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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

I think the points that are well taken are those around identity, relationships and contacts. I've been using iPhones for something like 8-9 years and I didn't know I could specify a contact as a specific family relationship. A while ago when I wanted to configure emergency contact information it took me a google search to figure out that I needed to find the Health app buried on the last screen of the phone.

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.

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It's a niche feature that has been there since at least iOS 4, (or at least I've known about it since iPhone 4, when I had the time to meticulously comb through every app on my Phone), but it wasn't actually useful until several interations of Siri later.

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.

> It's a niche feature that has been there since at least iOS 4

FWIW it's been in the MAC address book since the original OS X (jag-wire?)

Yes, the feature has been there since iOS 1.0. Siri on iOS 4.0 started making use of it to enable voice commands (e.g. “call Mom”)

You can also tell Siri relationships, “x is my brother”

I'm sure that everyone has something that should be stupid simple to find.

It's a hard problem. Has anyone really solved it well that offers the use cases our current smart phones/computers have?

No, and I don't think it can happen until users are empowered to be driving design decisions. Designers may need to serve as facilitators of the design process.

https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-con...

I'm not about to try it right now (don't want to mess up my contacts) but I'm pretty sure you can just tell Siri that "suchandsuch is my wife" and she'll update the relevant Contact cards for you.

This is correct.

"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

If you ask Siri "call my wife" before that, Siri will tell you he doesn't know who your wife is and ask for a contact name, then ask for confirmation, and finally persist the information and proceed with the call.

Right there you highlighted the biggest issue most people have. They're scared to touch or change anything in case they mess something up.

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.

And if you think people are terrified of messing up the iPhone itself, they cower in mortal fear at trying to do anything in iTunes, which is still, a decade on, inexplicably the only way to do many things with an iPhone (like, for instance, back it up if you don't trust your personal info to iCloud...)

Talk about a feature my 89 year old grandma will be terrified of.

Jane will find it funny if you say “call my wife” and it calls someone else instead I’m sure.

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