iPhones are hard to use
blog.fawny.org
blog.fawny.org
Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way.
I’d be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how to improve the situation without compromising on ease of use.
(Regarding the WiFi thing...I agree this is a very annoying default setting, but I think a worse outcome is when a user shows up in their friend’s house and has no idea how to connect to the WiFi. Making the user go to Settings -> WiFi to disable this prompt means they’ve demonstrated they’ll be able to go back to that page to manually connect to a network in the future. If you turn this setting off on a friend's phone, be sure they still know how to connect manually.
(Though I do think iOS could be smarter and not prompt you to connect to intermittent networks while you’re driving around a city...))
Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus.
There is definitely room for improvement though. There are some regressions that are too obvious. The recent regression that comes to mind is forcing the end user to go through extra taps to switch the camera between front and back during a FaceTime call when previously it was a one-button click
I seriously doubt there was a groundswell of users complaining they could swap cameras with a single tap.
The other annoying change was putting the End Call button in a panel the bottom right. Regular users have muscle memory, and suddenly they have to relearn one of the main features.
Changes like these are superficial tinkering and make work for the sake of appearances rather than considered, focused development.
While 'desktop mode' is super useful the HN crowd, I don't think most users would benefit from it.
A non-technical user is probably only minimally aware that mobile and desktop sites might have different features at all. And even when you do use it, it might not have the desired affect. I might have been browsing around on "mobile.site.com" for a while and repeating my request with a desktop User-Agent is still going to get me the mobile version. (this happens to me on m.facebook.com) To fix this I have to know how to modify the URL to point to the non-mobile-only version...easy for this crowd, but not for the average user.
Certain CSS @media queries also don't seem to be affected by "Desktop Mode". (It only changes the User-Agent I believe?) So in other situations, it won't work no matter what and that's pretty frustrating/confusing/inconsistent if you don't know the details.
Even if I do succeed, a desktop webpage on mobile can be a pain with all the zooming and zooming out needed. Sometimes desktop sites don't even work properly on mobile browsers! Now...we understand the constraints, but all these details come together to make it a pretty confusing feature for the average user.
I think most users wouldn't get value from this so it's obscure by default...but for the technical types that love this, it's not too hard to figure out how to move this feature to a place where it's convenient to access.
Overall I think the current design is a pretty good balance all things considered.
(though I do wish the ability to move the desktop mode button to the 1st slot was more obvious. Definitely took me a while to figure this out)
It took me a second to realize that "Request Desktop Site" is available in the Share Sheet. I use it by long-pressing the refresh button.
Long pressing there also gives me a "request without ad blockers" button which I've found super useful as well. A bit weird this option isn't in the Share Sheet like desktop mode is...
also isn't it weird that this is called the "Share Sheet" but has lots of buttons for non-sharing related things?
The whole "Share Sheet" is rather confusing. It has three categories of actions in one screen. Potentially useful options are hidden wayyy down the list (like this Request Desktop Option). Even more options are hidden inside "More" menu all the way at the end. Which is also where the re-ordering controls are – although I just realized the icons can be reordered with drag-and-drop.
All in all, not very discoverable for a feature with such high utility.
Added to this is the obvious point that with a touch interface on a small screen, you cannot make everything obvious. It's impossible.
Yes, why not? Tons of PC laptops had it that way as well, even industrial-style all-function PCs.
Perhaps they should be located in the middle of the screen? ;)
I'd rather present all of the options and let the user learn what options are there even if they never use them.
Personally, I prefer the Android ecosystem, and honestly I'd very much prefer even more control than that. In fact, I'm really excited about the Librem 5 project, which is pretty much the exact opposite of Apple. However, many of my friends prefer the Apple experience.
A product doesn't have to cater to everyone. If it tries to, it ends up alienating everyone.
I've always found the Apple-way, wrt UI, to be different; more confusing for me because I'm used to a different paradigm. But, there's some lock-in effect there, if you start with Apple, you become accustomed to their way and then other "ways" seem more complicated. In practice it seems largely to be just familiarity.
I like Apple's design, but that's...definitely not true. You could charitably say that Apple's goal is a seamless marriage of form and function, and they do that better than most. But they have always cared more about aesthetics than any other important developer, of hardware or software.
Meanwhile a function-motivated Finder in MacOS would not look anything like the clunky dinosaur we seem to be stuck with.
This is not so nice when you only want to reload the page while clearing the cached files.
Could have been something like a long press or double tap on the refresh button.
This reminds me that several versions ago, Windows stopped underlining the shortcut keys to the menu items by default --- taking away the only affordance to discovering that the keyboard can be used to more quickly activate the menus. I learned by accident long ago ("what's the Alt key for?"), and have used it since. In contrast, I remember trying to operate a Mac the same way but gave up experimenting with the Alt key and such to try to get the menus to show (I know about the shortcuts, but they are not easily discoverable/explorable in the same way that menus are) --- and only later found out that trying to operate the menus on a Mac from the keyboard is... not very intuitive and disabled by default (why!?!?):
https://superuser.com/questions/117549/use-the-keyboard-to-a...
https://superuser.com/questions/504111/how-to-select-file-me...
(I'm not sure if the above even apply to pre-OS X --- when I discovered the function of Alt and the underlined keys in Windows, it was the Windows 3.1 era.)
That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible.
The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non-obvious to me.
Force touch just seems like a different form of right mouse clicking.
E.g. to delete you didn't need to "right click, send to trash". You dragged the item to the trashcan.
You're probably thinking of either discoverability or affordance.
The problem with Solaris, Windows, and other desktop workstations at the time was that the second (and even third) mouse buttons were required for many workflows, especially in applications---i.e. a lot of functionality was only available from the right-click menu or via the middle mouse button. This introduced a lot of unnecessary complexity to computer use, especially for new users, because of low visibility and discoverability.
Even today, Mac hardware never has a visible 2nd mouse/trackpad button. Sure, you can click a trackpad with 2 fingers or tap on the right side of a mouse to get a context menu, but keeping the buttons invisible forced these shortcuts to remain just that, and not an essential requirement to get the job done. Windows apps today follow this rule as well -- never make right-clicking the only way to execute a particular function.
Damn the little tip about tapping the clock to jump is so handy, I have actually searched for how to do this and never came across a description of this feature.
Easter eggs?
Actually, I wish any modern smartphone OS had half the thought put into it that Palm had 20 years ago. After all this time, nothing even comes close for contact and calendar management, as well as actual phone use!
Whenever a key feature in iOS seems missing I just google for where it went. iOS search is so essential that I couldn’t see it ever removed...
Not a single time in the past 5 years or so. What's your point?
Well, that's not a dictum to design UIs by. This way everything becomes "critical".
At some point you just use statistics, and if something is critical to fewer people, you can give it lower priority anyway than what most want to use everyday.
I thought cool, I'll try it with the nyt - It'll be like the original iPhone demo again but no - it goes to a pay screen. Mercury Browser kind of worked though which is an app that "can spoof the UserAgent string to trick websites into thinking the browser is a desktop browser."
At the very least, the emergency contact info should be stupid simple to find (I'd say top level in Settings). This isn't an "advanced" feature, it's a fairly vital and basic feature of a cell phone. Family relationship specification should be simpler too.
Relationships is one of the features, to me that feels like Apple ended up building functionality on top of years after the feature was released, but since it was useless for so long nobody ever uses it.
Did you know not only could you specify your relationships, but other people's relationship's as well? I'm not sure if Siri lets you contact people this way ("Call John's mom"), but I wouldn't be surprised if a hidden update to Siri enabled this feature as well.
FWIW it's been in the MAC address book since the original OS X (jag-wire?)
It's a hard problem. Has anyone really solved it well that offers the use cases our current smart phones/computers have?
https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-con...
All devices need a universal undo so you can change something and easily undo if you get it wrong or you just preferred the old setting.
For security you could prompt after a while to make the new settings permanent and delete the snapshot.
"so-and-so is my wife" => it will update that contact's info (and yours). Then later you can say "text my wife I'm on my way home" and it will.
"call me Mister Smith" => it will update your contact's nickname and use that to address you
"Take me home" (or to work/etc.) => it will bring up directions in apple maps to the "home" address on your contact
They just changed the battery page in settings. Where's the tutorial? An obvious place would be apple.com/batteries but I don't see it.
https://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone
And no: Apple does not "believe their product is so easy to understand that people will just get it". You just made that up. It's...surprising what people will claim sometimes about what Apple "believes" based on zero evidence. The fact is, Apple knows very very well what is easy and obvious, and what isn't. They have done rigorous study of all of this.
I'm not saying that Apple always makes the right choices, design-wise. But to say that they are blithely ignorant of the basic usability facts surrounding the most successful consumer product in world history is...a bit of a stretch.
Edit: and according to the article, the manual doesn't cover a lot of the hidden features described in the article.
I learned at least five new things: select multiple pictures, announce calls, swipe right for forward, and a couple others I don't recall. I would rate myself as an advanced iphone user. I've made very complicated Siri shortcuts. But a lot of stuff has been rather hard to discover.
More likely to be found is that in the Tips app that a newly set-up iPhone tries to point you to, once you've gone through a few tips one'll suggest that you download the manual through Apple Books.
That reminds me of the 1990s scenario of having to know and understand FTP in order to install a web browser.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have it preloaded on the phone? I presume the OS is already regionalised, so they could include the appropriate manual.
It’s purely anecdotal but as far as I’m concerned I would rate discoverability as good enough.
You're being weirdly hostile about this.
I like Apple's design for the most part, and I enjoy a good comprehensive manual as much as the next guy, but the expectation these days is that software should be self-teaching. Presenting the user with an incomprehensible pile of options is bad, but so is only giving them a tiny subset of practical functionality. Good design presents the common/important options front and center, then lets power users drill down into advanced settings if they want. And all that should be at least nominally discoverable with recourse to the manual.
Stop being hostile, dude.
Poll a hundred iOS users and ask how many know there's a manual.
I have a feeling they also rely on less tech savy users buying in-person at the Apple Store where their sales staff can do whatever custom 1:1 training is required.
Loads and loads of people are older than 40. Loads of people just have weaker eyesight. Apple has really good accessibility tools, and it would make a _lot_ of sense for there to be a dedicated part of the onboarding for accessibility.
Onboarding was like 3 steps, including "plug in your old phone".
Better than cramming every such feature as a first priority, and making a UI that's confusing for everyday use.
They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them. Better than having all such settings front and center over more commonly used settings.
But they don't. You're a reader of HN. It is fairly obvious that you're the sort of person who, at a point when you need to accomplish something you don't know how to accomplish, will assume that it's possible and start with research. But there are a lot of people out there who will start with the assumption that not being able to see their phone screen so well anymore is just something to put up with. The entire point of this post and discussion is that Apple may not be providing the best experience for those users for whom it would never even cross their mind that changing the text size on their phone is possible.
