[scottjenson]

Deleting an 'x' was MEANT to be hard (and not typical) the whole point was to see how easy it was to target.

As to your "it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience" You are exactly the type of person that I'm trying to get through to! As I said in the post, for most social media tasks, text editing isn't a problem. However, if you believe that mobile will replace desktop, then you've got a problem as sophisticated text composition is quite hard on mobile.

[dan-robertson]

There is this website, nngroup.com that used to be a popular reference on UX matters. They wrote lots of articles about how they tested using computers by mouse instead of keyboard and that mousing was loads better and had wide-ranging conclusions about UX from this. But the studies turned out to have actually been things like ‘replace all letter ‘e’s in this sentence with ‘|’ symbols’ and using the keyboard meant arrow keys and backspace rather than using a find-and-replace function. So sure, mice are better than cursor keys at selecting lots of letter ‘e’s and editing them, but one would hope that such a description is not representative of actual computer use and so not a good foundation on which to base general UX conclusions.

It is in this sense that I worry about the test scenario described being unrealistic. If one is measuring (and so implicitly optimising for) things that don’t matter, one is potentially rejecting solutions that would improve things that do matter without helping things that don’t.

More realistic scenarios could be:

- successfully format 10 lines or so of haskell into a hacker news comment. Obviously this is not relevant to most people but I give it as a more realistic scenario where typical mobile text-input mechanisms struggle.

- edit a misspelled name in an email of a few paragraphs.

- reorder two paragraphs in an email then edit for clarity.

- add full stops to a bulleted list (struggling with this right now).

I am sad that text editing on mobile is hard. But it does seem that efforts to make it better were not appreciated. My reading of the 3d-touch thing and other comments on this article is that the problem was appreciated by Apple but people didn’t particularly care[1] when Apple then dropped 3d-touch, for which improved text editing was its ‘killer app’.

[1] I have seen people complain about the loss of this online but I think the complaint is quite niche.