Closed Bug 925706 Opened 11 years ago Closed 6 years ago

Investigate how edge gestures should work in right-to-left languages

Categories

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia, defect, P3)

x86
Linux
defect

Tracking

(ux-b2g:2.3)

RESOLVED WONTFIX
ux-b2g 2.3

People

(Reporter: etienne, Unassigned, NeedInfo)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [rtl-design])

Currently swiping from the left edge to the right will go "back in time".
I wonder how this holds in RTL languages.
Hey Cori,

Not sure who to ask, but I'm giving it a shot.
We're implementing a fast app switching gesture, the spec can be found on bug 919492.

It's chronological and swiping left to right goes back.
Should we make this right to left in RTL languages?
Flags: needinfo?(cschauer)
Hey Etienne - I've added Lindsay Kenzig and Francis Djarbri to answer your questions. They will know better than me. Thanks!
Flags: needinfo?(cschauer)
Considering there are also languages that go from top to bottom, my opinion is we should go with one standard and stick to that. 
If this is a really high priority to figure out I can try to find a willing contributor to research secondary sources for more info, but I'm not sure if that will be useful in the timeframe you need to make this decision by (guessing that would take about 2 weeks).
Cori, Lindsay,

Languages that go from top to bottom also have an horizontal direction (like we do have a top to bottom direction in latin languages too, when we go from a line to the next line).

These languages (most notably in east-asia) go from top to bottom and then right to left. But noawadays most of them support a "left to right, then top to bottom" direction like occidental languages. (source: [1])

But, this is not really a question on how people read, but rather how they represent time. I really don't know how Japanese, Chinese, etc, represent time, but since we have Mozilla employees there, it should be reasonably easy to ask.

For example, I've found [2] which says that for hebrew-speaking people, earlier things tend to be represented in the right.

"Our results demonstrate that people automatically access culturally specific spatial repre-
sentations when reasoning about time even in entirely nonlinguistic contexts. Written
languages appear to organize their readers’ attention in a vector from where text
usually begins to where it usually ends."

Maybe our E.me friends could help here too ? ;)

The conclusion is quite clear to me: the time direction is locale-dependent.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts
[2] http://psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/hebrew-time.pdf
As an additional data point, here is the MDN page about the "writing-mode" CSS property: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/writing-mode

This does not seem supported in Firefox but this shows the variety of what exists in the world :)
Good point about it being time-direction.
Taking that into account with the two rounds of testing I did with Jaime on Haida a few weeks ago, I still feel it should be one standard for all countries. 
The chronology of sheets/pages within the stack was not something users were at all thinking about during initial exposure and use. To me, this suggests it is more of a learned behavior in terms of entering the stack and swiping through it. Concern with where in the stack something lies based on when I opened it is much more of a power user function and requires people to hold too many things in their head at once, especially when there are more important tasks they are wanting to do. If you are concerned people may be frustrated with this, you could provide an option to toggle from which way they enter the stack in settings.
Blocks: gaia-rtl
Whiteboard: [rtl-design]
The Firefox OS UX team will research this and have a decision for 2.2.
ux-b2g: --- → 2.2
Blocks: system-rtl
No longer blocks: gaia-rtl, edge-gestures
Do we need to fix anything for 2.2 here?
Flags: needinfo?(swilkes)
No. Per the bidi pattern, edge gestures, task manager and back button are NOT in scope for 2.2. They would require too much engineering work in too short a release. We HOPE to do this for 2.3 but we'll see.
Flags: needinfo?(swilkes)
ux-b2g: 2.2 → 2.3
Priority: -- → P3
Flags: in-moztrap+
This work is not for 2.2, as noted earlier. I am setting Kaze to ni? for 2.0M, as we will make these changes in that branch. 

I will also update the Arabic language UX spec next week to describe these changes for 2.0M.
Flags: needinfo?(fabien)
Test case has been added in moztrap:
https://moztrap.mozilla.org/manage/case/15862/
Firefox OS is not being worked on
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 6 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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