How to Build an SMS Service
ISBN: 789742233
EAN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 52
Pages: 52
SMS Interaction Design Considerations > Limited Character Set
While it's tough to forget that phones don't have a full keyboard, it's still easy to overlook some of the implications of that fact. It's not just that text input is hard, it means that some characters are simply impossible to enter.
?, @, ., and ! are usually easily accessible on phones
#, $, %, and : may require a special symbols menu, at which point you may lose some of your less dedicated users.
Even with the "safe" characters, some may be easier to access then others. Count the number of taps it takes on your phone to access a special character and ask yourself whether it's OK to force users to go through that every time they want to access the functionality it unlocks.
NOTE
According to Wikipedia:
In Mandarin Chinese, numbers that sound similar to words are used in place of those words. For example, the numbers 520 in Chinese (wu er ling) sound like the words for "I love you" (wo ai ni). The sequence 748 (qi si ba) sounds like the curse for "drop dead."
Was that useful 4 U?