
Keyboards, UX, and “Fuck” - habosa
https://blogmask.herokuapp.com/posts/Mzg=/keyboards-ux-and-fuck
======
dizzystar
I don't understand the argument here. I use Android, and assuming the
experience is no different, I only have to put the word in once and tap to
accept as a new word in my dictionary.

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...

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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).

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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).

------
habosa
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.

~~~
tehdik
Very clever service.

"Technology" is misspelled here:
[https://blogmask.herokuapp.com/browse](https://blogmask.herokuapp.com/browse)

Also, why copy the Kudos feature from Svbtle?

~~~
habosa
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).

------
unsigner
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.)

~~~
skrebbel
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.

~~~
ygra
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...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/20/55055.aspx)

------
dmazin
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.

~~~
belluchan
> 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.

~~~
hnriot
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.

~~~
randallsquared
> 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.

------
kabdib
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.

------
apazzolini
Post should have ended with "It's about ducking time."

------
ars
If this bothers you just go into your keyboard settings in Android and turn
off the option called: "Block offensive words".

------
mavrc
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.

------
dandelany
What the fuck are you talking about?

 _Sent from my iPhone_

------
moeffju
I wrote about this a while back, in German, at
[https://moeffju.net/blog/beschattete-
abreise](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.

------
somesay
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words)

------
joe_the_user
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.

------
easy_rider
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

------
shortstuffsushi
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).

------
ultimatedelman
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.

------
mst
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.

~~~
moeffju
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”).

------
dchapman1988
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.

------
tobyjsullivan
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.

------
kukkukb
I use Swiftkey, and on the first try, I could "type" Fuck using flow (aka
Continuous input)

------
wink
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.

------
clarry
I expected the post to be about something like typing DuckDuckGo on a (Qwerty)
PC keyboard.

~~~
downer87
I often find myself typing "ducksuckgo" or "suckduckgo" on soft keyboards, and
I smile every time...

------
evanm
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](http://d.pr/i/tQgZ)

