xt1.org

Ruter# has upgraded the ticket kiosks to support multiple zones. The only problem is that the default zone (1) is not visible when you get to this step in the buying process.

The column of zones scrolls, although you would never guess this from the user interface.

4V is the name of a zone.

The up ? and down ? arrows don’t indicate progress within the steps (the double triangles do this ??), they trigger scrolling. When you push the upwards pointing arrow, the list of zones shifts to show more, including the most common choice (1).

Not exactly a super way of indicating that there are more choices.

Now granted – they are hampered by ELMER – the UI standard toolkit they are mandated to follow. It doesn’t allow for a lot of graphical flourishes in order to distinguish scrolling from standard choices.

But really, would it have killed you to put all the zones up using 2 or 3 columns? There’s lots of room on the right side of the screen that’s not being used.

The Android user interface has a few consistency issues. The icons can be moved around the screen by press holding the icon.

So far, so like the iPhone, minus the cute shaking.

However, the icon shelf at the bottom of the newer Android screens is not so easily altered, at least not on the Samsung Touch UI variant. The icon shelf is not editable from the ‘desktop’ at all. The desktop menu has Edit, but that rearranges the order of the screens. Nothing about the shelf here.

Press-hold an icon on the shelf? Nada. Nothing.

Press-hold the Home button, maybe? Nope. That’s recent apps and the running tasks list.

A quick google turns up the answer: the Application program. It has an Edit menu that lets you assign apps to the shelf. Except when the applications App is in list-view mode: then the edit menu item disappears without a trace.

Once switched to Edit mode, the grid of apps icons turn into buttons, but you don’t press them, you drag them to the shelf at the bottom of the screen. You can also drag icons off the shelf to the apps grid.

So we have two different ways of moving icons around: press and hold on the home screens, and drag-drop buttons in a special edit mode in the apps app.

More confusing is the involvement of the apps app in the whole thing. The shelf is part of the screens – there is no obvious link to the apps app.

A better solution would be to use press-hold on the icons on the shelf, and allow the icons to be moved on and off the shelf in the same way as the rest of the screen. The problem here is that the shelf turns into the trashcan when dragging icons. So how can you drag an icon to the shelf when the shelf disappears as soon as you start to drag an icon?

By using a press-hold action on an icon on the shelf to activate the apps app editor. This puts the editor closer to hand, and hides the application app dependency.