And now dumber than ever. At least on my iPhone 6s with the latest update. Now you have to go through 2 screens to send a photo to someone in imessage, whereas before the most recent photos were easily accessible. And on facetime you have to pull up a menu [that covers the entire screen] to flip the camera around, and if you accidentally hit it a couple times theres no way to know which way your camera is facing without closing the menu.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was feeling old when I became confused by the facetime pull up menu and accidentally disconnected the call, unable to figure out if the camera was flipped, and how to get back to the call.
Agreed on this one. Does FaceTime really have that many controls that they need a separate menu rather than just lining the ever larger device screens with them?
If you let the app bar show above the keyboard, you should be able to select photos by tapping on the appropriate icon in that row, which will show your latest photos. I agree that it is a usability regression but this option was better than always having to tap twice to attach a photo.
Two screens to send a photo sound like a bit of a hassle.
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!
>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.
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.
It's actually not. The gallery has just been moved to a Messages app, right above the keyboard (the Photos icon). It's a bit jarring to get used to, though.
Yeah, this took me a while to get used to because I was used to navigating to photos via the camera icon. Now, they are separate flows, although the camera still lets you get to the photos.
Accessing the recent photos is now accessed directly as one of those "iMessage App" icons that appears in the ribbon above the keyboard. However, the UI change is annoying and I constantly open the camera (though you can also get to recent photos by tapping the icon at the upper left of the camera, when inside messages).
This is far and away the most annoying change for change's sake they did. Battery screen is a very close second. If I go to the "Last 10 Days" tab and click a blue bar, I can see my total hour usage. Can I click a green bar and get the exact percentage? Nope.
I'm not too familiar with Android phones but having tried out my parents' Androids (and watched them use the phones) I gotta say everything is hidden there as well.
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 currently own both Android and iOS devices, and have used both for years.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes. If any smartphone vendor exposes all of its settings front and center right now, then people would just throw their hands in the air and quit right there and then.
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.
I thought that when I read, "He (a senior citizen) also thought he had to use the Gmail app to read his Gmail"
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.
There is a difference between feature use and phone usability. A lot of people seem to give Apple a pass on usability because Apple are stylish, or the marketing says they're brilliant, or something.
There's a lot to unpack here, and a lot to disagree with, as I believe there's plenty of evidence Apple cares a lot about accessibility.
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!.
For what it’s worth, I use 3D Touch pretty much every day. The number one usage for me is moving the cursor around while editing text. I actually did it while writing this post; I decided I wanted to add a comma after “worth” at the beginning and did so easily with this feature.
Tried it on my iPhone 8 (by disabling 3d touch). It seems to be a lot less precise for whatever reason. And one issue is also that the swipe always starts at the lowest end of the screen and it's not easily possible to scroll downwards with it, since one starts at the spacebar which is at the very bottom of the screen. With 3d touch one starts the gesture somewhere in the middle of the keyboard, which provides room in every direction.
That's amazing, thank you. I had no idea this was possible on my iPhone SE. I'm assuming that there is a lot of other things that my phone can do that I am completely ignorant of.
iPhone X with 3D Touch enables: the space bar longpress worked for me. This is actually more convenient as the 3D Touch hurts my finger and sometimes activates the alternate letter options.
This is really great, thank you. I wish Apple’s weird “intuitive” gestures were more discoverable, on both macOS and iOS. They are often good, but they lack the visual hinting that you get from keyboard shortcuts.
The long touch cursor movement is different than the 3d touch cursor movement.
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.
That's not the full story. From iOS 12 you can do the long touch on the spacebar and get the same functionality as the 3d touch on the rest of the keyboard.
Great for me as 3d touch is so flaky on my iPhone since I got the screen replaced.
I also use 3D touch many times every day.
Mainly for mobile payments, example:
1. Pay for bus fare: unlock->find app->3d touch->select "show payment barcode"
2. Instant payment in restaurant: unlock->find app(e.g. wechat)->3d touch->"show payment barcode"/OR "scan barcode" to scan restaurant's bar code for payment
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...
Drag space bar is new in 12, but two finger drag on iPad has been around a bit longer.
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.
