[UX] Case study - How to decrease human error in haptic interface and page scroll

There are lots of human errors in the haptic interface since it had been launched. Especially that is not easy to define the similar touch actions like scroll, upscale, or downscale. I found out some cases that the component in the screen is easily touched when the scroll event occurred. This problem must not come from the hardware, and that might be mostly the problem that is not designed for the exception of this kind of events.

At this article, I am going to introduce a case to overcome human errors when we design haptic interface on mobile. Nowadays using smart phone is very common to people.

By the way, why do we call it a smart phone compared to the previous one? If that is more complicated than a previous one, but the interface to control the device is much easier than before for sure. We don't have to learn how to control all the phones. Especially, we just need our fingers though, so elderly people or children also can use that easily without any learning.

However, it might be still difficult for some people to learn that, by the way. In every era, technical advance can't cover all ranges of people, but human have developed even in this case.

Anyway, I'd like to ask you about your experience that you had used your smart phone. Have you ever suffered from out of the control when you touch the screen on your phone? I am sure that you have had that bad experience. Surely, that made you so irritated at going back to the previous page.

If you had been surfing the internet with a full browsing, it would have made you more annoyed because you should waiting for a long time to load the previous page.

When we especially navigate some list page, it is much easier to make this mistake. You might just have tried to scroll the page, but next what happened to you? That's right! The item was touched by your finger, and the page might be also changed at that time.

I also have had this experience a lot, and I used to think about how to solve this problem. While I was surfing the Internet, I found this gorgeous solution to protect this human error.

There is a case to explain the solution. You can see a mobile web site below, and you can recognize the red line that means your real screen size. At that time, you want to go down the list, so you touch the screen first. After then you flick your finger up from the touched point. (You know normally flicking way and moving way are designed reversely.)

wireframe example of touch screen and scroll event handling badly

However, this design sometimes make more mistakes to move the page because an user doesn't concentrate on touching the screen so much. As you know, if a haptic interface had been so hard to control, it would never be as popular as now. I meant this interface gave us more conveniences to use our cell phone.

We call it a kind of human error, and how can we protect this error before people make this? Here is a solution that you are looking for. I don't have any relationship with this site, and this is just a kind of popular community sites for people who are interested in IT device. They usually try to maintain their site better and better though.

wireframe example of touch screen and scroll event handling in advanced

In order to screen the error, they put in a focus when we just do scrolling the page. That mean if there are touching and scrolling at the same time, they don't recognize the touching as a clicking the item. Therefore, we can get out of an error that is clicking the item unintentionally.When I see this interface, it was so simple and nice to overcome the usability problem in haptic interface on mobile. How had we made this kind of errors when we use our phone?, and I never expected that a big company would give this solution because frequently, and they just ignore this kind of inconvenience, but they try to take an advantage to users for their profit.

I hope that you can be a good person who lets people have better experience in their lives at least. What are you doing in your position? We can make much easier to live and give better experience to people. I think that's our mission, and that' why we exist as an UX expert.