As a left handed user... I fucking despise the idea of thumb-reach heatmaps geared solely towards right handed use.
As a side note, we make up ~10 percent of all users. If you design to the thumb reach of right handed users by default, you're fucking over a lot of people.
Add on that ~19 percent of the population has some form of disability, and a solid chunk of that involves hand/limb usages, making the head-up-ass assumption that a right handed thumb map is the "ideal" approach is... well you've shoved your head up your ass.
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edit: I want to add, I'm not attacking you so much as the general premise of the article. I come off as fairly hostile on this since it's such a common day to day inconvenience for a broad swath of the population.
Aside: I discovered touching a navbar button often doesn't work for a left hander, whereas it does work for a right handed person.
This left vs right handed UX flaw occurred with the navbar button at top left on an iPhone (e.g. back or hamburger).
A left finger comes in at an angle that makes the capacitive touchscreen register the touch as occurring at the extreme left edge of the screen. A right index finger registers the touch more correctly within the navbar button. Some navbar buttons don't extend the touch hit area to the edge, so a left finger fails to click it, whereas a right finger works...
>As a left handed user... I fucking despise the idea of thumb-reach heatmaps geared solely towards right handed use.
Hold your horses!
Just use the left side of the keyboard as a toggle button...
when you click it once... the keyboard switches over to a left handed position and stays there until someone else switches it back to the right handed position!
As a right-handed user, I encounter trouble frequently when I grab my phone with my left hand, and find touches no longer register reliably. It seems right-focused is a reasonable default for a vast majority of the population, but there needs to be a way to alter to a left-focused scheme via settings or something. It is maddeningly frustrating when I occasionally realize, “Oh, fuck. It’s doing that stupid ignore-my-left-hand thing.” Were that happening constantly, because I’m left-handed, I’d be feeling pretty damn salty.
Wait.. which hand do you use? I'm right-handed but I use the phone with my left. (and it goes in my left pocket, because my car and house keys are in the right, per other comments).
But still, the thumbs are probably the least "handed" element of the body. I mix right and left thumb use based on whatever I need to be doing with my other hand.
An interesting thought, but there's some other factors at play. Navigating through views typically proceeds from left to right, which is why the back button is on the left side. I suppose you could change the direction of the animations, too. That seems unnatural in the context of a left-to-right language though.
Also left handed. I feel your hostility 100%. So many apps are subtly designed for right-handed people that I simply have grown accustomed to fumbling around with my right hand when using my phone.
Don't even get me started on various other items designed for right-handed people. Like this popcorn scooper I found at a nearby convenience store: http://a.co/jjanj7H I've even run in to butter spreading knives that are impossible to use left-handed.
Being left-handed is already a UX nightmare. Please don't make it worse.
Hi, I totally agree, the thumb reach map does show it as a right hand usage diagram, but the flipped view holds true for left handed users too. Also inn my proposed alternatives, I should have mentioned that the should have preference for left handed users to flip the diagram.
Right / left, or rtl/ltr is not flipping 180 or mirroring.
You want eventually the navbar mirrored, but you surely don’t want to read 321, 654, 987 on your number pad. Being lefty doesn’t make your brain read rtl.
Which no developer will actually implement. During the reign of touch scrollbars, before Apple obsoleted them, it was extremely rare to have an option to place them on the left side to avoid hand occlusion.
As a side note, we make up ~10 percent of all users. If you design to the thumb reach of right handed users by default, you're fucking over a lot of people.
Add on that ~19 percent of the population has some form of disability, and a solid chunk of that involves hand/limb usages, making the head-up-ass assumption that a right handed thumb map is the "ideal" approach is... well you've shoved your head up your ass.
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edit: I want to add, I'm not attacking you so much as the general premise of the article. I come off as fairly hostile on this since it's such a common day to day inconvenience for a broad swath of the population.