Even most young people I know are not able to google things (even if it's some important information they urgently need). Or maybe they just don't get the idea of even asking the internet.
It's not like you're learning a new language everyday. Nor losing your eyesight. Keep in mind that the life of a cellphone is anywhere between one and six years, for most tends to be around three (speculation). Isn't reason enough to make it a top priority for people to be able to access language / text size changes in their settings everyday.
Text size? Same - I often have to show something to my elderly family members, but digging deep into the menu's to find the Text Size setting is very distracting.
I think what's happening in this thread is that people are simply attempting to justify bad design decisions without thinking things through. Language should be something you can change, with ease. Same with text size. Ditto, Wifi access, etc.
That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next on the menu" is contrived at best.
The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.
If that's the best argument, Apple is doing pretty well.
I'm switching languages I type in every whatsapp conversation.
On an older Android version that doesn't track per chat language, I have to switch the keyboard every single time. Three languages. And I happen to know more.
You don’t need to change the whole OS’s language to type in multiple languages!
3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control.
Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...
Then everyone does it a bit differently and there is this pre-parsing phase trying to understand which idiom people have written the text.
> That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one
I've lived in similar households. In KDE one can change the language on the fly for any arbitrary application or the desktop manager.
The Russian-speaking girlfriend, the Hebrew-speaking children, and the Spanish-speaking regular can all use KDE comfortably. I was actually surprised when I had to use an English-language Windows machine and could not change the language on the fly.
The vast majority of users in some countries may never change language, but there are other countries where multiple languages are officially spoken and where even members of the same household have different first languages.
For the phone form factor I would think that maybe language switching isn't as important since most people are not sharing their phones often, but for the iPad it might be more useful to be able to switch languages quickly.
I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)
FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:
- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.
- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.
This is what frustrates me about consumer electronics, that if you have a use case that the vendor doesn't want to support then you'll be constantly frustrated over what could be a simple software change.
Bingo! Apple have acquired immense expertise in applying this anti-pattern.
I‘m really not sure what else Apple could do other than:
- Asking during onboarding
- Putting it in Display as well as Accessibility settings
- Having a control center button
And of course there are still countries where there is no Apple store, but you see quite a few iPhones.
It seems a bit of a stretch to ask everyone around me to drive go there every time they get a new phone.
Reality: people who feel that they need help, and for most features it's a one-time trip with settings passed from phone to phone as you upgrade.
As much as I'm not a fan of their products, there is very little you can do to help users when they (by proxy in this case) ignore or avoid your attempts to help them.
Making the option easier to find after on-boarding might help, but for the users you describe it would need to be very easy to access and you will fill any list of quick-access options very quickly if you include things they may only want to use one or twice in the life of the phone rendering the "quick access" a big scary list that is neither quick nor easy. Even if you do find a good place for the option: will that class of user even know to look for it never mind find it? They'd just ask the person who on-boarded them instead so the technical level of the target audience has changed back to someone who at least knows how to Google for where to find a more buried option.
I know many people (yes, most of them older) for whom the idea of trying to look at an unfamiliar process on a computer (including smartphones) and see if it's something they can do themselves is just a completely alien idea. If it's not something they're already familiar with, it's Scary Technology Stuff, and they need a Technology Person to handle it for them.
So don't ask them. Default to a non privacy invading mode. Ask the questions later of people who wants the features.
I don't buy "this is the pinnacle of ease of use" and we can't get further.
Even so, all of those people have to change their text size just once or twice. They can look it up when they need to. It's not like it's a feature they need to use everyday.
Actually, I prefer a larger text size in the evening / night and a smaller text size during daylight hours. So I'm changing text size once or twice per day.
The main challenge there is just reminding people that the option exists so that they will know to ask. That and normalizing the idea of navigating interface elements by voice or querying the search bar rather than by physically scrolling around.
Worth noting that there's a fair number of apps historically that don't really support text sizing. Until iOS 11, if you were using a non-system font, you had to do the resizing manually. They made it much, much easier to buy in to Dynamic Type in iOS 11, so hopefully this will get better over the next year or two.
I don't think that was the point. The point was that people don't even know it's possible to change text size, never mind about other accessibility features, because they're not easily discoverable. Besides, the people who don't know about text sizing don't know about control center customizability either...
Our tech keeps getting more powerful, to the extent that the interfaces and sheer number of options outstrip the average person's capabilities to manage.
Like, as tech nerds we have no problem navigating lists of lists of settings, we can usually guess where a setting will be if it exists. But for a lot of people, just asking "Hey Siri, can you make the letters bigger?" would be more accessible.
Mind you I do believe Apple should release a proper manual. Barring that, there's a series of iphone books, websites and magazines that will go over these features over and over again.
If people don't invest the time themselves, why should Apple bother?
Also why is Apple and the iphone singled out? It's the same rhetoric for Windows, where the start button is a mystery to the computer illiterate.
TL;DR educate yourself or don't get an iphone.
I do believe text size should be an option for the first configuration though (and if you give your old phones to other people, do a factory reset and let them run through that initial setup themselves).
It gets complicated with apps though, designers often don't keep the variable size text in mind. That feature - at least when I looked into it a few years ago - gives you fixed text sizes to work, which is fine for default looking apps but a bit problematic when you're implementing a certain style.
-we have feature X but only 1% of users find it where 10 of users use it after someone else shows them how to use it. Maybe a feature that is only for 5-10% of users is advanced or niche but we need to design it better so this niche/advanced features are irrecoverable.
I do not know how to solve this on mobile, I know that some software on desktop has a tooltip dialog when you open it(with a checkbox to disable this feature) that presents some cool advanced feature, you can click Next and Next to see more and more advanced features. I seen this in Intellij, they also have a list of the actions you performed sorted by usage, so you can look at it later , notice you used action X the most and that you can speed it up if you learn or configure a shortcut
These type of complaints are the most common I hear from technical people that switch from android to iphone - the lack of customization, the product is on purpose 'dumbed down'.
This is after me owning 3 generations of iPhone (3S-4S) and an iPad AND the family owning one of every main iPhone since 3S.
Is turning off the device an advanced feature?
I guess most people really never need to turn it off. Maybe when switching sim cards to not hotplug them?
To say 'iPhones are hard to use' and then point out all the small edge cases of use as significant flaws is hyperbole in bad faith. The author is caught up in his own intellectual habit and not in touch with reality.
A better title for this article could be 'Simplifying complexity inevitably sidelines some of some user's needs'.
We should still keep it off HN. I expect the headlines to work for me, not for the author.
I don't think that his point is an overly broad indictment of the iphone so much as an analysis of where many of its more common flaws actually lie. I've seen so many criticisms of trivialities around colors in the calendar, but little analysis of what real people with basic knowledge don't know.
The fact that it is so iPhone centric leads me to believe that the author is a fan. I don't consider this bad faith at all.
The fact that an iPhone can literally be used out of the box with no user-manual (unlike an engine-diagnostic unit) is testament to its simplicity. I don't even know why I am arguing this point.
Does iOS get everything right? Nope. Is an ongoing conversation about UX important? Of course. My point is not that the author may or may not bring up some valid points, it's that he hung his whole piece off of an self serving, insincere title and sensational premise.
More and more we are declaring that there is so much noise on the web that it's ok to bait users with nonsense titles. Just a couple comments down someone advocates this. If you let principles like sincerity and honesty slip just to get attention you've let a piece of your integrity go which in turn mars what you are actually saying.
If what you are saying isn't interesting enough to warrant an interesting title, maybe you aren't as smart as you think you are, or what you have to say is less important than you think it is. Either way, don't hijack the attention of others to validate your own ego, work harder and earn the attention honestly.
“Hard” is obviously a definition that’s relative and varies from person to person. Maybe you could define it as some sort of objective metric where you poll people about ease of use, but then your definition of hard becomes subjective.
For a lot of people any tech is hard relative to the rest of their life, including the iPhone. My mom is very much not computer savvy and she runs into so many problems with her iPhone that would otherwise be obvious to tech users. When you really think about her problems often there is some unintuitive design choice causing it.
My point is that “iPhones are hard to use” is a very true statement for many people. I don’t think the author was insincere.
Within the spectrum of all personal computing, ever, I think today's mobile devices are some of the easiest to use. Blinker yourself from the realm the devices occupy and set idealistic goals and maybe you can say 'iPhones are hard to use', but you are likely being purposefully obtuse, dishonest, or willfully naive.
You seem to describe something as "hard" or "easy" relative to other things.
If your job is lifting rocks and all of them are really heavy, but one weighs slightly less, you might describe the less heavy one as "easy" to lift. Someone else might describe them all as "hard" to lift.
A lot of people in the tech industry, yourself included, seem to be in the first mindset. That mindset can be dangerous as it invites complacency.
This language matters a lot, because who wants to improve something that's already "easy"? Refusing to call something "hard" because it doesn't apply to what you view as the average or ideal user is picking a small semantic point in a way that avoids improvement.
Perhaps this is not you, but I've seen many people use language like yours("idealistic", "naive", "one size will never fit all") to dismiss turning a critical eye towards tech design. The argument seems to be that modern design is actually really good and that efforts to improve it are just a futile quest fueled by people who are unnecessarily critical.
Maybe that argument is right, but I don't think so. Whenever I get a chance to peek outside my bubble in the tech world and I talk with a less tech savvy user it becomes clear their relationship with technology is basically adversarial.
The iPhone can be "great", "easy", "hard", and "terrible" all at the same time. Refusing to accept calling it "hard" and describing someone who would do so as "obtuse, dishonest, or willfully naive" is a constrained and inaccurate mindset.
Saying that there is something you can do with a device without an explanation doesn't automatically imply that it's easy to use. Ease of use is a metric for how much of the full potential of something you can utilize with as little instructions as possible. The article has a point that this ease of use is quite reduced when you are disabled or don't have prior knowledge of devices.
I'm not saying that the title couldn't be less sensational but simply saying that iPhones aren't difficult to use is wrong aswell.
The author's issue lies with the complexity of today's modern devices vs. the number of people that require certain features. It's definitely in bad faith and, frankly, is nonsense.
I say this as an Apple fanboi with both a PC and an Android Nexus phone.
But I see his blog as one dude's opinion, who just happens to also be a good writer. Its hard for me to blame such a person for clickbait when I can't really see how they would even derive significant personal benefit from such clickbait.
As to your comment about the Daewoo engine diagnostics module, I've never used that one specifically, but you might be surprised at how easy some engine diagnostic tools are to get started with. And also how powerful they are if used really well, and how frustrating (and incorrect) they are if used for marginally more advanced things without a basic level of knowledge. The analogy worked pretty well for me.
Also harping on specific terminology like password vs passcode is not really productive in terms of improving the underlying UX, as the word gets translated into tons of languages which may or may not have the same level of nuance.
