Looking Forward--May 1999

Looking Forward—May 1999

For some time spirits on the team were down. The one-row concept had been around for almost a year, and team members who devoted their passion to it, making new versions and prototypes, running user tests, and trying to improve it, finally had to let it go.

However, the question uppermost in team members’ minds changed quite quickly from “What went wrong?” to “What’s next?” All in all, it had been an excellent learning experience. In fact, asking what went wrong did not feel quite right, since many things had gone exactly the way they should. For instance, the team didn’t just trust its own—false—intuitions blindly, but involved users in the design process early on. On the basis of user tests, the initial idea could be taken several steps further. It was only on completing the second usability test that we knew that we had hit a wall and ended the effort. We received invaluable feedback in the user tests. Observing and interviewing subjects gave us completely new and fresh insights. The lessons we learned with the one-row keyboard also helped us analyze other existing text input methods.

Mobile text input still remains a big challenge. All current input methods have serious limitations in the mobile context. The one-row experience helped us to see those limitations and come up with new solutions.