The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to manipulate user interface objects on a display.
Exemplary manipulations include navigating through lists to find a desired piece of content. For example, in a digital content player (e.g., a portable music and/or video player), a user may need to navigate through lists of artists, albums, authors, composers, compilations, or titles (e.g., song titles) to find a desired piece of content. In many cases, the user needs to search through artists, albums, authors, composers, compilations, or titles in multiple languages. For example, a Japanese user may have Japanese content identified in Japanese and English content identified in English; a Chinese user may have Chinese content identified in Chinese, Japanese content identified in Japanese, and English content identified in English; and so on.
But existing methods for navigating through lists are cumbersome and inefficient, particularly when the list contains identifiers for content in more than one language. Navigating through lists with multiple languages is tedious and creates a significant cognitive burden on a user. In addition, existing navigation methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.