I’ve found pretty little on the usability of the Fairphone 6 as a left handed person. Which surprised me, as I’ve found a lot of issues with that, more or at least more severe ones than with any other handheld I’ve had so far.
For a company styling itself on accessibility it’s a bit disappointing that the product design directly impacts some 10% of the world, and 13% of your home country, as far as I can tell from some quick internet search.
The only thing I’ve seen about that topic was another post on your forum that mentioned the volume buttons, which I find to be a minor issue. So I though I should create this post to bring these issues to the mind of your designers.
Its honestly not a lot that’s going wrong. Just two main issue. But these are very problematic IMO. There’s the location of the fingerprint reader, and the placement of the main microphone.
The fingerprint reader is really hard to reach as a left handed person, and that’s even exacerbated if one uses the finger loop accessory. It’s far too high (as in too close to the earpiece) on the device side, and it has more design features that make it unreliable for everyone, but make left handed use even more difficult too. The fingerprint sensor is difficult to differentiate from the rest of the phone side, since it’s neither elevated nor embedded into the body. Because the sensor is so slim, it tends to have false negatives when operated with the right finger, but the wrong part of the finger. And since we can’t add more data to the fingerprint (which I seem to remember being a possibility on some devices) that can’t easily be solved - adding it as a separate finger isnt a possibility since I’m already at the maximum of 5 fingers, because I may want to use different fingers (aka my right hand) in situations where it’s possible to make the device actually ergonomic. The fingerprint is also far from the backside corner, which also makes it hard to reach with a finger when holding the phone with a left hand.
I understand that the fingerprint sensor slimness and distance of the backside corner are due to the removable backside, and it’s height makes it slightly easier to operate when holding it right handed. But to me as a left handed person this feels like deliberate design tradeoffs that were chosen to the detriment of me, without really searching for an alternative, or with the height of the sensor the choice to make things massively more uncomfortable for us, to make things slightly more comfortable for right handed persons.
So, getting to the microphone placement. There is, AFAICT, just a single microphone in the bottom, that being placed just at the end of the bottom-left border radius. That placement makes it extremely easy to cover up while holding the phone to the ear with your left hand, which according to my conversation partner made me much more difficult to understand.
While the fingerprint sensor issues are largely for recognizable design decisions, which I’m not a huge fan of but kind of get the reasons for, this placement seems to me to have been either a blatant oversight, or a blatant disregard of left handed use in favor of right handed use. If you want to have a microphone that close to the corner, then please just add another microphone to the other corner to deal with one of them being covered up. Otherwise it really shouldn’t be THAT difficult to find a way to move the microphone closer to the center, where both left handed and right handed use is fair game.
It’s not even as if only left handed persons will want to use the phone with their left hand, particularly when calling someone there might be a multitude of other reasons to move the phone to the left hand even for right handed users, like to keep their primary hand free to operate something.
Sorry if this was harshly formulated, perhaps I’m still a bit affected by the recent realization of the microphone placement. Other than that I’m pretty impressed with this device you’ve made. There are of course other things that could be improved, which I may get into at other times, but that were the main things I wanted to bring to the attention of your dsign team.
