Steve Fenton

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Tuesday, 5th July 2011

I have had my Motorola Defy for a while now and its rugged construction, scratch resistant screen and splash proofing have proved to be a massive bonus. You can be quite casual with this phone without worrying too much about what might go wrong.

One thing I noticed today, though, is quite interesting. As with all touch-screen devices there is a constant battle between the two uses of the display. You want to be able to see what is on the screen - but you also make the screen dirty by constantly touching it while eating crisps (or indeed potato chips).

One handy side effect of not having cleaned the screen all day, is that I could suddenly see a very strong pattern of how I use the touch screen.

It is immediately obvious from the pattern of grease on the screen that the reversed L shape is my main usage of the screen. I swipe left and right along the bottom of the screen a lot and I swipe up and down up the right-hand side of the screen a lot too.

There is a secondary pattern of less-used splodges that forms what looks like four evenly spaced dots along the top.

After analysing my usage I have come to the following conclusions.

The horizontal bar along the bottom gets a lot of use because of the "slide to unlock" and "slide to mute phone" functions on the Motorola Defy. I don't have many other reasons to slide horizontally except when I occasionally use the photo-gallery.

The vertical pattern on the right, which forms the upright of the reversed L shape is from scrolling. Whether it is email, web browser or application, this is where I scroll. I imagine that a left-handed user would see an L shape, rather than the reversed L shape that I see as a right-handed user. I'm using my right hand to scroll and I presume I perform this action on the right so I can still view the screen while I do it. If I scrolled in the centre or on the left, my hand would be in the way.

Finally, the four lesser-used spots along the top seem to be entirely attributable to Twitter as they line up precisely over the navigation on the Twitter for Android application.

So before you clean off your touch-screen, why not take a moment to analyse your usage by examining your greasy paw-prints on your phone.

Note: The photographs of the phone didn't really show off the grease, so I have mocked up the picture in this article to make it more obvious.