The puzzle of the fat pear--Where does the user "return"?

This article is concerned that the design of the same product on different platforms, should be a unified design, or for different platform characteristics of differential processing? Colleagues have talked about whether the iphone and Android interactive logic can be ported to each other. What we want to say today is palm.
What is palm?

When it comes to palm, some people may not be familiar with it. Palm has the following layers of meaning:

--palm OS operating system. An operating system for PDAs that is not designed specifically for mobile phones, but its support for mobile devices makes it rage in the Mobile world. But with the rise of http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/11210.html ">nokia S60, BlackBerry and other smartphones, Palm OS has gone downhill."
--palm Web OS operating system. As a new generation of web operating system, has many advantages.
--palm Computing Company. The former was bought by Hewlett-Packard, which everyone says is running on the Web OS.
--palm phone. This refers specifically to palm handsets containing web OS systems, including the Palm Pre, Palm Pre Plus, and Pixi models. Most of these phones look like fat pears, and we all affectionately call them "fat pears".
The scope of this paper is the design of fat Pear mobile phone software based on Palm Web OS.

"Gesture Area"

The Palm phone has a special place-it has no physical buttons and replaces it with a "gesture area." Therefore, when users start to use the mobile phone, need to master a number of "gestures" to smooth operation of the mobile phone. For example, when you return to the previous interface, you need to make a "return" gesture in the gesture area.

So the tangle begins: Should you also design a "back" button for palm applications?

One idea is "to". Before the iphone, Android, and other applications on the phone have a "back" button, we can have ah, users do not have to work hard to think: Ah, how to return to the operation? What was that gesture? Row to the right? or left? ”

The reason for "No" is: first of all, should follow the original code of the mobile phone system; Second, the user does not master the gesture is unable to operate the mobile phone, therefore, you can assume that "gesture" although the alternative, but users can be proficient; Finally, if the return button and gesture repeat, the user needs to first judge " Should I use a gesture or a button? "To increase the cost of judgment.

Neither side can convince each other.

What do users think?

To end this debate and find out whether the design on our Palm application requires a "back" button, two questions need to be clarified:

1. What is the operation behavior and attitude of palm users ' gesture area?
2. In the case of both, how will the user choose?

To that end, we surveyed a large number of users, with a summary of the following conclusions:

1. Overall, the Palm user has more than 90% users who accept the gesture area operation. Can quickly get used to the "return gesture" operation, that "return gesture" operation is very convenient for users of the same super 90%.
2. At the behavioral level, asked, "When you need to return to the previous interface of the software, how do you prefer to operate?" When using return gestures: Find the "back" button for the software = 8:2.
3. On the attitude, asked "What is your attitude towards the gesture area when compared to the operation buttons on the software?" "When the" more like gesture area operation "users accounted for 76%, more like the software button operation of the user accounted for 6%, the middle attitude of 18%.

Discussion

At this time, some people may have questions: when we provide the software "back" button, the user is accustomed to operating physical keys will not be happy, and the habit of using the software button to improve the user satisfaction, or they actually do not care? And for the "Back" button software, and if the button is removed, our users will be at a loss, or the correct change to use the physical button?

In addition, this data does not explain whether the user exists "despite the use of physical buttons, but do not want to use the physical button in mind," the case.
Therefore, our research is continuing ...

Back to the issues we debated earlier, we finally got a verdict on the return button. Small sell a person, want to know the answer, please look forward to our upcoming new products on Palm: P
(This article originates from Tencent CDC Blog, please indicate the source when reprint)