Whaaaat? I'm on my 3rd iPhone and I never found this, I just assumed that Apple was punishing people who wouldn't upgrade to 6s by denying them this feature.
Fun fact, before Apple so graciously incorporated this feature into their software, it was a tweak you could install after jailbreaking the previous versions of iOS. Same with the "quick reply" from notifications and a dozen other actually useful features. This behavior from Apple reinforced my belief that all they do is absorb other's innovations, make them shiny, and then sell at a ridiculous markup.
I agree with the author that the iPhone is hard to use
3D Touch is great when it works. But sometimes it just doesn't. I know on my 6S, there are times where 3D Touch stops working until I restart my iPhone. It is so frustrating that it sometimes works/sometimes doesn't and if you push to hard it's another gesture altogether.
Did you get your screen replaced by a third-party? My friend has this same issue and the only thing we can think of is that it's his mall kiosk screen replacement.
I also use it every day, but for apps. Many of the apps I have on my home screen, have "shortcuts", not in the new siri way, but in the "do something/go somewhere quickly in the app" way. I used it to call a person, I use it to open a new tab on Firefox, I use it to add a new todo item, I use it to go to a specific tab on an app.
I would be very sad if it goes away at some point..
Samsung manages to include the "shortcut" functionality you mention AND the ability to reorganize apps through a simple long press. Like a commenter above already mentioned, 3D touch was most likely a solution looking for a problem.
I sure hope not. If I were buying a new phone this year, that single feature would get me to pay the extra $250 or whatever to get an XS instead of an XR.
No it won't. Pressure sensitivity is built into the hardware. 3D Touch is just a feature of that hardware functionality. Unless they get rid of the hardware, which doesn't seem likely since it's used for other things, 3D touch is probably here to stay.
It's gotten worse. Screens keep getting bigger, but more and more functionality keeps getting hidden behind undiscoverable swipes and taps. I've been an iPhone user since the 3G, I used to program computers for a living, and I don't have a reliable mental model of what the available gestures even are these days. I'm reduced to randomly tapping and pressing and swiping like some sort of idiot.
I feel the same. And when I learn how it works I get it but it doesn't rub right to me, I say to myself weird. I think it's apple without Steve Jobs super crazy attention to detail and the overall feel of it degraded over time.
> but more and more functionality keeps getting hidden behind undiscoverable swipes and taps
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.
I don't think that's the biggest part of the issue, though. I think it's that whatever functionality is there has to work across a broad range of devices. Someone mentioned consistency and that's what's key here that I think most people are missing. Using an iPad is, generally, the same experience as using an iPhone even though an iPad has a completely different set of utility than an iPhone.
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.
I'm generally dismayed at the state of UX in general, and mobile UX in particular, these days.
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".
20 year UX veteran here. It's absolutely unheard of for UX to be the final arbiter on marketing &/or development driven features.
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'
Product design is inherently a push system. If it was needs-based pull, the world would be slightly different.
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”.
> If everything was evaluated by cybersecurity and UX experts first, we wouldn’t have half the problems
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.
People have the same sorts of problems with most non-trivial devices. In the extreme cases mentioned in the article the solution is the same that the author discovered: some who knows, teaches someone who can benefit. There isn't an obvious solution to this problem in general that wont make the system harder to use for intermediate/expert users.
It's a weird blog. As well as the Claudia tooltip and throwing around 'autist' as an insult, the title bar at the top also has the 'title' attribute set to "Analogous to allowing transgenders to rewrite gay history. (Ask a Millennial who started Stonewall)", and it looks like there are a bunch of links/rants about "trannies" in the archives. Not that that should necessarily detract from what seems like a pretty reasonable article about usability, but it doesn't give me a good feeling.
Not that that should necessarily detract from what seems like a pretty reasonable article about usability, but it doesn't give me a good feeling.
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.
There are persistent bugs in common functions also. E.g. in messages attach a photo, press the left arrow and then come back to the conversation. The photo will be messed up (XS with the latest update).
A number of years ago, I was employed by an Apple Retail store. I don't know how it is now but when I started (in 2010), they would hold employee-led workshops on the basics of iOS devices and how to customize them.
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.
