This post is part of a series on mobile user interface design patterns, excerpted from Designing the Mobile User Experience
, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. This third set of patterns will address application navigation design for mobile applications.
Sometimes an alphabetic list of results is quite long, and the design listed above will not work.
Design
Provide a text entry box allowing the user to type a few letters in the item's name. Return all items starting with the typed letters, followed by all items with that string within the name. If possible, return list results while the user is typing.
Applicable Devices and Platforms
All devices and platforms.
When Used
Use when two hundred or more items in the list, or when a list has entries clustered on a few letters. For example, there are hundreds of cities in California, a very large portion of which start with "San", like San Jose, Santa Clara, San Ramon, and so forth. Even the list of US states has 19 entries starting with M, N, and O, which are the letters on the 6 button, while Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana are the only states on the 5 button. In these cases, consider direct text input.
Rationale
Long lists require many button presses, many fetches, and are generally tedious. In contrast, entering three or four letters to search within the list is at worst twelve keypresses and likely only five or six. States in particular can be accessed with their postal two-letter abbreviation. This is likely faster than displaying a list of items starting with a letter.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Design, Java ME, Mobile applications, Mobile web, UI Design Patterns.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.