While I don't necessarily agree with the premise, especially when compared with the competition, I will say that iOS has not gotten easier to use over time. Features like 3D touch are implemented inconsistently both at the hardware level, and in the UX — Worst is how undiscoverable they are. Here's the crazy part: Apple is about to release the iPhone XR, their 1 and only phone without 3D touch!.
Both are great ideas, but only sparsely exploited even by Apple, itself.
With a long touch, it brings up a loupe that magnifies the text. With 3d touch it lets you use the keyboard almost as a trackpad to move the cursor around.
Great for me as 3d touch is so flaky on my iPhone since I got the screen replaced.
Without 3d touch you need one more step to open the app, and maybe more steps to find menu for payments(depends on apps you use)
edit: just found some apps(not all) provide widget to access features like payment...
So you don't actually need 3D Touch to have the benefit of the awesome cursor UX.
It’s a bonus for SE users without force touch. Seems obvious to include this, but I assume the reason they went back and bothered with it is the new XR taking force touch back out.
Since iOS 9. Early in the betas this feature existed for non-3D Touch iPhones as well, but then it was removed and restricted to models with 3D Touch.
I agree with the author that the iPhone is hard to use
No, it is the right-mouse click of touch interfaces.
I think the issue is that Apple keeps adding functionality to iOS, but seldom removes functionality. So all these "non-essential" features end up relegated to harder to discover actions.
That means that the fact that phone screens have gotten larger is irrelevant because whatever complications or features are added have to work broadly and consistently amongst devices of varying screen sizes. Web developers actually have it down best when it comes to responsive design but even responsive design makes for a different experience on mobile vs. desktop and I think Apple is trying to avoid that. An iPhone might be "hard to use" for someone that's not tech savvy but, once they learn how to use it, they now have an easier time across Apple's entire product line, not just that one device.
It feels like we have regressed a lot from where we were in the "golden age of the desktop". I mean, we actually had standards for things - remember CUA? And UX was designed in a way that made it so that once you learn a few basic tricks (like double click and drag and drop), they would work everywhere, and they would do so consistently. Consistency, in general, was key to the UX of that era. Some things might not have been as easy to access as they are today, but all things could be found where you expected them. Even the menu hierarchy was largely standardized.
Now, even if you stick to one particular platform, it often changes the concepts radically within 4-5 years; and many of those aren't even consistently applied. Worse yet, instead of fixing the mess, the UX designers just keep piling more and more stuff, like Apple's "3D touch".
To take your 3D touch example. I'll bet it went a little something like this; development said 'we can now detect pressure', leads (inc UX) brainstormed on ways to utilise the functionality. Then it's soley on UX to make it usable.
I've never been involved in a situation where I get to demand capabilities that hitherto did not exist. Nor have I ever held the power to stop-ship. We have varying degrees of touch on functionality as it evolves for sure but not the power you assume we have.
We don't live in a reality where any company, Apple specifically, says 'hey customers, we realised we actually got things right on the last release, please give us more money 'cos shareholders'
If everything was evaluated by cybersecurity and UX experts first, we wouldn’t have half the problems, but people aren’t interested in those sorts of issues, it is more of a matter of getting there “firstest with the mostest”.
That's an extremely brash assumption. The reason privacy and security haven't been built into the core of everything we do is because the ease of use within highly secure systems is inversely proportional to it's UX. The more secure you want something to be, the harder it is to learn and use.
I have used windows phone, linux, chrome OS, Blackberry's palm-like UI over the years, but I have gotten the hang of each over a small period of time. Apple devices however, are simply counter intuitive for me.
Apple seems to design UI for 2 types of people.
1. Old Apple users 2. The person whose phone use is the same as it was 15 years years ago + an app launcher
Because of those, I have seen 2 negative trends in their UI/UX design :
1. Sticking to old but familiar (for Apple customers) ways, even if they are cumbersome. (itunes) 2. Front loading everything that is heavily used by a layman (their launcher and quick setting menu), and hiding everything else behind a bevy of menus in settings.
If you have not grown up thinking like an Apple user and want to do anything advanced (my demographic), then their interface is incredibly alienating. The only other time I have felt this way has been when using SnapChat. (although Snap's was a lot more egregious than Apple)
I used an iPad for 2 months this Summer, and swapped it out for a Fire HD 10. As much as the iPad was fast, I can't be happier to be back to familiar territory in Android (even if it is on 5.1 Lollipop)
Granted, that my demographic may be the minority, esp. in the US. But, I can't help but feel, that the incessant praise showered on Apple's devices is partly because of the greater familiarity people have with those devices. And, that Apple won't fare as well if they were to be evaluated by an audience unfamiliar with their brand and devices all together.
2. Click compose button
How could that possibly be difficult of all things?
TL;DR - Compose is the correct word to use.
However, Android did not live up to my expectations at all. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but Android was not it.
After a while I came to understand that for me personally Android was a bad fit, and everything I had envisioned about running Linux on my phone was ill-adviced. Linux and FreeBSD are my main two operating systems I run on my own computers and servers, and I would not trade them for anything in the world on my main laptop, main desktop and servers. But on phones neither have anything to offer that is of use to me actually.
I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?
I use my iPhone for web browsing, watching videos, making music, playing some games, taking photos, 2nd factor auth, sending and receiving money, SSH client in my pocket, GPS with updated maps, listening to music, writing down notes, setting alarms, keeping track of my schedule, keeping in touch with people, creating PDFs that are indistinguishable from the scan a full size flatbed scanner would give me. The list goes on.
Everything I thought I wanted when I imagined having Linux in my pocket turned out to be a distraction. When I need Linux or FreeBSD, I have my laptop, desktop and servers for that.
Anyway, the point is to say that I don’t identify with the two groups of people you said are their target audience, but I find myself a very happy iPhone user.
But I am not married to Apple, and I am a loyal customer only because of 1. their stance on privacy and security and 2. their product fits me so well.
If they mess up with my trust then they will lose me as a customer. If they make changes to iOS that make using it bothersome, they will lose me as a customer.
It's not that things aren't possible (sometimes), it's that they're not discoverable.
If you can't figure out how to do things on an iPhone and think it's difficult, I'd wager a argument that it's because you're not just looking at what's there, you're trying to project your existing experience onto a different device and expecting it to work the same way. In other words (and I don't really say this sarcastically), you're using it wrong. If they were meant to be used the same way, they'd be the same products and they're not.
I could give you one. An actual user-accessible filesystem instead of having only iCloud plus siloed app-specific storage. (No, Apple's eventual capitulation to include a "Files" app which just aggregates files from different apps doesn't count.)
Proficient users aren't born, they're made. Or, increasingly, not made, thanks to contemporary UX trends.
I've had direct access to my filesystem on my iOS devices since 2012 and it is very very rare that I use it. And when I do it is mostly for fun and exploration, nothing a normal user would be doing anyway.
You and I know that a file is data and a file format is defined by the structure of the data.
Most regular users I have talked to don’t know this. If you ask them what a file format is they will say that the file format is determined by the extension of the file.
Even with a file system presented to the user you still end up with most people not having a real understanding of what files actually are.
Likewise, a lot of users will insist that certain file formats “belong” to some particular program, just because the extension associated with the format is handled by that program on their computer.
Furthermore, most users have no idea what really happens when you open a file in a program.
In fact I would bet that at least some are completely unable to distinguish the data of the file from the interface that they are using to edit the file.
A file system is a powerful abstraction, but I don’t think it teaches the “truth” on its own.
Neither do I think knowing about files is the most important for someone wishing to understand computation.
The most important to understand is what a data format is, and knowing that knowing the details of the byte-level structure of the data is what allows software to be implemented to interact with and optionally transform that data.
Furthermore, I wish more people knew some fundamental things about data like
- the difference between text and an image of text
- the difference between bitmap and vector graphics
- the difference between lossy and lossless compression, and how these work
- why some formats are hard to work with, for example extracting data from PDF files
Etc.
Understanding these things does not require a user visible fs, nor will a user visible fs help most people understand these things for reasons I stated earlier in this comment.
That's nonsense. Most users don't care that there's a file system and they surely don't care how it works. They care that, when they open up Microsoft Word, they can find the document they last created or an older document. They care that, when they open an app called Photos, they see their pictures. They don't care how they're stored by the computer or how they're organized, they only care that they can find what they're looking for when they're looking for it.
It may be easier for you to navigate through a file system because that's how you've adapted your workflow but to say that not having one is somehow destroying productivity is crazy nonsense. You're taking your individual experience and extrapolating it on populations that are not similar to you at all.
I mean... do you honestly thing that Donald Trump/your grandmother/a teenager cares that there's a file system on his iPhone?
My personal favorites are to turn off wifi if I'm not at home or work, turn off bluetooth if I'm not home, turn down brightness at night and shaking your phone to turn on the flashlight.
Personally I'm still pretty annoyed you can't replace the default url handlers for stuff like Maps and Mail. Every time Apple Maps pops up I curse them.
Pipe dream level: Apple Maps gains api-accessible import/export of geodata, (POIs, tracks, layers...?), so opening any compatible map app can both open at the 'there' location and can display the shared geodata.
(typically I use google maps for urban stuff, maps.me for pre-downloaded offline maps and POIs, ordnance survey for uk outdoors, michelin maps for france (the search is terrible, but having roads marked as scenic is fantastic), bikehub for cycle routes... and more. I switch maps a lot...but never to Apple Maps)
Haven't they spent the last decade expanding into new markets successfully though? And from what I gather their new customer retention and satisfaction is among the best in the industry.
People like to explain away Apple's success as merely the product of "fanboys" they've had for decades, as though the same 10 million guys who bought the first iphone are somehow responsible for the 50+ million phones apple sells each quarter. The truth is simpler: (1) yes they do have many loyal customers and (2) those customers keep buying Apple products because they have good experiences with them. It's also true that their design priorities are not universal and some are especially ornery for power users. But the idea that their UI design is inherently bad seems off and the fact that people keep copying them [1] seems like the best evidence.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17988564/chinese-phone-s... , money quote: "judging by the accuracy and specificity of the rip-offs, the camera app from iOS 7 has a serious claim to being one of the most influential software designs of the past decade."
Given the world's fashion industry is worth trillions, it will take a more persuasive argument than that to convince me it's not heavily influenced by people's perception of it as a status symbol.
> those customers keep buying Apple products because they have good experiences with them.
Or they've bought into the hype and that's all they experience on a regular basis anymore. My mom has driven a Mercedes for decades. My sister drove a cheaper one as her first car, and recently bought a much nicer one. Even if I wanted to spend that much money on a car, I don't like them, and have always had bad experiences with them. My mom's car was a lemon, in and out of the shop multiple times every year for the first 15 years, until it's been too unreliable to drive on a regular basis the last 5 years.
