Interaction with elements on cartography touch application

Question

I'm currently designing a touch tablet application that deals with cartography and elements manipulation. We need to be able to touch interact with the elements on the map and :

• get info
• move item on the map
• delete item
• mail item
• change item layer

Therefore I need some kind of contextual menu, it has to be touch friendly and minimise errors. I have three stategies in mind :

• side contextual menu
• pie/radial contextual menu
• bottom screen contextual menu

Does anyone have any feedback on successful or failure implementations of these strategies on a large monotouch device? (12" or 15")

Does anyone have other strategies in mind?

Any feedback appreciated!

Thanks to all.

Answer 1

I suppose that by "side contextual menu" you mean the regular right-click menu that appears on the side of the place you clicked.

Pie menus are nice, except that they don't work very well with text. Most good implementations of pie menus just contain icons. I've seen some with text-only items, but they very rarely look good. And I don't think I ever saw one with icon+text.

Wouldn't go for the menu at the bottom of the screen, or anywhere else in a fixed location. Your device is large, and it might often be a long distance to travel between the selected object and the menu - and in at least some cases you'll need to get back to the object after activating a menu item - e.g. to move it somewhere on the map. Using an "edit in place" approach is a common guideline for touch devices in general, and your case doesn't seem to be different.

Keep in mind that with a side menu it's easy to solve the cases where your object is at the edge of the screen - you just display the menu on the other side. But with a pie menu, and if you mean for the object to be at the center of it, it can get tricky. You can't just display it at an offset, because then it might get centered on a different object. You don't have this problem with a side menu.

Answer 2

Don't use a context menu for move. Instead allow the user to tap & hold on a pin to switch to a pin-moving mode.

Your contextual controls should be displayed close to the element that the user taps, for example the way that google displays a popup when you click a pin in google maps, or apple's popovers. But, bear in mind that this will obscure part of the map. In the case of a radial menu, you will obscure in all directions.