still do this, but it wastes a bunch of my time by unavoidably performing one to four page turns when I do.) Attempts to call up the menu frequently turn the page instead. Jumping to a location is now a ridiculously long workflow involving summoning the menu, selecting "go to", and then selecting "page or location", because the table of contents has been stuffed into the "go to" menu instead of being part of the book.

Normal functions should be easier to reach than rare functions, but not so easy that they happen constantly regardless of whether the user wanted them. The Oasis somehow manages to fail at both of those points.

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tmd83• 8 years ago

The bigger problem to me is not even the note taking but that the touch screen for page turning is such a worse experience that I can't understand any reason for it beyond fad. A page turning button in the right place (on both side) means I can hold it in a nice grip throughout my reading and just press. Now I have to move the hand off the grip to the screen, press quickly cause I don't want to force a text action and move it back. It also means I can't really hold the kindle in a nice grip. For me turning a paper book was a more seamless experience than turning kindle. Now in terms of weight and holding a number of book and light kindle is of course a much better experience.

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paulcole• 8 years ago

This reminds me of like 10 years ago when you couldn't go online for 5 minutes without seeing another design student offering up an unsolicited redesign of an airline's boarding passes.

Kind of an interesting exercise but overlooks the important fact that one person can't change an incredibly complicated system they're not remotely familiar with.

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CPLX• 8 years ago

But what if the whole reason I enjoy a Kindle is because I am exhausted by interactive media?

I just want to read a book, except not have it be so heavy, have a built in bookstore, and not need a reading lamp.

The Kindle accomplishes all that quite admirably. More ability to interact with the text or graphical elements would make the experience significantly worse.

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icebraining2• 8 years ago

It's not more, though; the ability is already there. It's just a change in how you invoke it.

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kemayo3• 8 years ago

I think it might be fair to say that making touch actions default to definitions/note-taking/etc would make those features more prominent, which might make people like the OP feel them intruding on their desired passive reading experience more.

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billfruit• 8 years ago

I think perhaps the new Voyage has it, but other models don't, but something that should improve the reading experience: the functionality of reverse video, white text on black background.

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chatmasta2• 8 years ago

I read my Kindle every night. I like to read lying on my side, and preferably without holding the kindle at all. Usually I prop it up on an extra pillow in front of my face or something.

The problem is this makes page turning hard. I would love a small bluetooth page turning device that I can hold in my hand and press to turn the page. Anyone seen something like this or maybe even reverse engineered the kindle to make it possible?

EDIT: Looks like someone managed to do it with a jailbroken kindle and a presentation remote! http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2016/09/30/remote-control-h...

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lykahb• 8 years ago

I agree with the authors argument. The physical buttons is why I still haven't upgraded my Kindle 4. But one interface is unlikely to be the best fit for everybody.

Older gadgets and programs exposed more settings - either through UI and access to the system files. Many cheap phones even had themes - something now impossible without root on the Android phones. The power users could improve productivity or appearance. It often came at the cost of less polished design for some settings and higher UI complexity.

My ideal next Kindle would come with hardware buttons and touch screen controls that have good defaults for the average user and can be configured.

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neilobremski• 8 years ago

I send tech books and articles to my Kindle for later reading but these often include HYPERLINKS that are easily / accidentally tapped when trying to turn the page. For that reason alone I miss the hardware buttons on the side. Were they that expensive to add?

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reaperducer• 8 years ago

Makes a lot of sense to me.

It's like being in a car: Your primary focus should be on the road, and the controls tactile enough to be used without changing that focus. Touch screens don't make sense in this context (coughTeslacough).

Ditto, Kindle. Reading should be the primary focus. And after a while you develop the muscle memory twitch for turning the page. Moving your entire arm and hand to swipe pulls you out of the moment, and you're focused on the device and not the content.

It is for this reason that I get all of my Nooks and Kindles at Goodwill. Fortunately, they are plentiful. With the added bonus of being able to read a dead guy's library.

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stcredzero• 8 years ago

"There are no affordances to the taps. No edges to the active areas. Nothing to hint at what might happen. This creates what I call a “brittle” interface — where one wrong tap sends you careening in an unknown direction, without knowing why or how you got there."

Is it just me, or have smartphone interfaces gotten both more and less brittle over the years? I've noticed that very mature apps tend to be very non-brittle, and new apps (or revamps of mature apps) made by newer developers tend to be very brittle.

For some reason, I've noticed this conditional brittleness particularly with maps apps. Fancy "3D" features in maps apps exhibit this, as well as badly timed alternative route features, which present a button, then yank it away bullfighter style.

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ggg99902• 8 years ago

Holy Christ I do not want to “engage with a book’s content” any further than reading the words on the page. My Kindle already has too many garbage features (dictionary? I have one in my phone). All I want is a physical home button, a physical page turn button, and a quality display. My Kindle is a substitute for a bookshelf, not an iPhone.

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majormajor2• 8 years ago

Agreed that "incentivize engaging with a book’s content" reads like bizarro world marketing speak from someone who hasn't read anything longer than a tweet. Which doesn't seem to be the case from the article itself, but holy hell it's buzzword-speak at its worst.

But I completely disagree about the dictionary - that's exactly the right level of functionality I want my reader to have - yet also disagree with the author about the touchscreen functionality. I've had a Keyboard, a Paperwhite, and an Oasis, and my only UX complaint is "add the physical page turn buttons to the Paperwhite too."

I like the two layers of tapping.

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ggg99902• 8 years ago

I’ve invoked the dictionary accidentally 10x as often as intentionally. Probably a combination of having a decent vocabulary and reading material that is not that challenging.

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pcmoney• 8 years ago

Honestly if it just had a real off switch I would forgive just about anything else.

The number of times my kindle has died because it was displaying an ad forever because it takes 4seconds to turn off... pretty much makes the long battery life feature useless.

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glifchits• 8 years ago

I wouldn't have checked this out if I knew it would burn a Medium article access for me.

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Reconsidering the Hardware Kindle Interface

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