She's in a market for a new car, and both she and my sister are excited to get her a Mercedes. Their experiences should have driven then away from the brand years ago, but they haven't. Why do you suppose that is? I have my own theories.
The luxury goods industry, by contrast, is only worth 250 billion.
https://www.statista.com/topics/1110/global-luxury-goods-ind...
I feel your analogy is not very well founded.
I was using https://fashionunited.com/global-fashion-industry-statistics, which has slightly different values (but it's likely including labor force).
And yes, I meant fashion, including clothing. Either works in this case, as both are very large numbers, and a large amount of the general apparel category is also carried by brands and brand awareness. Just because it's not Louis Vuitton doesn't mean people aren't opting for the Gap instead of Walmart, Target, or in years past, Kmart because of perceived value and status.
> I feel your analogy is not very well founded.
Feel free to provide a counter example, or explain why the specifics you called out change the point I was trying to express. Maybe you thought what you already provided was self-evident, but I don't see it that way so I don't see how you've provided any evidence that it's not well founded.
In XXI century, in a western country, a smartphone is pretty much a necessary item too. Not on the clothing level yet, but it's definitely not a luxury category.
Status signalling is what a particular kind of "rich" person does to indicate they are rich or high value. Often also used to bolster social capital. You see it when women buy extraordinarily expensive designer brand hand bags. Men buying sports cars but have no clue what is under the hood. The key element is not the actual product but the visible cost involved in actually purchasing it - expense as a feature.
Seems there is a good manual online, but it's poorly advertised. The new features are often mainly announced once when you first open a system app after an ios update.
I've seem my parents repeatedly close them in a rush to get to the app. There's no "show me these tips later" option either, so they never learn the new features.
There are many advantages to the simplicity, but it's not wrong to say that new stuff is poorly discoverable. For pros and casual users alike.
That said, basic useability is great. Both of my parents figured out how to use iphones for their day to day with basically no tech support requests. Same with a mac. I was impressed, they always asked for help on Windows.
There is a Tips app which is visible on the Home Screen that contains general information such as "Welcome to iPhone" and "What's New" that contains tips on how to use the new features.
The app sometimes even nags you with "Tip of the Day" notifications.
It's a mystery to me why they don't have a list of tips for each stock app in the tips app.
However, as more features were added, Apple's desire to keep things appearing to be simple and clean, and their refusal to increase screen size, meant features get hidden away, behind swipes, long presses and double presses from different parts of the screen. I find iPhones really hard to use nowadays - even though they now have a lot of features which stopped me from buying them initially.
They also didn't send MMS. No Flash, at a time when the web was highly reliant on it. No front facing camera. No practical way to share files. But the interface was definitely simple and easy to understand.
I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G and have built apps for it. I know iOS inside out. I recently started a new job where the vast majority of our customers use Android. I therefore chose my work phone to be Android, so I could use the same platform that our customers use.
Wow - is it confusing! Nothing is intuitive, and I genuinely find it very hard to use and get into a rhythm with. It's a Galaxy S9, so hardly a "bad" Android phone.
My takeaway is that so much of the way we use our devices, especially our phones, becomes muscle memory. Android is not badly designed, neither is iOS, it's just that I've built up a decade's worth of muscle memory, coming from hundreds of interactions a day with the device, that switching to a different paradigm is going to feel jarring.
Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone. Of course, there are things that can be improved (with many decent suggestions from the author that most power users would agree with) but based on the author’s mild annoyances and casual observations that elderly, visibly challenged or foreign language people do not always know about features that can help them, iPhones are now “hard to use”. That’s quite an unfair title. There’s zero consideration by the author of how many hundreds of millions of people perform so many of the same tasks (email, messaging and navigation) almost seamlessly everyday using an iPhone. Our human nature is to only notice things that ‘dont’t work’ though. It would be interesting to see how the same people mentioned in the article fare on an Android device.
This article reminds me of the time when the iOS alarm clock app had a bug that caused the alarm to go off one hour later on some random Sunday and it made headlines in all the tech press. Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found in the public Google Play store.
Sure. But also, I'd say it's been written by a die-hard Apple fan who goes to Apple because they think they care. I was deeply skeptical of the article until I got some way into it.
You know you're the market leader when you don't get compared to other, shittier alternatives, you're getting compared to platonic ideals.
My phone cost $300
To add to the author's list of things that iPhone users don't know that Apple keeps hidden, several orders of magnitude more iPhone users have been infected with malware than Google Play Store users despite the Play Store having several orders of magnitude more users.
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malw...
So a quick google for xcodegohst brings up a Wikipedia page and widespread main steam news coverage (including BBC), with quotes from Apple - literally not hidden at all.
I consider anything that Apple says to be an ephemeral marketing gimmick.
Now let's compare that with Android and Google Play. According to Nokia's Security Intelligence lab, 74 percent of malware attacks are on Android devices. In 2017 alone, the largest confirmed Android malware attack was for 40 million users. That's verified installs. (http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/no...) If 40 million users were hit off of one app and there are 8.5 million infected installers on the Google Play store (https://www.sophos.com/en-us/medialibrary/PDFs/technical-pap...), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you're quickly getting past the 1 billion active malware installs that would double the single incident you cited (which, again, assumed that the worst case happened).
Additionally, you're completely ignoring the fact that the vector for the attack was the developers of those apps themselves who downloaded Xcode from a random site on the internet. They issued an update and the malware was removed. On Android, on the other hand, the only action taken was the removal of those apps from the Google Play store which means that the apps remained installed on all the devices they had infected.
The rarity of attacks on the iOS front alone makes your statements both misleading and disingenuous. Android is also installed on far more phones than iOS is so we're only even dealing with the malware that's been confirmed and discovered. There's likely an order of magnitude more malware installs out there that are silently doing their thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
That's cited directly from the article you posted. You're full of it and you know it.
Let's do the worst case analysis of my claim. Let's pretend that the users of all the iOS malware are a strict subset of iOS WeChat users. Let's pretend also that the users affected by each Google Play malware are disjoint. Compare the cardinalities of the resulting sets, and I'll still have orders of magnitude to spare.
Android alarm going off one hour earlier in Brazil also got some press attention today. https://androidcommunity.com/brazils-dst-change-inadvertentl...
How long ago? Should they sit on their laurels and do nothing? Or what if they have made progressively worse and worse decisions with regards to UX?
What they did a decade ago doesn't matter if what they currently produce isn't that simple usability.
Also half of the time I am in an apple store I am helped by someone who needs to use the accessibility features to check me out/in. I think it is awesome that Apple dog foods their products that way.
Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have. Even as someone who did IT support and handled a lot of iPhone troubleshooting constantly, I got blindsided by lots of small things, like when they switched the force reboot from power+home to power+volume down, or whatever it is now.
If you have a feature but nobody knows how to use it, is it really helpful?
They could easily include one but instead they encourage people to come to the Apple Stores and discuss the problem with a Genius. This in turn encourages people to look at at new products and get premium 1-1 support that you don't get from other vendors.
There’s a section that describes most everything that has changed in the newest iOS release.
(There was no "Tips" when I swiped left on my iPhone, or any of my Macs.)
iPhone User Guide
Before using iPhone, review the user guide at help.apple.com/iphone. You can also use Apple Books to download the guide (where available) or, to view the user guide on iPhone, use the Safari bookmark. Retain documentation for future reference.
I think this is sort of his point. How in the world am I supposed to know to do that?
The point is, devices used to come with a manual that had at least some guidance on how to use a device. It may not have exposed everything, but it told you the basics. Apple, anecdotally, has outsourced this to Google and the kindness of strangers like yourself, to tell me how my device works. And that's the biggest CX failure for me.
I've honestly considered switching to Android many times because the iOS premium no longer seems justified in terms of hardware or UX, and at this point the only thing stopping me is my suspicion of Google.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151204044205/http://www.apple....
My biggest gripe with Apple products is that usability is a freaking treasure hunt.
You would not have needed a manual in the past. Discoverability used to be a core tenet of the Apple HIG. Now that's apparently gone, and we're reduced to hunting through a "Tips" app or trying gestures until something happens.
That is a good definition of discovery...
"Today’s devices lack discoverability: There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen. Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? So often, the user has to try touching everything on the screen just to find out what are actually touchable objects"
Article here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
Historically large manuals do not help users use the device better. Ex. How well do you know how to use the advanced features of your microwave?
I would say apple is the least bad at this. They offer classes, every release has “What is new” progressions when you launch. Over time this is going to be an increasingly difficult challenge, as tech develops on a platform it builds on its previous patterns. You get to the point where some competence is assumed (correctly or wrongly). When I get into a car there is no display that tells me “this is a steering wheel, it turns the wheels in proportion to how much you twist it”.
This article has iPhone in the title because it talks specifically and exclusively about iPhones.
Of course there's always a lot of improve with UI and UX on all devices, but this article focuses on iPhones.
These are all common smart phone features. They only pertain to iphones because of the title and the author uses specific examples of otherwise generic problems in the context of iphone use.
I would say only iPhones have apple stores with classes specifically geared towards teaching the novice user how to use their phones.
If he had tried to imply that it covered Android as well it would have focused on some problems that Android might not have and probably overlooked a dozen more that it does have.
I don't think the author thinks that either platform is perfect.
“McDonald’s is dead cows.”
“Too much Smirnoff will get you drunk.”
It implies comparison to the competition, and cheats it’s way in front of an audience that wants to compare products.
Saying “Usain Bolt Too Slow” is obvious clickbait.
Also maybe phones could be more proactive in pushing the user to do stuff differently. Eg if the user keeps googling Facebook to get there it could suggest typing directly or showing a message about what bookmarks are.
But the title of this article is definitely click bait. I know I clicked on it indignantly thinking “maybe but no more than other phones”. Whereas if it had been “phones are hard to use”, then “lets look at the iPhone”, the chances I clicked on it would’ve been lower as I would’ve though “yeah you’re probably right”
It’s actually a pretty good article, that made me think about my job, just would’ve been nice to see examples from other platforms for comparison.
While I don't disagree with you, in the United States it feels like more and more the term "iPhone" is used to mean "smart phone." Like how people use the brands TelePrompTer and Dumpster as generic terms.
I don't know if this is good or bad, but I've heard the phrase "Android iPhone" twice in public.
Don't you think it has iPhone in the title since the author is an iPhone user so the article is about iPhones? Every example he gives in the article is specific to an iPhone.
Maybe the article could be generalized to other smartphones, but the author's experience is with iPhones, that's what he wrote about in the article, so it seems appropriate for the title.
These are all common smart phone features. They only pertain to iphones because of the title and the author uses specific examples of otherwise generic problems in the context of iphone use.
I would say only iPhones have apple stores with classes specifically geared towards teaching the novice user how to use their phones.
