Taptu iPhone App: Flick Interface
In using the Taptu Search App on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ve seen that we have done away with traditional search engine results and given then a new visual representation that utilizes the beautiful touch interface that is native to the iPhone. We’ve done away with result lists and replaced them with visual ‘cards’.
We think it’s a pretty novel way to surf through search results. Each result is presented in a card format. You can flick horizontally through the cards, in order of relevancy.
This interface is brand new and is something we at Taptu have been working hard on. In fact, it’s a key differentiator between our search results and other options available on the mobile web. Granted, flicking through search results may not be a way to research your college thesis, but flicking is a fun and functional way of navigating search results on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
As always, we’re looking for ways to improve our apps and core search service. If you have feedback, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below, via Twitter.
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September 8th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Hi Marc,
One thing I find my self constantly doing is just tapping the image thumbnail (above the pink arrow) to navigate to the actual site – It’s a much larger and more intuitive tap zone.
Why not do away with the pink button altogether?
This would then make it consistent with the way you can use the taptu app to navigate images.
Andrew
September 8th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the suggestion.
Unfortunately, due to sensitivity of the iPhone’s ‘touch’ event, it’s not possible for the software to reliably differentiate between a horizontal ‘flick’ event and a ‘tap’ event. We’ve observed many users attempt to flick cards, but those flicks were mistakenly interpreted as taps by the iPhone itself. This resulted in the user being taken to the source site rather than to the next card – very frustrating.
So, to reduce error-rate, we decided to size-down the action hotspot to a pink ‘go to source’ button.
Hope that helps.
September 9th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Hi Marc,
Almost ALL of Apples applications on the iPhone are built on the standard combined tap / swipe paradigm. If the taptu app isnt reliably differentiating between a flick and tap event, then there is something wrong.
One example in point is the multi function launch / drag / move / edit of the iPhone home screen. This screen reliably detects the following actions.
1. Launching an application – the application is only launched when you lift your finger from the screen.
2. Swiping to a different page – if you select an application but swipe, the whole page swipes to the next page.
3. Deleting or Moving an application – if you select an application but dont release or dont swipe, the home screen goes into edit mode.
Being the iphone home screen, it sets the bar of expectation for ALL iPhone / iPod touch apps, and I liken the usability of this screen to the taptu iphone application.
My point is that you comfortably comply to this usability on both the taptu home screen where you swipe or touch the suggested categories and on the image search where you swipe or select an image to view. However, you picked a different paradigm on the results page where you have a pink button to view the page.
This is why I was tapping the thumbnail and getting frustrated as it didnt load the page as expected.
Andrew
October 16th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Hi Marc, Andrew is right, there really shouldn’t be any difficulty in detecting tab vs swipe. It’s a standard thing in iPhone and being used all over the place.
Another thing is that I don’t find showing card more superior than showing list. With cards, I don’t know what is next, with list I get to see more at a glance. Visually it may look better, but functionally, it’s less superior.