Keyboards, UX, and “Fuck”(blogmask.herokuapp.com)
blogmask.herokuapp.com
Keyboards, UX, and “Fuck”
https://blogmask.herokuapp.com/posts/Mzg=/keyboards-ux-and-fuck
23 comments
I find autocorrect so annoying it's always the first thing I disable when getting a phone. Sure I make more typos, but at least the phone doesn't keep trying to think instead of me.
Actually, the most mistakes I've ever made when sending blurbs of texts was the several months before I figured out how to disable autocorrect on Tweetbot on my Mac. Man that was terrible. Kept having to delete tweets because I hit "Send" before fixing the autocorrected text.
Alas, if you frequently use two different languages and often mix them both in the same sentence (common among bilinguals) autocorrect is your absolute bane because it will always do the wrong thing.
Actually, the most mistakes I've ever made when sending blurbs of texts was the several months before I figured out how to disable autocorrect on Tweetbot on my Mac. Man that was terrible. Kept having to delete tweets because I hit "Send" before fixing the autocorrected text.
Alas, if you frequently use two different languages and often mix them both in the same sentence (common among bilinguals) autocorrect is your absolute bane because it will always do the wrong thing.
I have found that SwiftKey basically lets me blindly mash the keyboard in the direction of the keys I want to press and it will insert the correct words, and I use three languages (English/Spanish/Greek).
I'll have to try if that exists for iOS then ...
The sticking point for me, so far, has been when I use an English word but declense it like it was a Slovenian word. Every time I do that, autocorrect thinks I can't type even though I typed exactly what I wanted to.
And with 18 different declension suffixes for nouns and ~15 for verbs and proverbs, it would take autocorrect ages to learn how to spell. Especially since the correct spelling is context dependant and usually only a letter different than the wrong spellings.
The sticking point for me, so far, has been when I use an English word but declense it like it was a Slovenian word. Every time I do that, autocorrect thinks I can't type even though I typed exactly what I wanted to.
And with 18 different declension suffixes for nouns and ~15 for verbs and proverbs, it would take autocorrect ages to learn how to spell. Especially since the correct spelling is context dependant and usually only a letter different than the wrong spellings.
As far as I know, SwiftKey uses a Markov chain with length 2 or 3, so it can usually decline the words correctly and give you the right one. Greek is similar, and I have no problems there (it does sometimes screw up two-word letters that only differ by one letter, though).
Yeah, I've been contemplating disabling autocorrect system-wide on my Mac because of how infuriating it is. It's not as useful because I'm much more accurate with a physical keyboard, it's more difficult to cancel a correction because I have to move my hand off the keyboard to my mouse or trackpad then click a tiny "x", and frankly it's often just an absurd correction.
To cancel it, you can just hit escape when the correction is displayed.
Android's default keyboard (at least on KitKat; not sure how far back this goes) has a setting to turn off the profanity filter.
From the keyboard, hold comma to get to the settings menu, pick Google Keyboard Settings, scroll down under "Text Correction", and uncheck "Block offensive words".
From the keyboard, hold comma to get to the settings menu, pick Google Keyboard Settings, scroll down under "Text Correction", and uncheck "Block offensive words".
I had to go a half step farther... In order for the swipe input to get the curse words first, I had to add them to my personal dictionary, including derivatives...
Fucking annoying, but relatively easy to get the little fucker to output the shit I want.
Fucking annoying, but relatively easy to get the little fucker to output the shit I want.
It's a setting in the "Google Keyboard" you can get from the Play Store for Ice Cream Sandwich/Jelly Bean/KitKat (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...).
It still stays shy about suggesting naughty words when you swipe ("gesture type"), though. I got curious, and it looks like manually adding the ones you care about in Settings > Personal Dictionary gets around that. Just for completeness, voice recognition has its own "block offensive words" option in its settings (phone settings -> language and input -> settings icon next to "Google voice typing").
I don't see a way around it in SwiftKey. I wouldn't mind a similar checkbox (hey, always good to match Google Keyboard's features, right?) but it hasn't been a huge deal--it's like typing names or other things not in the dictionary (tap the left completion when you're done), which works for me.
It still stays shy about suggesting naughty words when you swipe ("gesture type"), though. I got curious, and it looks like manually adding the ones you care about in Settings > Personal Dictionary gets around that. Just for completeness, voice recognition has its own "block offensive words" option in its settings (phone settings -> language and input -> settings icon next to "Google voice typing").
I don't see a way around it in SwiftKey. I wouldn't mind a similar checkbox (hey, always good to match Google Keyboard's features, right?) but it hasn't been a huge deal--it's like typing names or other things not in the dictionary (tap the left completion when you're done), which works for me.
