User Experience Thinking: The Left and the Right

I use my mouse in my right-hand – I write with my left hand. No I don’t know why, perhaps just because I’m awkward .

As I wrote the other day I am experimenting with some working habit changes. These involve me doing far more reading on my tablet and getting to grips with a pen based interface.

It’s only a simple thing, but my ambidextrous working this has lead me to a couple of user experience issues.

When reading, which is clearly what I do a lot of I often need to scroll down, no surprises there. When I am using a mouse I use the scroll bar on the side of the screen or the wheel. The scroll bar is on the right, my mouse is on the right, no problems their then. When I’m using my tablet (in tablet mode) I have all sorts of choices and these are leading to some confusion on my part.

• If I use the pen and the scroll-down bar I cover the screen with my hand so I can’t free-scroll to get to where I want to get to. Not being able to see the screen makes free-scroll it a bit pointless as a feature. I have found myself doing a kind of contortion so I can do both but it doesn’t look very professional and certainly not cool .
• If I use the jog-wheel with my right-hand I often find myself scrolling the wrong thing because I haven’t clicked on the thing I want to scroll first. This is something I find myself doing naturally with a mouse, but not yet with a pen and the jog-wheel .
• If I use flicks I can’t free-scroll and flicks are a bit cumbersome anyway .

It’s a shame I like free-scroll so much.

I have a similar problem when I’m using hand writing for input. The words that are being interpreted from my spidery scrawl are shown on the bottom left of the window where my hand is. This means that I can’t do any kind of live check on the writing without lifting my hand off and out of the way.

I’m a bit bipolar on how this could be resolved though. Part of me would like the scroll bars (and other things) to be down the left of the screen so I can use my pen effectively, but I still use my mouse and it makes sense that they are on the right in that context. I’m not sure my brain could cope with having both . Like any western left-handed person I have dealt with the issue of things going from left-to-right all my life so this is nothing new it’s just a new take on an old issue.

The handwriting recognition in Vista is astonishing though. Like many left-handed people handwriting has always been a bit of a problem but Vista does a wonderful job of recognising it.

Tags: Tablet, Vista