If ever the gap between existing mobile user experience and what’s hoped for has been clearly stated, it’s ironically in this Telstra ad for the The Age on mobile. The woman opens her phone and a virtual paper expands out in front of her. The reality is on the left. A dumb handset with 2 headlines.
Thank goodness for the iPhone, Android and beyond.
We’ve faced or experienced this challenge before. We have a textbox and there’s a limited number of characters that can be entered.
Basic solution: put a little text hint next to the field (eg. “up to 500 characters”) and stop accepting characters once you get to max.
Better: Do the javascript countdown, so you know when you are getting close.
But, best: I love how Twitterific handles it on the iPhone. As you come near the limit, the countdown character count turns a warning colour. But once you hit the limit, you can keep typing. You can’t submit it and it’s clear you have gone over the edge, but it allows you to review the whole of the intended message to edit it down to the character limit. Better than the back-and-forth of deleting a few characters, adding some more, delete some more, add, delete…
