Mobile Touchscreen Cut and Paste Comparison
Last week, after accidentally triggering cut and paste on my iPhone for what seemed like the 10,000th time, I griped on Twitter, asking who even uses that feature. As it turns out, a lot of people do, and I was challenged to come up with a better solution.
Yesterday, I sat down all hot to fix this problem, then sketched and tested and paper prototyped. And…the result was I wasn’t able to come up with anything as good as what Apple has come up with. In case you’re curious, I tried circling or rubbing the phrase; dragging and dropping brackets around the phrase; two-finger multitouch (on either end of the phrase); and (possibly the best) double-tapping both ends of the phrase. There were a few reasons these solutions didn’t work: screen size was too small for the gesture; it didn’t work for long texts; it didn’t address select all; it didn’t work for paste; or it just felt clunky. Like any good design solution for something that exists, the result has to be better than what’s already there, and I didn’t feel like any of my solutions did that. So here’s Apple’s solution:
The Apple Solution
A tap on text brings up a small menu. From there you can select, select all, or paste. Selecting brings up a highlighter with handles on the ends to move. Paste involves another tap elsewhere that brings up the same menu.
The Android Solution
Android engaged cut and paste using a long press, which brings up a large pop-up. Another long press will let you paste. But this is only for cut/copy all. If you want specific words, you have to hold the shift key to select words. Not horrible, but not great either.
The Palm Solution
To select text, you have to hold down the shift key and drag your finger over the text you want. Then to copy the text you’ve selected, you tap and hold on the gesture area (a pad on the device) and then hit the C key. To paste, you hold down on the gesture area and hit the V key. Umm, wow. Really clunky.
The RIM Solution
For Blackberry Storm 2, you put one finger at the beginning and another at the end of the text you want to copy. By sliding your two fingers together, the text is highlighted. Then you use the bottom menu for copying and pasting. (Demo is at ~1:50)
The Microsoft Solution
Unknown. As of right now, no one has seen cut and paste for Windows 7 Series phones, although Microsoft is “adamant” it will be released, after there was an uproar about it not being included. I’m curious as to what they will come up with.
This does at least show that for many interaction design problems, there is more than one way to solve it. Although clearly, some solutions are better than others.
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2 Comments
Maybe my perspective is tainted by initial exposure to the iPhone, but from my couple weeks of experience with the Android I find their approach nearly untenable. I rarely use cut/paste for single words or email addresses, since most apps already do a good job of helping to quickly input those. The important use case for me is when I need to either cut or copy a big chunk of text from a message or doc. Android doesn’t allow for that (right now, anway).
Another plus for Apple’s approach is that it seems ready to scale to the iPad.
I guess the best approach depends on whether your “touch” GUI is trying to concentrate on a single-finger or multi-finger approach.
If you’re already committed to a “multi-finger” GUI (eg “pinch/stretch”), then you could press and hold with one finger, and then repeatedly tap to the left or right with another to select additional characters or words. Tapping above or below the held finger would then select additional lines of paragraphs. The “held” finger enters edit mode and sets the start position, and the second finger nudges the selection range in the appropriate direction (equivalent to holding down shift and prodding the arrow keys on a standard keyboard when you’re in text edit mode).
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