Call me a snob, but I couldn't bear to let a computer correct my spelling for me. I love the squiggly underline of the spellcheck (irony note: spellcheck is not in my dictionary) but I want that as a passive feature, not an active one. What ship-brained ducking count ever thought that was a good idea?
Me: activates phone, types "fuck", verifies that phone suggests "fuck", sleeps phone
Me: activates tablet, types 'fuck', verifies that phone suggests music, get suckered into listening to that song again…
http://i.imgur.com/lAimHhn.png
http://i.imgur.com/lAimHhn.png
You would be fine without autocorrect if you hadn't been using autocorrect so long, probably. I've found a great keyboard for Andorid called Hacker's Keyboard. It's fully like a QWERTY when sideways.
You couldn't live without a draggable gesture word style keyboard if you tried one for a while probably. I've found them to greatly improve my speed and accuracy for english text.
Since this has a few points I'd like to tack on a shameless plug for BlogMask, the service I used to post this. It's a great way to make a quick, 100% anonymous blog post when you want to say something a like this that you might not put on your main blog or a social network.
Scratches an itch I had with posting to HN, sometimes I just want to write a quick rant that's somewhat off the record.
Currently in beta, feedback is very, very welcome.
Scratches an itch I had with posting to HN, sometimes I just want to write a quick rant that's somewhat off the record.
Currently in beta, feedback is very, very welcome.
Very clever service.
"Technology" is misspelled here: https://blogmask.herokuapp.com/browse
Also, why copy the Kudos feature from Svbtle?
"Technology" is misspelled here: https://blogmask.herokuapp.com/browse
Also, why copy the Kudos feature from Svbtle?
Noticed the spelling error, want to correct it but waiting to do a push until this fades off of the top page of HN. Thanks for pointing it out though!
As for the kudos mechanism, people seem to be happy to engage with it. I know on HN it's something that everyone recognizes but the average web user doesn't notice it (kind of like Bootstrap).
As for the kudos mechanism, people seem to be happy to engage with it. I know on HN it's something that everyone recognizes but the average web user doesn't notice it (kind of like Bootstrap).
As of now this post has 67 points on HN and 782 on BlogMask. Means that people really must like watching that little circle fill up to vote. Not exactly "scientific", but definitely enough to make me leave it in as a feature.
Funny you mention Swiftkey.
I was recently setting up my daughter's cheap Android phone, when I decided to send a test Viber message to my wife. I started typing "Hello mom", and "mom" got autocorrected to a declination of "mother" which is 99% of the time used in "f-ck your mom" phrases (мамата, for compatriots). My daughter is old enough for a smartphone, but too young for this grade of swearing; I considered it highly inappropriate, and just one more appalling thing in this first contact with Android.
Crowd-training obviously has its limits. And you should err on the side of caution in this sort of things.
(The other appalling thing was the obviously crowd-translation of the base OS, with glaring typos permeating the interface; some were occasional, but some of the most offending ones were systemic, e.g. the word Audio was wrong everywhere. You'd think between them Google, Alcatel and a mobile network operator working in half of Europe could afford to have an editor read through a few dozen thousand strings.)
I was recently setting up my daughter's cheap Android phone, when I decided to send a test Viber message to my wife. I started typing "Hello mom", and "mom" got autocorrected to a declination of "mother" which is 99% of the time used in "f-ck your mom" phrases (мамата, for compatriots). My daughter is old enough for a smartphone, but too young for this grade of swearing; I considered it highly inappropriate, and just one more appalling thing in this first contact with Android.
Crowd-training obviously has its limits. And you should err on the side of caution in this sort of things.
(The other appalling thing was the obviously crowd-translation of the base OS, with glaring typos permeating the interface; some were occasional, but some of the most offending ones were systemic, e.g. the word Audio was wrong everywhere. You'd think between them Google, Alcatel and a mobile network operator working in half of Europe could afford to have an editor read through a few dozen thousand strings.)
Wait, so the full, unshortened rendition of "mother" has essentially become a swear word in your language? (Bulgarian?) Wow :-) Language never fails to amaze me.
I see your point entirely, and you're right to complain, but I doubt I would've seen that coming if I were making an autocorrecting keyboard.
I see your point entirely, and you're right to complain, but I doubt I would've seen that coming if I were making an autocorrecting keyboard.
I18n is Hard ;) Apart from having a good dictionary of words to use in your desired target languages, you apparently have to keep track of actual language usage as well and sometimes even regional variations on usage. Sometimes those are then explanations for quirky behavior, e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/20/55055...
It's the definite article-d form of a diminuitive word; roughly "the mommy" in English. It has stuck as part of a common swear phrase, and consequently fallen out of other, general use. Used by itself, it is clearly recognizable as a swear word. (Cf. "up yours")
Are you sure? On iOS, typing a word five times adds it to the dictionary.
