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Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

That isn't Apple's fault though.

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.

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You can make the onboarding so simple they don't need help?

Not if the problem has nothing to do with how simple the onboarding actually is, and everything to do with the users being scared to try things.

Why?

Why? It's literally the whole reason for that article. It's "hidden" because these older people are too scare to even click on a setting button.

Maybe I suck at the Socratic method. Maybe the onboarding should be much easier. I think that if people must ask a friend to set up the phone, something has failed. It should just work and setup should be optional. If you wanted to migrate all your data and settings from a previous phone, you should be able to do that later, without wiping your phone. There's a lot yet to do in UX, not much explored. Apple really owns the "slick" game but they could spend some effort on the next billion customers.

It doesn't matter how easy a particular procedure is on an iPhone or anything else if the person trying to use it is so scared of technology that they don't even try.

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.

Honestly I don’t think it could be any simpler. The problem is some of the questions it asks about privacy and the cloud are beyond the scope of many people. But these questions need to be asked.

It can't be simpler but the questions are not simple?

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.

I lost count of the people who complained about their iDevices features not working properly because they intentionally (so they thought) turned them off. Having eg location services turned off by default and not ask about it will just lead to tons of people complaining that directions don’t work properly. And asking them the moment they open the builtin maps application will make them close the app because ‘it does not work’ and ‘there’s an error’ and ‘iPhones are so complicated’.

I think you will find much of this is because of the current balance struck between privacy invasion and usability. If brilliant minds were put to it, I am sure location services could be mostly client side and not server side. And so on. Just writing it feels heretic and crack-pot, except it wouldn't have to be.

Location services are client side. You turn it off if you don't trust client side apps to have access to your location.

Do you know what iOS onboarding even looks like? It literally can't be more basic without removing the exact thing you are trying to make a point to have.

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