Most people don't even know that they have a problem because they are unaware of what they should be able to do. They think that any preventable annoying behavior is the natural state of the machine. I was spending time with my parents awhile back and happened to look over to watch my mom try to communicate some content from a website she was looking at to a friend. She would go back and forth from the browser, to the message, to the browser, to the message, reading and typing. I asked her "Does that site block copy paste? Why aren't you copy pasting?" She gave me a blank look. I showed her that copy paste was a feature and it blew her mind.
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).
Easy to complain about copy/paste functionality, but how else would you implement it?
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.
I'm not complaining about the implementation. The problem isn't just how features are implemented, it's that many users lack the mental models to successfully use these devices at even a basic level.
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.
I know how to copy/paste on an iPhone and it's still an insufferable operation. I don't know if my fingers are fatter than the average but I find it next to impossible to select anything, or even place the cursor at the end of a word instead of selecting an entire word for that matter.
Same here. I just learned yesterday that iOS 12 allows you to rest your finger on the space bar to begin moving the cursor like you would a mouse. Use another finger to tap the keyboard (anywhere) to start and end selection mode.
It's a lot easier than trying to precisely aim your fat meat fingers on the itty bitty text!
Ok, I need to say it. This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views. This is a problem with not just all smartphones but all rapidly evolving technology products. Do you think you could hand an android phone to one of those example cases and have them do any better with it?
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.
Just because all companies handle the problem space really badly, doesn't mean we should excuse it.
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.
The “Tips” feature (Swipe left from home) points you right to the User Guide downloadable from the Books app for the device. It also prompts you with this info shortly after you finish setting up the device. It’s a 600+ page manual that describes every single button, gesture, function, menu, for every preinstalled app on the phone.
There’s a section that describes most everything that has changed in the newest iOS release.
I also just checked the paper insert that comes with the new iPhone and the first thing at the top of the page is the following:
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.
Well there are many ways to get there, tap the Tips app that is preinstalled on the home screen on a newly setup iOS device. As I said, it also sends a notification shortly after device setup directing you there.
I've literally never seen the Tips app. Granted, I haven't had a new device in a while; but I don't recall this being present when I bought my iPhone 7, and it certainly didn't show up when I upgraded to iOS 12 over the weekend. And as someone who has had iOS devices for a while, I'm not sure that I would ever get it, since my first thing is usually to just transfer a backup to my new phone.
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.
Yeah, the Tips app is new in iOS 11. It might have been relegated to some "Preinstalled" app group somewhere or pushed to one of the last pages. It's definitely front and center on new phones now.
It showed up in iOS 9 and gave you both a push notification and a message during the initial update to iOS 9 (whether that was an upgrade on-boarding or a setup as a new device).
> Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have
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.
Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini (an original Apple HIG author) wrote a great article about this a few years ago. Here's the excerpt describing discoverability:
"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"
I’m a big fan of Don Norman - I read his book when it was called “The Psychology of Everyday Things” while I was studying industrial design in the lat 80’s. I disagree with him on this. Discoverability varies between products depending on the complexity of the interaction model.
I wholeheartedly agree that more accessibility focus and ease of adoption for novices is something the industry as a whole should focus on.
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”.
I disagree unless you are saying:
1. Only iPhones can adjust text size.
2. Only iPhones have mapping functionality
3. Only iPhones have a voice activated digital assistant.
4. Only iPhone have a health app.
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 I were the author and I was only familiar with iPhones then I would be extremely wary of making claims about other phone OSes that I didn't have as much experience with. Nothing in his article says that other phones don't have these problems—he's merely asserting that iPhones do.
Exactly. I mean, Android has most of these issues, but I believe that Google's latest initial setup strongly encourages the configuration of emergency contact information just as one example.
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.
It's still justified because Apple prides itself as the pinnacle of usability. It's one thing if $RANDOM_ANDROID_OEM builds a bad UI. It's a whole different thing if Apple builds a bad UI.
Almost all of it can be applied to not only Android phones but also Mac, and Windows. The problem is that everyone needs a slightly different set of features to be at the front. There is no way any software maker can surface the features a user needs for everyone. At some point the user has to take responsibility and learn the tool they bought. If it was anything from a coffee machine, to a tractor, the user has to learn how to use it, and also use it all to it’s full capacity. With accessibility issues this is harder I know, and yes Apple should put text size settings in the set up process.