By default it reads out all the prompts for setting up your PC with Cortana, so if you wish you can setup everything via voice. I haven't ever tried it, so can't comment on how well it works, but it seems like a good start...
Hello
Son
Is
This
Working
?
She worked out how to send texts.
I upgraded her to an old iphone. I sent it to her in the mail. She worked out everything including how to take photos. I told her about LINE and she found the App Store and downloaded it.
Her phone died so I bought her an android cos I couldn’t afford the iphone.
She can’t figure it out at all. She had to go to the store to ask how to connect to wifi. How to use the play store, etc.
I thought cos she went iphone > android she would be able to pick it up. That isn’t the case.
iPhones may have hidden features. But they are a lot easier to pick up than an android phone by a Long shot as far as I’m concerned.
But that's not actually it. People who go from iPhone to Android find Android difficult to use. People who go from Android to iPhone find iOS difficult to use.
I'm now convinced the greatest UI innovation this century is the Back button. If IBM PC keyboards had a big dedicated "back" key the world would have a been a much better place.
So weird.
I used my coworker's iPhone yesterday, opening a link from a text message, and couldn't figure out how to go back to the message. Swiping in from the left side went back... within the browser, which had no back history. I had to go to the home screen and open text messages again.
On Android, you just hit the back button and it goes back to the previous app in the stack if you launched one app from another.
If you want to go back to the previous app you can swipe from the left on the home indicator, or on older iPhones swipe from the left with force.
The other problem is that no application trains the user doing this with for example an animated hint.
Knowing and using that makes the back button for users without disabilities superfluous.
While the author has mentioned a lot of things that I never knew existed or even care about, I don’t understand why Apple should have to make these things obvious for people who would never use them.
After 6 months number of "send from my iPad" messages is finally starting to increase.
The old Windows computer caused lots of arguments and angry text messages with me. I'm not a fan of mac os, but best thing ever for my parents.
The X's interface is so different from my old 4 that it took a few days to get adjusted, but I can honestly say that I like it better now. I can't think of anything I miss about Android at this point.
Almost every important action I need to take in an iOS app is hidden behind a gesture. In Android apps, gestures are value adds. They make on-screen actions or actions accessable through contextual menus quicker to accomplish for the experienced user. In iOS they're essential to accomplish some tasks.
But there goes the discoverability. The three nav buttons were simple and effective.
2. Quitting apps completely (not having them run in a background thread)
I agree about point #1, but I'm also not sure how to make copy/paste particularly obvious with touch. To be fair it's not really obvious with a mouse or other external pointing device -- it's something we just have to learn.
Creating folders is the same as iPhone.
There is a caveat that if the icon was held very still then you'll open a menu similar to 3D touch menu. I never use this because it isn't that discoverable.
It has 6 functions, on a single button, based on how light or quickly you press it - single click, long press, double click, single tap (lighter then a click), double tap, triple click (if enabled)
I've had somebody come to a PC repair shop for columns being the wrong size in Thunderbird. She wasn't a dumb person, but it's clearly a deeply flawed and incomplete understanding of the interface and computers in general that led to her inability to cope with the entirely new state of her desktop (yes, I'm still talking about the columns).
iPhones literally do have an unskippable screen during setup that prompts you to choose a text size
https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/pu...
As someone with reading glasses the useful thing is to make text big in the web browser which you can do sometimes in Safari by clicking reader view stipes top left and then the aA thing top right. Took me ages to figure that.
I've always been okay with dark humor, never thought any subject (e.g. holocaust, cancer, etc) should ever be taboo matter for humor regardless of how dark it is in reality. I would never presume to tell a comedian "the material you used for that skit, that's really not something to joke about."
To me it's the same principle. I certainly would never mean to mock those with autism or their families who struggle alongside them, and you have my utmost respect for the difficulties involved, but I don't feel that the subject is of such gravity that I can't use the word as hyperbole in a private context.
Not sure it's any of your business what he says to his friends in private, even if you have an autistic son.
I can see a case where this would be valuable, but I'm not an old man and not likely to be in an accident where the only thing I can do is press the not-the-volume side of my phone a few times. On top of that, it was only a year ago that this was an inconspicuous shortcut for disabling your Touch ID from an attacker or the police. Now it makes an alarming in what might already be a tense situation. If you have an iPhone, you probably want to review your "Emergency SOS" settings to better understand what the few remaining buttons on your phone do.
By the time I left, they had completely revamped those workshops to be mere Q&A sessions. My biggest gripe about these Q&A style workshops is that most of the people attending weren't aware of what questions to ask.
This seems completely fine to me.
The idea is to help people solve their problems. Not give them solutions for problems that never had in the first place.
She didn't think that she had a problem because she didn't expect copy paste to even be a function on a phone (as she is not a confident computer user either).
I agree with most of the criticisms in the article, but copy/paste is just one of those things that is never going to be 100% reflexive or intuitive on a touchscreen.
Sure someone can Google "how do I copy paste on an iPhone", or maybe Apple could somehow make the feature more intuitive (they probably can't as you say), but fundamentally the user is required to understand that:
* The iPhone is a computer underneath
* Computers have standard sets of features for text manipulation, one of which is copy paste.
* Being a computer, the iPhone should likely also have this functionality implemented in some way.
If you don't understand these three things then why would you assume that there would be ANY implementation of copy paste? My Mom didn't understand that copy paste as a concept was a thing
This is why the educational programs that the grandparent poster was talking about are important and it's a shame that they're gone.
It's a lot easier than trying to precisely aim your fat meat fingers on the itty bitty text!
On my Sony phone I can take a photo, press the "share" button to get a context based share menu and my most recent signal/email contacts appear right at the top ready to send without leaving the camera app at all. If I want to send it to someone not on that list I have to get into another screen but not two.
The Facetime menu sounds quite crazy and very "un-Apple".
I see my mother struggle quite a bit with her iphone as well and she wants a dumb phone again but I think that would happen with an android too!
You can do that on the iPhone too. What the person you're replying to is talking about is if you're already in messages, the interface for pulling a photo in is now an extra step over what it was before.
Nobody knows that they can swipe up or down on the screen? Tell me where Android shows you this during setup and tell that it's not the same with most devices.
This article should just be "Smartphones are hard to use".
Heck, there are features mentioned in the article that I don't frequently use, that doesn't mean I should nor that Apple has done a bad job at showing me.
Nowadays I notice Apple mostly just markets the new shiny. The XS commercial is a masterpiece of vapidity, they don't even pretend it's anything but brand.
It's like typing. Learning to touchtype was one of the best things I've ever done on a return for investment basis. All I did was stick a little printout of the keyboard layout under the monitor, and committed to not look at the physical keyboard ever again. It was slow for a couple of weeks, but from then on I could touchtype. It was not such a massive burden. But most people I see are still painfully hunting and pecking, even people who use a computer all day long in a professional capacity!
I know there is much more that Apple and other manufacturers could do to make things better, and definitely they should be doing those things, but the main problem IMO is that people are just lazy. They want their phone to do complicated things, but they don't want to spend the time to learn how to do those things.
It would be good if there was easy training for these things though, maybe some kind of beginner courses? I know some community centres/libraries have courses for beginners and older people... But most people just expect to automatically be able to use a smartphone with no training, knowledge or effort.
I don't mind learning a new interface or even coming up to speed with an entirely new UI paradigm, if there's something in it for me. But my objection is that as soon as I learn it, someone who is paid to look busy will change it for no reason other than to justify their role in the company hierarchy.
Obvious examples include almost anything from Microsoft ("Metro^H^H^H^H^HWindows 10 is awesome! You just don't like change!") or Google ("We have altered GMail. Pray all you want, we're going to alter it further"), but Apple is far from guiltless.
When that happens, it's hard to escape the feeling that your time is being wasted... and as you suggest, the older you get the bigger a deal that is.
I still believe the iOS UI is terrible. Navigation is all over the place, the wall of icons gives no preference to priority (other than creating folders), the icons and colours change (as mentioned in the article) and interaction is inconsistent (press/long-press).
But everyone learnt the interface so now it's 'good.'
The hardware Menu button was the best way to make advanced options easy to access, and it has been removed completely in favor of an inconsistent three-line icon that might or might not appear in any location on the screen, so you have to look around for it. Stupid.
I'm sort of waiting for them to bring those back before I upgrade my phone.
For example we bought my gf's mother a smartphone and she has a very limited understanding of what the difference between her plan data and storage on the phone is, which causes a lot of confusion.
She uses it mostly to take photos which eventually filled up the storage on her phone, so she became unable to send or receive photos from her children.
She was confused by the error messages coming up that the phone storage was full and thought they meant that she had used up her phone plan data. Because of her limited understanding of how it works, she was unable to deduce that those two things might be connected, so she was expecting the phone to become properly functional again at the end of the month when her plan data resets.
That's just the first example that comes to mind, but there have been many others.
The sink can only hold so much water at once, but she can use more/less water each month than the sink can hold. If the sink is full, she has to drain some water to be able to add more. Also, if she uses too much water, she may be charged more than she was expecting.
I've explained storage vs data this way to a few people and it seems to have been useful.
While I agree with exactly what you're saying here, I don't think Apple's UX choices pertain at all to how a computer works at a fundamental level. Even changes between OS and software revisions have upended what I thought I'd learned about it, which is entirely dissimilar from using a keyboard where you can literally just look down at your hands if you forget where your hands are or if you are using a new layout.
As far as hand held computers go, using a Palm V was much easier and more comparable to a keyboard in the sense that I had to internalize the Graffiti alphabet. Once that was done, every setting and system application on the thing was clearly laid out in consistent forms and modal dialogs, with the input working consistently across all applications. You didn't have to coerce it into marking text instead of magnifying, and its analogue to iTunes wasn't a backpack-sized Swiss army knife.
I know how a computer works at a fundamental level, but whenever I have to use iTunes to manage the data on my phone I'm in for a googlefest. You don't need some cargo cult residing on an Apple user forum to give you various more or less outdated opinions on where the tilde key is located on the keyboard if you happen to forget. I could probably tell you on a pretty detailed level how MP3 works, but to this day I haven't figured out how to get songs off my iPhone to the PC.
Meanwhile, I've had phones and MP3 players that I could just connect with USB and they'd show up as mass storage devices with a regular file system. Perfectly intuitive no-nonsense approach compared to launching iTunes once a year only to learn that they've completely reworked the thing so that you can now only enable uploading plain MP3 recordings by checking some obscure checkbox hidden away in a dialog accessible from a menu.
To be fair, the trivial features I typically use on a daily basis all seem very intuitive and accessible, but any slight step off the path Apple has laid out for you is always a pain in the ass, which in my experience holds true for OS X to an even greater extent. Often it's not hard, but unergonomic and esoteric. Often, as is the case with managing music on the thing, there is an obvious alternative that would be much more user friendly.
