A Design Critique of the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

A Design Critique of the iPhone

kingsley2.com

10 pointskingsley_206 comments

I'd welcome some feedback. I haven't seen a real considered critique of the iPhone's user experience, so I decided to pool some long-dormant thoughts into a short essay.

I think you made some great points, esp. re contacts as non-first-class entities. Another obvious one (that maybe you avoided on purpose) is the notification system.

I thought it was interesting that you didn't compare it to any of the other platforms. For example, you could have talked about Android's contact widgets, which are placeable on the home screen and, when pushed, give you a modal dialogue with options for phone, text, email, etc. Did you avoid talking about other platforms on purpose or have you just not had access?

I didn't quite understand your last point about the slide to unlock. You didn't indicate what exactly you don't like about it, and didn't provide a better a solution or a even a direction toward one. Also, I'm not sure about the similarities to the Win95 start button. Is it just the location on the screen (bottom left)? Is it a visual similarity thing? Maybe this is just something I missed because I'm not in your intended target audience ("design community")?

I'm also unclear what the problem is with slide to unlock. Some kind of unlock has always been necessary on any kind of non-flip phone. It's certainly less awkward than the button press combo's that were necessary on the old feature phones.

I think the author is referring to the "slide to unlock" explanation, with a reference to the infamous Win95 "Click here to Begin" that used to appear above the start button.

I don't necessarily agree that it's a horrible design decision, but it is very unlike Apple to invent a control that needs on-screen instructions instead of just being intuitive.

It's not horrible, but we should expect better, especially from Apple, and there's no harm in setting the bar high for Google and MS as well.

I use an Android as my primary phone now after a year with iPhone 4, so I'm well aware of the capabilities. I refrained from comparing it with anything else for 2 reasons:

1. The iPhone was the first out the block, so I didn't want to compare it with a product that came after. and 2. I want to save the comparisons for a later post. I left notifications out again for the same reason - I think they deserve a whole post of their own.

WRT "slide to unlock" I think there are many easily obvious metaphors/ visual cues that could be used to make the action apparent. For (stupid) example, they could have used something like a translucent zipper. Or a real lock. Almost any metaphor would have worked.

Using text to prompt the user to perform simple, should-be-dead-simple actions is just lazy design. This is the same thing that was annoying about the "click to begin" bouncing arrow in Win95. You make a grey button on a grey taskbar, place it in a corner, so you need to add an animated arrow+text pointing to it because users don't know where to click.

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