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.
This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views
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.
This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views
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.
I disagree unless you are saying:
1. Only iPhones can adjust text size.
2. Only iPhones have mapping functionality
3. Only iPhones have a voice activated digital assistant.
4. Only iPhone have a health app.
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.
Microsoft have done a pretty good job with Windows 10 when you first set it up.
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...
All tech is hard to use. All our interfaces expect a certain amount of familiarity with abstract concepts that have little to no relation to the real world. Most people get by because they memorize the most obvious processes (how to save a file) and build their own largely incorrect mental models that happen to give the correct results most of the time (assuming a consistent environment). As soon as something minor breaks or changes, these models become completely useless.
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).
I recently switched to iOS from Android after years on Android. I'm coming from being a daily macOS user for almost a decade. I would argue that iOS should no longer be considered the more "user friendly" of the two. That might have been the case years ago, but iOS seems to expect prior experience with what I can only guess are iOS paradigms specifically.
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.
I think it's probably okay that quitting apps isn't that obvious; under most circumstances you don't need to quit iOS apps. Only very specific kinds of activities are allowed to run in the background; when you switch away from an app and don't switch back to it, it's going to be force quit by the system when it needs resources. Managing iOS apps like desktop apps is kind of an anti-pattern.
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.
Opening the app switcher is essentially a gesture. As is opening quick settings. Opening notifications makes a little more sense as notifications appear at the top of the screen. Rearranging the home screen is also a gesture.
A long press on the icon you want to move and you've picked it up (it comes "closer" to you and moves to be exactly under your finger). Drag it around and other icons will move around to preview/indicate where it'd be. Let go and it drops into place. There is no jiggling. You can also drag to Remove or Uninstall (Remove leaves it in the alphabetical app drawer).
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.
I agree. Android seems to have more consistent UX for apps regardless of developer. Back button is such a key input that I always feel trapped in iOS, where as on Android everything feels intuitive and multitasking is a breeze.
Too bad it doesn't work on some apps, and that it works inconsistently on other apps, and that it doesn't work on modal screens. Then there's the added concern of trying to swipe back but instead doing a swipe gesture on some item on the current screen.
I think the height of this is the iPhone's home button (which is gone in iPhone X, but regardless).
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)
It's not surprising at all to me that people who don't take the time to learn how to use the supercomputers in our pockets are unable to use them.
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 am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger. When I was younger a shiny thing would make me excited, take my eye and sort of fool me that this new thing is cool. I'd be excited to learn what the new thing was all about. I'd spend a few hours and figure it out. Back then apple was winning big with consistent and intuitive interfaces, operations.
As I got older i started to prioritize what I want to learn in a different way. Now all I want from the phone is to be a tool, not the other way around. A good tool but not something I have to learn over and over. And especially when I know these changes were made for.. the sake of change, to sort of give the impression of innovation I'm even less incentivized to take a course to teach me how to use a phone. And most of the time these changes make my life harder... e.g. remove the tactile button trend. I'm willing to bet that the 1 button will return at some point as an "innovation". Someone here mentioned the mental maps that people build when learning a system. If you mess with that mental map for a few generations you end up with frustrated users. We know what game these companies are playing: force people to upgrade through planned obsolesce. If it's real upgrades such as better performing cameras, faster ram, etc, I will eventually upgrade. But if they're forcing these changes through updates that we cannot turn off, we have a problem.
I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger.
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.
Actually the MS 'Metro' design used in the ZuneHD and Windows Phone UI (best Home screen design by far) were both more logical and discoverable than the iOS UI (well until they released the Win Phone 10 UI with the hamburger menus...), but everyone just learned how to navigate iOS because 'everyone's doing it.'
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.'
100% agree. I'm on Android and it seems to be going further and further away from simple, consistent home/back/menu buttons that are always available.
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.
No, it is not like touch-typing. That is a skill that won't be obsoleted when a vendor decides to change the user interface on a whim with the next OS release.
I contend that doing a course or learning how a computer works at a fundamental level is a skill just like touchtyping that will remain even into the next generation of phones.
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.
A good analogy she may grok easily could be comparing her plan data to her water usage and comparing her phone storage to the kitchen sink.