How can you learn to press and hold , or press harder, or shake the phone, or whatever else when there's no manual, you don't even know there's some other way of interacting, there's no getting started video, etc. I firmly believe that if companies actually wrote a manual for their software, they would ocassionaly make things more obvious, so it would be easier to write the manual.
Yes, a lot of people wouldn't read the manual, or wouldn't understand it, but not providing a manual means those few that would read it can't.
I agree there should be a manual. My phone (Samsung) has an almost useless pdf manual available.
But I also think that most people do not spend anywhere near the time necessary to learn how their phone works or how to use it. They wouldn't read the manual even if it was available. They don't watch the intro videos that play when you first start your phone out of the box. They expect to just get it out of the box and it to magically be completely usable for them.
There's lots of ways they could learn those things you mentioned. Libraries and community centres often have courses for beginners. There's youtube videos. There's books. There's endless websites. Nothing makes most techies special except the motivation to google the things they don't know. Most people don't even try, and just muddle along with what little they already (don't) know.
Most of those extra gestures you can get away without knowing, can't you? I'm not on iPhone but on Android you could get away with just using the home button and tapping on icons on the screen to do almost anything. Tapping on a touchscreen to activate an icon hasn't changed since the first touch devices in the 90's.
I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that not everything has to be obvious, and in my opinion it is ok to have some learning curve for advanced operation, in the same way that many of us have spent extra time learning to touchtype in order to save time over the long run.
If you dumb the device down completely for the lowest capability user, then it will limit how a person willing to put in that learning time will be able to operate it.
Hmm. This is a reflection of the author's bias towards not having the features he likes on the Iphone be more in your face, and the features he finds annoying are labelled as useless.
The two factor ID, is there as a CYA for Apple, so they won't have to deal with the fallout of their users' accounts being compromised. Those are the types of features prioritized and forced. The same goes for touch ID, in addition to it making new purchases a seamless and more effortless process, it also helps deal with chargebacks and the like. When I use touch ID to call a Lyft, I have esseentially 'signed' the CC receipt of that transaction.
The other features he finds annoying, may be annoying to many people, but those are key features that most people would otherwise not turn on, and as a result have a poor experience with wifi. the list goes on.
It effectively prevents phishing attacks and helps mitigate weak/reused passwords.
Everyone should have it turned on. If you don't have 2FA turned on, it's just a question of time until someone downloads all your nudie pictures.
I am not overly fond of how Apple does things but they are doing a so-so-okay job trying to pander to the least-common-denominator.
Like what do you want, an unskippable popup about the difference between email providers and email clients, and instructions on configuring IMAP and SMTP on a 3rd email app? That would only lead to more fear and confusion. The Gmail app is fine.
You know what the author didn’t mention? That with any Apple device you can go in for a 1:1 session or a class on usage, and the people running them will walk you through everything. They’re also good at identifying people struggling to use the device in various ways and know about all the accessibility options, which in general are more plentiful and much better supported in iOS than Android.
My mother got an iPad after years of owning only android devices, went in, and not only did they walk her through it, but they let her know that a new iOS release would be coming out soon which would change a few things, and invited her back to a second session after that change if she was at all confused.
Wow I have been an iPhone user for many years now, spend several hours a day using my phone (according to their new screen time metrics), and I did not know this!
The issue is people; most non-tech people either don't care about learning how to properly use a tool they'd be using for the rest of their life, or are scared to for whatever reason.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Dumbing down the UI for the lowest common denominator doesn't seem viable - it would completely kill any productivity (try to do your job with the children's toy equivalent of your usual tools), and I'm not even sure it would solve this - the "target market" of such change would most likely also get annoyed by it (I noticed that the people we're talking about are outright not interested in spending any time setting up their device, so a 50-step setup screen is unlikely to sort out the issue).
Maybe the solution is to let "natural selection" take its course; eventually you'll be expected to know how to operate these devices if you want to function in society. And honestly that's fine by me. There are already tons of things you are expected to know if you want to operate in today's society (social skills, managing your finances & administrative tasks, etc) and everyone seems to be doing fine with that.
And for aging parents, the simple mode works fantastically!
He says that few people understand AirDrop, Apple Pay, iMessages Apps. Even though we have numbers on Apple Pay adoption (people do understand it) and we know how much Apple invested on Animoji (many younger people love apps).
Also does he know Apple has anonymous telemetry ? They don't guess what is popular or not. They know.
Just as everyone learned to use Windows because it was everywhere, people learned to use iOS. That does not necessarily mean it's especially good.
I have a parent who is terrified to use the internet while on WiFi because they don't want to get a huge bill at the end of the month. I have done some explaining to reduce that anxiety and I'd like to tell them not to worry about it, but frankly, iOS doesn't help at all, both in terms of managing data, communicating how much LTE data you are using, etc.
I know others who spend hundreds of dollars extra per year on "unlimited" data plans even though they have no need for it. But it's easier than trying to manage their data. Imagine how many people who don't understand data usage are spending hundreds of dollars annually on data plans they don't use "just to be safe" because the phone company might send them a $5K bill if they accidentally misconfigure their phone to allow Netflix access to cellular.
If iOS wants to be layman-friendly, there has to be a better way of handling data and communicating to a user what the status of their data usage is. This is just one example.
Also simple would be intelligent alerts for data usage, including alerts for apps that are known to use large amounts of data. (i.e. “Are you sure you want to use Netflix while not connected to WiFi? This may cause you to exceed your data limit.”)
Besides a user curated version of this, how would your phone know which apps use a lot of data? Sure, we can probably knock out youtube/Netflix/spotify, but then:
1. You really don't think Youtube/Netflix/Spotify are going to complain that Apple, by default, discourages people from using their app?
2. I'm personally uncomfortable with the idea of my phone collecting how much data I'm using per app and sending it back to Apple. Privacy is one of the reasons I buy an iPhone.
3. Setting this up leads to some very shaky experiences. How do dual sims work? What about data-only/voice only sims?
4. Bizarrely, some carriers bill traffic differently. T-Mobile, for example, bills Netflix traffic differently than other traffic.
This isn't a bad notion, but a blanket pop up actually has a ton of competing interests going into it.
If your phone knows about your data plan, it could prompt you when you're using data at a problematic rate -- although special pricing does make things weird. Anyway, it could have a button to not show for that app / ever again in case you don't care.
With respect to Apple collecting data about bandwidth usage - I would have assumed that they are already collecting that information from me on an anonymized basis.
<body id="APOSTOPHES-body-id" title="Claudia, you are banned from here">1) There's no way to scroll the text while moving the cursor by moving it to the end of the last visible line, the way there is with the cursor interface you get by directly touching and holding the text.
2) Sometimes when I'm doing this it will randomly select the word my cursor is over, and I've never figured out exactly what triggers this.
Applying extra pressure toggles selection mode--you can further move the cursor around to select more text
This should work–at least, it does for me.
> Sometimes when I'm doing this it will randomly select the word my cursor is over, and I've never figured out exactly what triggers this.
On 3D Touch devices, pressing harder does this.
I should have been more specific: this works for me up to a point, but there’s no way to keep scrolling. To see what I mean, try to use that method to delete the last character of a long URL in the address bar of safari — you can’t scroll all the way over to it.
> On 3D Touch devices, pressing harder does this.
I had suspected that might be the case, and I’m able to reproduce it now. Not having any haptic feedback on the second, harder 3D Touch feels inconsistent though.
It’s kinda like the “tap the clock to scroll to the top” feature, I think I discovered it by accident one day.
1. Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for the same article again.
2. Some apps don't allow me to open a url in Chrome, for some reason I have to do it in Safari. And why can't I delete Safari altogether? How's it's different from Microsoft and IE in the 90s?
3. There's no easy, automated way to disable background running, bandwidth consuming apps while connected to hotspot in macOS. This should be obvious I don't want to backup 30GB of data to Backblaze while on my data plan.
Apple would very much like you to have the experience that apps do not change when you leave them. There are a couple ways that apps break this model, though: if they use a lot of memory, iOS will kill them in the background. In any case, apps are supposed to have state restoration to get back to where they were when you last left it, but few apps implement this correctly.
> Some apps don't allow me to open a url in Chrome, for some reason I have to do it in Safari. And why can't I delete Safari altogether? How's it's different from Microsoft and IE in the 90s?
Safari is the system browser. I believe the difference from Microsoft is that iOS is not a monopoly?
You're probably right. But Facebook isn't just some random app - it's used by around half of all iPhone users, and Apple is known for lengthy acceptance process in their app store. They should be able to detect such cases. And if Facebook doesn't implement the model correctly who will. Also, switching apps is such a common pattern it shouldn't be garbage collected that fast in the first place.
(sorry for the semi-off-topic rant)
Smartphones are sold with the underlying assumption that 'user friendly' equates to zero training or learning. The idea is that UI is so intuitive that you can simply pick the phone up and use it.
It's clear that this novice strategy has upper limit respect to the number of features.
If you spend $500 on a device that you use more than your car or computer, maybe you should spend 6-12 hours to learn it. People take courses in woodworking, knitting, why not smartphones.
I completely agree with this. And if you're not willing to learn how to use a device, why would you buy one anyway?
The title of this article is click-baity. "I think iPhones are hard to use if you're old or disabled" would have been better but that doesn't drive readership, I guess.
I've been forced to do this recently on android. In chromium, the default search engine has location permissions by default. No way to disable this without patching and recompiling chromium. So if you leave google as your default search engine, which is what it ships with, google (i.e., *.google.com) gets location permission. So my workaround has been to set AOL as the default search engine. When I really want to google something, I have to go to google.com.
On the other hand, my mother who in her 70s recently got an iPad and an iPhone and is able to engage more confidently with those two devices than any PC or laptop she owned in the 30 years prior. And my son who is 4 years old is able to move around between and within apps fairly effortlessly - without even knowing how to read.
So while there are definitely some things that could be improved in iOS, I think it's also important to recognize that the iPhone has ushered in an era of unprecedented usability for the general public.
I agree with this, except for the part about the article being pretty reasonable. The valid complaints Clark makes are largely ones that could be made about Android phones. And many of the complaints are, as commenters here have pointed out, not really about smartphones at all (e.g., "this elderly person didn't understand they could connect to Gmail without downloading the Gmail app").
And, yes, I get that sociopolitical opinions are orthogonal to technology opinions, and that you can enjoy/respect someone's writings on Subject A while finding their opinions on Subject B to be a little bonkers. But it's tough to separate those subjects as a reader if they won't separate them as a writer.
The author touches upon a topic that I also have seen and experienced countless of times in my life, which is the need for a better first-run accessibility settings onboarding experience for users that would benefit most (e.g. senior citizens), that also can be trivially skipped by more tech savvy users.
This new onboarding flow can be triggered by apple determining a person's first time ever signing into that model iPhone, under the assumption that most new users to the platform would benefit the most from becoming familiar with these accessibility features and where they live in the settings from the get go.
