Rule #1 was Design with Consistency.
Rule #2 is Enable Keyboard Shortcuts.
The great majority of Windows Mobile devices have hardware buttons and keyboards/keypads. Beginning with Windows Mobile 5, the operating system was designed to take advantage of hardware buttons for increased user interaction efficiency and usability.
Windows Mobile has two hardware keys that are assigned to the left and right bottom bar menus/functions also known as soft keys. This makes it very easy to open those menus using the hardware buttons that you can feel with your fingers. You instantly know what pressing those hardware buttons will do.
Subsequently, if you have a Qwerty keyboard, you will see that each menu item has one of the letters underlined. Pressing the corresponding letter on the keyboard instantly activates that command without you having to scroll using the D-pad or touch the screen. This is an excellent feature for efficiency.
Third party developers usually adhere to this design convention on Windows Mobile Standard because they have to. There’s no touch screen to use as a secondary interface.
The problem is on Windows Mobile Professional which supports both the hardware key interface and a touch-screen interface. Many developers only design their programs to cater to the touch screen interface even though practically all Windows Mobile Pro devices include hardware navigation buttonsÂ… and the hardware button interaction method is proven far more efficient.
This has a number of negative effects:
- The users who have learned the efficient keyboard shortcuts must now switch to the less efficient touch-screen interaction method in order to use your program.
- The consistency of the Windows Mobile experience has been interrupted and the user’s mental model has been broken.
Many 3rd party developers take this one step further by removing functionality of the Windows Mobile Pro start menu and OK button hardware keys as well as the touch-screen equivalents. This causes further frustration since the primary method of interacting with and navigating Windows Mobile as an operating system has been removed. It’s like getting in your car, putting a CD in the CD player, and then seeing the steering wheel disappear!
If you see any developers breaking this rule, be sure to report the poor design decision in their feedback forms and explain the reasoning or provide them with a link to this post.
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