If I type 'fick', it'll try to correct to 'duck', but 'fuck' doesn't get corrected.
If I type 'fick', it'll try to correct to 'duck', but 'fuck' doesn't get corrected.
> typing a word five times adds it to the dictionary.
That seems terrible. I only want to add words to a dictionary explicitly. Make a typo often enough now you got teh in your dictionary. I turn off autocorrect anyway.
That seems terrible. I only want to add words to a dictionary explicitly. Make a typo often enough now you got teh in your dictionary. I turn off autocorrect anyway.
No; if you type a word that isn't in the dictionary five times, but let it get autocorrected each of those times, then it will keep autocorrecting it. It's cancelling/reverting the autocorrect suggestion that increments a word's "should be in the dictionary" score.
that's not how it works, just because you make a typo a few times wont mean it's picked by autocorrect.
To bypass the five times, just type a word into safari's omni bar and it will add it to the dictionary.
it would be an awful ux if words needed to be added explicitly to the dictionary.
To bypass the five times, just type a word into safari's omni bar and it will add it to the dictionary.
it would be an awful ux if words needed to be added explicitly to the dictionary.
> it would be an awful ux if words needed to be added explicitly to the dictionary.
What I'm learning today is that there is no such thing as best UX practices.
Some people are clearly adamant that having to add words explicitly is awful. After all, the phone should be able to figure out what is wanted, right?
Other people are just as certain that having the phone implicitly add words using any specific rule will fail often enough that it's obviously worse UX to try.
I find myself in sympathy with both camps. I would like my devices and environment to just know what I want and do it without my having to explicitly direct actions. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working out that way for a lot of areas. Instead, we have a mishmash situation where devices and apps try to do what most people want, and fail fairly often for a given user (unless I'm a major outlier). Ten years ago, when my computer failed to do what I expected, I understood that I'd failed to use it properly. I read documentation until I understood the failure or, at least, had some idea of what I might have done wrong, and tried again, and eventually I would understand the system.
Now that the system is supposed to understand me, I've noticed two effects:
First, detailed documentation of user interfaces is incredibly scarce. I wonder if there's a perception among other developers that if you need documentation, the UX has failed, and therefore the most direct route to apparently better UX is to have less documentation?
Second, I find that partly due to the apparent complexity of my phone (or perhaps personification of it), I'm more likely to just swear at it and complain about it than to actually try to understand what I'm doing wrong.
What I'm learning today is that there is no such thing as best UX practices.
Some people are clearly adamant that having to add words explicitly is awful. After all, the phone should be able to figure out what is wanted, right?
Other people are just as certain that having the phone implicitly add words using any specific rule will fail often enough that it's obviously worse UX to try.
I find myself in sympathy with both camps. I would like my devices and environment to just know what I want and do it without my having to explicitly direct actions. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working out that way for a lot of areas. Instead, we have a mishmash situation where devices and apps try to do what most people want, and fail fairly often for a given user (unless I'm a major outlier). Ten years ago, when my computer failed to do what I expected, I understood that I'd failed to use it properly. I read documentation until I understood the failure or, at least, had some idea of what I might have done wrong, and tried again, and eventually I would understand the system.
Now that the system is supposed to understand me, I've noticed two effects:
First, detailed documentation of user interfaces is incredibly scarce. I wonder if there's a perception among other developers that if you need documentation, the UX has failed, and therefore the most direct route to apparently better UX is to have less documentation?
Second, I find that partly due to the apparent complexity of my phone (or perhaps personification of it), I'm more likely to just swear at it and complain about it than to actually try to understand what I'm doing wrong.
Id much rather click a button once than have to recorrect the computer five times to get my desired result.
Actually, way easier. You go back to the end of the auto-corrected word, and you choose your original spelling from the popup.
At least at MS, you're not allowed to check in "dirty" words (there's a program called 'vericheck' -- or something like that -- that does keyword scanning and generates reports to managers. It doesn't prevent you from checking in, but it's quite possible you'll get a talking to).
Of course you can obfuscate by escaping to hex, if you want.
I looked at the filters for Windows once. The usual profanity, but a few surprises, including many mentions of keywords involving the consent decree, FBI, Janet Reno and so forth.
Of course you can obfuscate by escaping to hex, if you want.
I looked at the filters for Windows once. The usual profanity, but a few surprises, including many mentions of keywords involving the consent decree, FBI, Janet Reno and so forth.
Post should have ended with "It's about ducking time."
If this bothers you just go into your keyboard settings in Android and turn off the option called: "Block offensive words".