I know many senior citizens (including my parents) who would have greatly benefited from a heavy accessibility settings onboarding experience, due to many of the issues the author mentioned regarding eye sight and vision related age decline.
It's a shame that a company like apple, one that pioneered usability and human factors in designing products for people since their very beginning (see Human Interface Guidelines [1]), buries these crucial accessibility settings and makes them so difficult to reach for the people that need them the most.
I hope someone from apple is reading this and can champion this topic internally to improve the lives of senior citizens, cause we'll all be old some day scratching our head trying to use the latest and greatest iDevice...
[1] https://kneeland.me/2011/10/07/2010s-smartphone-screens-are-...
The problem that Apple has to deal with is how to teach people without having 1-on-1 time with every single user to watch what they're doing, and this article offers no solutions for almost anything. (Except for asking for a few things to be part of the on-boarding process, which semi-solves some issues - text size is now part of the on-boarding process, but often, the person using the phone is not the same as the person setting up the phone, especially with older users I imagine).
Beyond that, I don't know how much of a responsibility it is for the phone to push its accessibility options on everyone after initial setup.
Take the iPhone camera;
Obvious: taking a picture with the shutter button
Easy: switching between front and back cameras is easy to discover
Possible: switching between HD and 4K (in the settings menu - possible to discover.
Unless your product is as simple as an office stapler, some parts of it will be non-obvious, that's fine.
However, Apple makes it as easy as any Android vendor to explore their devices, except that on any Apple iOS device it is the same system, and almost the same tricks. Not so on myriads of Android devices.
I must admit the bit that some features are indeed hidden, so that I cannot find them exploring. Sometimes I read an article about iOS devices and discover functions I didn't know my iPhone could do.
Maybe Android is a bit more consistent, because there is universal 'undo', plus the idiom of three vertical dots on the top right for 'more actions'. But subjectively I've found that Android has even more 'randomness': you are trying to get something done, something else opens, then something pops up... it's all deterministic of course, but not intuitive, so it feels accidental.
I think the single "Omni-Pull Down" from the top works way cleaner than the now 3 seperate pull from side of screen actions. I actually find pulling up from the bottom difficult and frustrating.
Swipe to dismiss, tap to open makes so much more intuitive sense than swipe to open.
Text editing / selection does what I expect way more often.
Android doesn't bug you about Wifi access points by default.
This one is controversial, but I think a visible always available back button is a huge accessibility win even if it's sometimes inconsistant in behaviour.
Also, the Google Assistant at this point is probably 10 times more accurate and understanding than Siri. I have a pretty standard midwestern accent and Siri understands almost nothing I say to a pathetic degree. I use Google Assistant to do probably about half of the quick things I want to do on my phone like set alarms and such. I don't trust Siri to do anything.
A lot of things of course are worse just because they vary between manufacturers and even individual phones.
The fact that many OS components are replaceable is a double edge sword. My dad for instance somehow installed a dialer that made him dismiss an advertisement before he could answer his phone. He had no idea how to get rid of it and assumed he had broke his phone.
As a recent iPhone switcher I can't stand the "back" behavior. I was so happy to discover the swipe right to go back feature until I realized that it didn't apply to images and other full screen elements (where there's an "x" instead of "<back" in the top left corner). For those you swipe up to dismiss. So now I have to keep mental state for what type of content is currently displayed to know how to get back to where I was. This is more annoying than Android's inconsistent back button experience IMO.
I not only agree, I'm still disappointed they got rid of the menu button. Used to be a single consistent, visible, always-there interface across apps that now is done in several different ways.
And now in the newest Android, the back button will be appearing/disappearing/changing direction. Not nice.
Dang, this finally explains a "bug" in one of our apps. (We primarily do web apps, so we don't have in-depth knowledge of platforms)
Claudia had to do something awful.
I insist this is not an optional or nice-to-have feature.
For a usability expert, I'm surprised he cares so little about the actual intentions of people to use the phone. I can imagine a lot of non-technical users who would get pretty mad if their new phone blocked them from proceeding until they've personally asked aunt Betty to fill in her personal data.
You are right in pointing out that it could be better, I think that the "Tips" app can have a dedicated section for accessibility features and video tutorials on how to use certain features of inbuilt apps.
They could also have an app dedicated to Accessibility features, pull out the existing accessibility settings from Settings app and show them one at a time in a UIPageViewController inside that app.
When you have a phone that can do 10,000 different things limited to a screen a few inches wide, of course it's going to be harder to do some things than others. And there will be some inconsistencies and some annoyances.
It's not like any other phone is obviously way better. Yes there are plenty of UX things that could be improved... but "iPhones are hard to use" is a clickbait title, and the content is just a totally random laundry list of one person's annoyances. Doesn't really seem like HN material.
Whatever level I left a speaker or headphones, that's where it starts next time I connect, completely separate from whatever I have the built-in speaker set to.
Mine doesn't have a cap per device, but I'd have to manually click up on that device to get louder than I left it.
First time I realized it was remembering all these different listening volumes, I was pretty amazed.
Sometimes people will stumble onto solutions, or someone they know will mention them, or they will actually be bothered enough to search for a solution. But it pains me to think of all the instances of problems that could be avoided if we could do a better job of bridging the knowledge gap.
That applies to me too when I discover something and wish I had known about it far earlier. I try to actively search for solutions, but sometimes you aren't even aware that something is a problem.
I mentioned this to a colleague and he too had to turn it off one day but didn't know how.
The steps aren't intuitive and if you ask me again to do it, I would need to Google it again
Really it's not how often you need to do it, but the fact the most basic and fundamental step of turning off a device can't be accomplished with searching online.
People are different. That's part of designing for an audience - software design needs to balance micro and macro level affordances. Extremely customizable isn't always extremely pleasing. 'You can please some people most of the time, but you can't please everyone all the time' (or something like that).
This is a case where someone isn't pleased. Some claims are true, while others are hot air. Based on the author's blog, they enjoy being a self-righteous asshat on the internet. If the author strives to bring points to light in an abrasive and inflammatory manner, rather than a sensible and constructive dialogue, then at least he has that working out well.
Steve Jobs called it “an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator” … that was hard to swallow (or learn), but today that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’re fortunate enough to understand the majority of the features you shouldn’t be embarrassed by the ability to help someone figure out the myriad features and details …
Are iPhones hard to use: absolutely not … unless your expectations are off the charts and you think a device that complex should require no effort.
That said, it would be funny if Apple eventually launches a device called iPhone that only makes phone calls.
- Too many features I'll never use, that mostly can't be removed. Less is more.
i.e. I'll never use Siri or facial recognition. Never owned a bluetooth device. "Screen Mirroring" What? in the Control Center. Yet those and more always in the way, sometimes draining battery.
- When radios are off to save energy, constantly nags about connection with modal dialogs that prevent use of the home button.
- Can't use it as a flash drive (w/o grudging workarounds)
- Insists on using white backgrounds at night. Night mode saved my life but would prefer a dark theme at night. Clock is the opposite, hard to read in the day time. All hardcoded.
- Can't disable the always accidental swipe from top stuff I'm never interested in.
Btw, thanks to the author for linking to how to disable apps in iMessage, just more clutter I didn't want. Totally unintuitve, BTW.
Bonus: There's App and Microphone icons in the iMessages entry field that take up 1/3 of the space. Don't use Apps there and might use the microphone button once a year. Hit it mistakenly often.
Open the Photos app, search for "people", and it will pull up photos of people's faces. Tap on one to make a full screen picture, and swipe it up , it will show "Related" people and pictures. You can tap on someone to find more photos of them.
Even if you never tagged them with names.
(You can also search Photos for general terms, like "flower" or "snow" or "food", it's doing image recognition on all pictures somewhere). iOS 11, 12 at least.
It's doing it on the device.
An On-device Deep Neural Network for Face Detection
Apple’s iCloud Photo Library is a cloud-based solution for photo and video storage. However, due to Apple’s strong commitment to user privacy, we couldn’t use iCloud servers for computer vision computations. Every photo and video sent to iCloud Photo Library is encrypted on the device before it is sent to cloud storage, and can only be decrypted by devices that are registered with the iCloud account. Therefore, to bring deep learning based computer vision solutions to our customers, we had to address directly the challenges of getting deep learning algorithms running on iPhone.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/11/16/face-detection....
Phones can only go so far to give use good, mechanical intuitiveness. Press a button, see what it does. Now make an object to 500 different things and obviously only the most important things for the majority of the population will be easy to access, even if it’s not intuitive, because of icons.
Basically this forced us to move from mechanical thinking to something less concrete (digital, non-analog) which is something many older people and those with disabilities may have a harder time adapting to.
Android, iPhones, “smart” TVs, they are all confusing to some extent.
The problem isn’t iphones or androids, the problem is how we design things. The digital world is still very bad at doing things intuitively for a brain that starts life in a very physical, mechanical world.
Maybe I'm projecting, but the "solutions people" at the company where I work have endless horror stories of how "people actually use our software".
"Trans-Exclusive Radical Faggot" springs to mind as a quick male alternate to "Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminist" but it does have the slight problem of containing a word that a lot of people currently put in the "slur" category.
I also thought I needed the Gmail app? didn't Google stop with any open protocols? (xmpp, imap, carddav?)
An iTouch? Please... And should Apple change their core UI for everyone because some people are almost blind? Sure they can be accommodating, perhaps a button can be placed somewhere, or better a Siri instruction for people with poor sight to activated a more clear UI. But don't change the UI for everyone because of this.
Would Siri understand a mispronounced street name? Who asks their phone for directions anyway? And why does she need help when the street is already on her screen? What at that point would help her? Seems like the iPhone was pretty helpful.
Ok, I'm starting feel sorry I even gave this any attention so I'm going to stop.
Take for example a senior using an iPhone:
My grandmother, 77 years old, has had her iPhone for 2 years. Prior to that, she had no mobile at all and has not used a ton of technology through her life.
She learned to use her crucial apps: Mail, Safari, Notes, Calendar and Contacts by herself.
She will only ask if there are different ways of doing things if she can't figure it out by herself—which is very rare.
I agree that Settings can be cluttered to navigate, but it's also assumed that it's not an app that people use every day. Taking that into account, the General tab is usually where you find what you need when it comes to changing most settings anyway.
Actually, this happened on my wife's iPhone 5. Granted, they don't actually exist anymore (or at least aren't buttons), but it very much did happen.
This is what Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman both of whom were first few interface designers are Apple, also wrote the Human Interface Guidelines. https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9743996/apple-designer-i...
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
and also later Don Norman independently
Quick, if you could change one UX that would maximize the numbers of lives saved, what would it be?
(For the purposes of this thought experiment you get to force all users to watch a 30 second educational video one time.)
