Playroom V3 number inputting suggestions

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Punteggio: +5

1. Nikola,

Hello,
Playroom V3 introduced one change in the way you input numbers, and many users who I talk to do not really like this, but for my part even though I do not mind it as much, I would like to try to explain why I think this has a very bad design, in my opinion.

To illustrate my explanations, we will use Cribbage, although this will work in any dialog where you are asked to type a number.
Once you need to count your hand, the input dialog has a 0 written by default.
On Windows, this 0 is already selected by default, so you can just type over it and everything will be fine as long as you are careful. However, still even on Windows, this can be problematic.
In some cases, Playroom users are used to the fact that everything responds almost instantly, so it is normal to just press enter, type your value, and enter again. However, if your Internet is just a bit slower and you have a bit of lag, it is completely possible that on your first enter, the dialog did not open as fast as you are used to, and your number did not register, so in reality, your second enter just sent the default value of 0.

However, where I find this a lot more annoying is on the web client, and even though I do not use it as often, when I do use it, this even personally annoys me.
The main problem is that on the web client, this value, unlike on Windows, is not selected by default. Even worse, your cursor is at the beginning of the edit field. Let me illustrate what you have to do on iOS to input your Cribbage score:

  1. Double tap any card to open the input dialog.
  2. Double tap the edit box to show the keyboard.
  3. Double tap the edit box again, to move the cursor to the end.
  4. Press delete to delete the default value.
  5. Type your score.

This is even worse because in all input dialogs, on iOS, there is some bug (don’t know if it is fixable), which causes the keyboard not to display once you double tap the edit field. To show it, you have to double tap it once more, so in reality this is double tapping the edit field 3 times in total.

Getting back to Windows for a second, in theory, the way I understand it, this new input format allows us to have a minimum and a maximum range to enter. For instance, in Spades with 4 players, this will be 0 to 13, for the number of tricks we can bid.
However, the problem is that this is not very accessible for blind users (may be a WX problem or just with NVDA). For instance, in my Spades example, if I try to type 14 by mistake, I will hear absolutely nothing. Normally, I would expect to hear some notification that my input is out of the allowed range.
In reality, this 14 will be auto replaced by 13, but you are never notified that this happened, unless you look at the edit field manually. Of course, this is quite a bad example since nobody will type 13 in Spades, but rather it happens that somebody for example may move the cursor by accident and the 0 becomes unselected, so maybe they type 100 instead of 10, and in that case the dialog will just auto replace it with 13.

And finally, the last problem with this is also that the arrow keys up and down increase or decrease the value. Many players are also used to the fact that to check what is written in some dialog, they can just press up or down arrow, but by mistake now I have often seen tables where the score limit is 5001 for instance instead of 5000, and something like that.

To summarize, it would be great if the input field was just empty by default and did not have a pre-selected value entered, and if the range notifications could exist rather than a silent auto replace. I am also not sure how useful this arrow keys moving the numbers really is, perhaps it can exist but under a different shortcut like page up and down/ctrl+arrows.

Punteggio: +1

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