Is the problem just that there is no setting to enable this behavior out of the box? Perhaps I just swear too fucking much, but my SwiftKey has learned all of my common uses of profanity, and is surprisingly good at auto-correcting them.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Sent from my iPhone
Sent from my iPhone
I wrote about this a while back, in German, at https://moeffju.net/blog/beschattete-abreise. Basically, Android (used to, I haven’t check the most current version) ships with a blacklist of words that are not in the dictionary and that you cannot simply add to the user dictionary just by typing them and tapping on them. I see why they would not be in the autosuggest list by default, but making it hard to add them is just annoying.
I rather think this is an America phenomenon where they actually banned words from public media like I never seen it in other developed countries. [1] Nobody here has a problem with vile language as long as it isn't within a children's program. It would be strange in professional ambience like news or classic radio, but that's all. If there is a beeping sound, then just because they are dubbing an English movie or anonymize some names or trying to look more interesting by self-censoring their bullshit program.
Seriously, words like "shit" or "penis" aren't offensive at all these days. Other are just collegial and unprofessional. For someone from Europe this really looks like needless uptightness. It's like a kid isn't even allowed to see her naked mother.
Also, from some educative point of view, I think it's likely the worst solution to simply conceal them from your kids. As a parent you could easily explain their meaning, that it might be rude for some etc. Actually, the important point is to be reflective when learning those words. Those rather simple words are not like showing hardcode porn to children. I don't wanna say that you couldn't be verbally offensive, but that's not the point here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words
Seriously, words like "shit" or "penis" aren't offensive at all these days. Other are just collegial and unprofessional. For someone from Europe this really looks like needless uptightness. It's like a kid isn't even allowed to see her naked mother.
Also, from some educative point of view, I think it's likely the worst solution to simply conceal them from your kids. As a parent you could easily explain their meaning, that it might be rude for some etc. Actually, the important point is to be reflective when learning those words. Those rather simple words are not like showing hardcode porn to children. I don't wanna say that you couldn't be verbally offensive, but that's not the point here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words
Well, that is how I understood the iPhone to be sold.
If it "just works", of course it won't give you only some people want.
What makes this a bit more interesting than usual UI stupidity issue for me is that the walled garden can get away with certain personality just because it fits the marketing. And certain personalities get bought along with the hardware.
If it "just works", of course it won't give you only some people want.
What makes this a bit more interesting than usual UI stupidity issue for me is that the walled garden can get away with certain personality just because it fits the marketing. And certain personalities get bought along with the hardware.
Actually, when I type in "fuck" I also get the suggestions "dick" and "fucking".
Maybe you should RTFM more? And I actually don't recall consciously adding them to the dictionary.. / Android 2.3
To all the Android users -- isn't this only an iPhone issue? The author seemed to mention it coming from the original, and persisting to the latest, but doesn't mention it affecting the Android (unless it has been edited).
Just use swype. It doesn't come with "adult" words installed, but once you type them once and select them, they become part of your dictionary. After a few days, all the words you want are swype-able.
There's usually an option when autocorrect gives you choices to save whatever non-standard word you just told it is correct. I'm pretty sure my Nexus 4 knows how to swear now.
Up until around KitKat, there used to be a blacklist of words that Android would not offer to save to the personal dictionary by typing-and-tapping. Now, it’s an option called “Block offensive words”).
My Droid Maxx "learns" profanity in that it will stop marking it with the red squiggly line, but it still won't correct fyck to fuck even when it will correct dyck to duck.
Save your cuss words to your dictionary with the "Tap again to save option". That's what I do with swift key and it just works. Sorry you can cuss in your text messages.
I just found the opt-in setting on my Android (post KitKat update) about a week ago and couldn't be happier. I swear like a sailor and now my friends get to read it.
I use Swiftkey, and on the first try, I could "type" Fuck using flow (aka Continuous input)
AFAIK I can't use 2 dictionaries, so whether I use German or English, autocorrect sucks in 50% of blobs of texts I write.
Text messages and Facebook posts/replies are mostly German, Twitter is 50/50 and random stuff is likely to be English as well.
Text messages and Facebook posts/replies are mostly German, Twitter is 50/50 and random stuff is likely to be English as well.
my solution is to add a contact in your address book filled with profane words and other abbreviations you don't want autocorrected.
e.x. http://d.pr/i/tQgZ
e.x. http://d.pr/i/tQgZ
There's a vast swath of people who don't want to use curse words for various reasons, and how terrible it would be to accidentally insert "fuck" in your work-only phone!
Besides, we aren't all super coordinated with phones. I've been typing on these keyboards for two years now, and I wouldn't be able to live without auto-correct. I'm guessing that, since you are such an expert of using the keyboard that you apparently never misfire, perhaps you ought to roll without auto-correct? I know a few people that do...