Change the human brain response to eating vegetables and exercise so they felt good, while any other "food" and lazing around was unbearable?
My biggest gripe about iOS is how terrible autocorrect is. Even as I type this, iOS is aweful at predicting what I'm entering when I miss the letters. When I had an Android phone I was always delighted that big G was so good at getting my words right and at predicting what I would type next so I could speed up my input just by selecting the right words at the top of the keyboard. Impossible to do with iOS.
> "What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product? Apple could have designed its phone so that the majority of people could read and use the phone without having to label themselves as needy, disabled, and requiring assistance."
...as just a few days ago I reluctantly traded in my iPhone 6 for the iPhone XS. So far, I cannot get over not having a home button. (since it was mentioned below, I just want to point out that my gripe isn't about not wanting to adapt to a new interface; it's about what Don brought up). After exploring the OS menus for a while I found that, I could add a button to the screen that mimics to a small degre, much of the functionality of the home button Apple previously entrained me on. Of course this option is tucked under the accessibility preferences. In fact, I found a half-dozen 'features' under accessibility that I decided to turn on.
Pic: http://bit.ly/iPhoneXS_accessibility
Note that the floating home button is labeled AssistiveTouch. Here is a really short video I just made attempting to use this slippery-ass button...
Hopefully I can adapt to the default XS patterns soon, so I can turn off some of some of these accessible features, apparently intended for the iPhoneXS-disabled. I'm just wondering why these things, which to me just seem like user preferences or options are nested under the accessibility tab. Then again, maybe Apple is trying to tell this 6th-year phd student that I'm no spring chicken, so hurry up and graduate already.
[1] Don Norman article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
edit: Anyway that was Don's main point.
edit2: oh I also found this kinda funny, as another example: Note I've turned on 'reachability' in the 'accessibility' tab. This accessibility option allows people using their phone with one hand to swipe down at the bottom of the screen to shift icons from the top-half to the bottom-half, so if you're an 'inaccessible' like me who doesn't have thumbs that reach the top corners of the screen, you can still use those apps.
The iPhone gets a lot right in terms of discoverability and usability of 90% of its functionality, but that last 10% is frustratingly hard to find definitive answers for.
There’s also a further 10%: The functionality you think the iPhone might or should have, but doesn’t. Good luck getting any official source to confirm though. You are left to trawl helpless forums.
Also, I think there are many points being made that are either down to people being told incorrect information, or them just being plain wrong.
Regarding using Spotlight to search for apps/files: "Find a spot in Springboard (what’s that?) with no apps or folders." This is wrong, you can swipe down even over apps or folders.
"The simplest task that is functionally impossible to do (also on Macintosh): Play exactly one song." Wrong
"Apple Pay. Inscrutable and scary even in countries that have had chip cards forever, like Canada." This is not Apple's fault. Here in the UK, we've had a very good chip&pin system, which was updated to wireless readers a few years ago. And Apple Pay just works with them automatically. You'll find it hard to find a place that doesn't support it. I've heard that it's completely the opposite in the US, but does that mean the iPhone is hard to use? Also, it prompts you to set this up when you first use the phone.
"Because Apple calls its passwords passcodes, nobody has any clue at all that you can use an alphanumeric password instead of a string of six digits." Oh really.
I could include many other quotes here, but it's getting boring. But there is one point that is just absolutely fundamentally stupid - "If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not)". There is no way you can say Apple doesn't care about accessibility.
Another point I'd like to make - Even if there's an "advanced" feature like AirDrop, using Siri to schedule a meeting, or using an Apple Watch to receive directions, on your phone, it doesn't mean you will know how to use it immediately. And that is not by default a bad thing. But anyway, I think a lot of these features are easy to use. For example, when using the share sheet, AirDrop automatically appears at the top of the view. With names and images of nearby devices/contacts. Surely it couldn't be more intuitive?
Maybe when people spend large amounts of money on something, they should put more effort into learning how to use it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It absolutely, completely is. What pointers to the hidden features, or more information, are built into the very trivial onboarding phones provide? What quick reference leaflets are in the box? What brightly printed card with a QR code to the downloadable beginners guide, or full manual is there? What getting started app or link is there on the home screen?
None at all.
My microwave, stereo, car, kettle and lawnmower all included more get you going guides, links, sometimes PDFs, sometimes proper paper guides. For trivial often single purpose items.
Search for a user guide for a phone, or Android/iOS and you'll get shitty third party sites and/or programming guides for developing apps. Apple happen to have a really comprehensive one, that's not exactly mentioned anywhere, that you can download into books. They could include it on all phones for zero effort and loss of a tiny amount of storage.
Tech manufacturers should be deeply embarrassed.
No need to include a 3 volume printed manual set, just a card or two signposting current, relevant resources. A simple app on the home screen would suffice too.
> Maybe when people spend large amounts of money on something, they should put more effort into learning how to use it?
Maybe the resources could be subtly telegraphed to the people when they spend large amounts of money on something. Like just about every other category of product in existence manages to a far fuller degree.
There's a mini user guide in every iPhone box.
Also, Apple includes the Tips app by default on iPhones, that continuously prompts about features, and guides on how to use them.
Only other things in the box were a sticker or two, and a single sheet of absurdly microscopic print with warranty and regulatory info etc.
My recollection, which may be faulty as it's been a while, of the tips app is it included mostly bits of trivia but nothing particularly useful or substantive. Basically just tips - not especially surprising.
Apart from that, I agree that iOS has too many hidden features and — first and foremost — too many interactions that you must know exist and you can’t find by just glancing at the screen (which is defined as mandatory in Apple‘s User Interface Guidelines).
So, yes, their products get worse. But, no, not like described in this article.
The best you can do is shake the phone and if you don't drop it it might undo for you ...or it might just redo the bogus autocorrect when you retype the word.
Whole websites are devoted to ridiculing people for sending text messages with "hilarious" autocorrect errors in. Still Apple can't or won't improve it.
There's no apparent way to fix this bad UI design.
So now I have a raspberry pi do the same task with no issues. Bonus feature is that no update can remove this functionality again.
Jesus christ talk about intrusive annoyances akin to dissociative anesthesia. Stop trying to be quirky and random.
Why is that popping up?
Once you show people how to use a certain feature they get on quite easily.
Insane amount of productivity is lost because a lot of people don't feel comfortable with their digital tools and think they have to live with whatever default settings are.
Then there’s everybody else. "
I've never cared to watch a keynote, but I am a fairly advanced user. Makes me feel like the author lives in a bubble...not that his many points aren't well taken aor wel stated.
They probably changed it back once he was gone.
I actually find it quite interesting. At some point, it's true, the home button was a common point of failure on iphones - and a kind of memetic "folk wisdom" idea was born that everyone should use the assistive touch button instead. This idea, which "everyone knows", persisted (and persists) long after the actual issue had been fixed. I am still seeing it today with iPhone 8 users! Hopefully the advent of FaceID finally puts it to bed.
Another good example of the genre is the "common knowledge" that you let your phone/laptop battery run down before recharging, and don't keep it constantly plugged in. Might have had some validity back in the days of NiCad - actively wrong advice in the age of LiOn. But the meme persists...
Many of the items outlined in this article could be included in the phone setup wizard like other settings.
Not going to lie but the iPhone hands down is a pain in the ass. Battery life is shite compared to the China phone, the thing constantly goes to emergency menus in my pocket or tries to tap pay for shit.
Reception on it is AVG at best (both phones on same network) and it's general usability sucks. Like can't even just plug it in to transfer files, the fingerprint sensor has about 1/3rd the hit rate of my China phone, the thing can't shoot video while in a phone call, hell I can't use my earbuds for hands-free while it's on the charge because it has no headphone jack (oh and the stock headphones are about the tinniest worse quality sound I've had in half a decade). Christ I could rant for dayz but you get the point the list goes on.
Tbh all these things suprise me, I've avoided iPhones like the plague for moral reasons but I figured/assumed the phones would have decent usability. Apparently I was wrong as I have been forced to discover thanks to work.
I would have to agree with the article, shit that is simple and fairly easy to do elsewhere becomes a tedious task W/ iPhones.
The level of complexity is far too much for me. What Apple seems to think are obvious things (Eg UI interaction elements) are not obvious to me.
A thoroughly frustrating experience.
Any of the hundreds of capabilities that are made easy and obvious, cause other capabilities to become more obscure and harder to enable and even know about.
- Main volume control
- Ringers and alerts volume control
- switch on side of phone
- Do Not Disturb mode
- Sounds => Vibrate on Ring
- Sounds => Vibrate on Silent
The most useless of the bunch, maybe that's why nobody even bother to mention it?
Anyone who wants to add more steps you cannot skip during setup is completely lacking in credibility when it comes to user interface. QED.
yikes
Is this true?
Some more observations:
1. The author mentions the manual on the Apple Books Store but doesn't even mention the Tips app that's been around a few years and shows some neat tips to discover some (not all) features. Apple ought to expand on this one more.
2. Some of the issues that the author lists are not easy to solve without having a long, tedious and difficult to use onboarding process when the device is first powered on. It also sounds like some of the examples he quotes are about people where someone else did the onboarding and forgot to setup certain things correctly when handing the device over to someone else. How can iOS or any OS solve these issues? The onboarding process, by some measures, is already long and incomprehensible by many lay people. For example, what exactly is "Location services" or "Notifications"? Taken to an extreme, some concepts (not these) are almost impossible for a device to explain to people. They're only a little bit more easier for people to explain to people. Computers are difficult for most people. Not everyone needs to know everything or every feature. But people learn over time because there are others who teach them things.
3. Also, telling people that they can ask the iPhone for directions and that Apple should make sure people know about it is a catch 22. In India, Apple Maps cannot even find well known locations in major cities or provide directions to many places. Siri doesn't understand the Indian English accents (yeah, there are different accents depending on where the user is from within the country) well. Apple would have to know how good some of its services are and decide to tell people or not tell people or completely disable them in certain places. In this example, should Apple not tell users in India about Apple Maps or about Siri? Should it wait until another major release when these services are better? What defines "good enough" or "better"? Maps is almost useless in India, but Siri is not completely useless. It has some utility.
4. While writing a rant is easy, I wish the author had also spent some time on providing some suggestions or solutions for at least some, if not all, of the issues.
5. Email this to people at senior executives at Apple. That's something the author could've done after writing this post.
I couldn’t get this to work.
>Show a magnified absolute-centred duplicate of nearly anything onscreen you cannot actually manipulate, like whatever is in the title bar. (Try pressing and holding on the battery icon.)
Neither this one.
Do I need some obscure accessibility setting for these?
- Asking during onboarding
Not sure how much hidden there it is. It could be more obvious, but I'm not sure how.
BTW pushing every setting in your face is also a design anti-pattern, so the complaint has to be taken lightly. (Also the "Apple doesn't care about usability" is just cheap words)