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.
> I contend that doing a course or learning how a computer works at a fundamental level is a skill just like touchtyping that will remain even into the next generation of phones.
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.
It's not like typing at all. Typing is fairly obvious: hit the button with the letter you want, and it will always be in the same place, so maybe you don't have to look too often; anyway lots of people will teach you to type. Cute cats (paws), Mario, Mavis Beacon.
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.
It's the same in that it is a set of skills that you need to spend time to learn. That's the point I was trying to make. I learned touchtyping in a couple of weeks. I guarantee someone with motivation could learn the basics of a smartphone in that time.
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.
The standard layout of a keyboard has remained completely unchanged for literal decades. It doesn't update every year with invisible gestures, nor does it remove keys that used to be there in favor of those gestures.
I was trying to make the point that you need to actually find the motivation to spend the time to learn something in order to be able to use it, and not just expect to be able to use it with no time spent learning at all.
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.
I have been an android-windows user for the longest time, and using Apple devices is among the most difficult things I've had to do.
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.
I'm the same way. I've gotten used to using a Mac for work; there are the few things I need to know how to run, and I've more or less figured those out. Even after that, though, I was utterly useless last week trying to send an email for my mom on her iPhone.
I've never been able to understand why mail apps insist on the word Compose. Is it an American thing? I've never wanted to compose a piece of text, and never heard the word used in that way.
I do see a "+" front and center though,which is not the case on apple devices. even if I don't know what compose means, I do know that + probably means creating a email
To be clear: whatever the button is called, it doesn't have any text on iOS (which, as far as I can tell, is what OP was talking about). It's just an icon of a pencil writing on paper.
To be even clearer: It's literally one of only 4 buttons on the main Mail screen (the others being Back, Edit, and Filter). If you just go to Mail and don't even attempt a guess, that's on you.
Compose is defined as putting together many pieces into one coherent work. Most people associate it with music, where composers put together notes until they make up a piece of music. In the mail app context it also makes perfect sense as you are composing a larger piece of work (your letter) from smaller individual elements (words).
When the Android phones came on the market, I was extatic. Linux, in my pocket!
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.
I have had the same experience with iPhones - being unable to figure out how to do things should have been easy. Ended up having to use my Android to look up how to do things.
It's not that things aren't possible (sometimes), it's that they're not discoverable.
I've done extensive user testing with people on both Android and iOS devices (and, comparatively on Windows and MacOS devices) and the common thread that I see is that Android users coming to an iPhone try to use it exactly the same way that they use their Android device and then get frustrated that it doesn't work the same way. Windows users try to use a Mac exactly the same way they use Windows and get frustrated when it doesn't work that way. Inversely, the same is try for iPhone users trying to use Android and Mac users trying to use Windows. They ignore the intuitive features of both sides simply because they're used to working with one or the other.
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 don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?
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.)
Seconded. Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing. I hate when people build abstractions that lie to you about the way things work - because lies are always inconsistent, they'll eventually leak and confuse people.
Proficient users aren't born, they're made. Or, increasingly, not made, thanks to contemporary UX trends.
What do you need the filesystem for on your device?
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.
I am not sure that the way files are usually presented is actually that much better.
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.
>Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing
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?
We must use the phone in very different ways. I spend hours a day in a terminal, so I live by a file system on a computer. Yet I've never felt the need for a filesystem on an 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.
I've a fun one: The BlackBerry KEYone and KEY2 have a physical button called the Convenience Key that can be set to any app or shortcut. I set mine to a Tasker shortcut that changes what it does based on the day and time (mostly based around my daily commute, for bus prediction times and an e-reader).
> I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?
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.
on the maps front it annoys me they're all silos, and there isn't, at the very least, easy switching between map apps for the same coordinates&zoom. The location api exposes a notion of 'here'/'location', I want a shared notion of 'there'/'destination' (useful not only for mapping, but eg transport apps).
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)
> Apple won't fare as well if they were to be evaluated by an audience unfamiliar with their brand and devices all together.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
> But that includes clothing, which is a necessary item.
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.
I had nearly every iPhone until the LG G5 came out and I switched to Android. Whenever I use my wife's phone I honestly feel like an idiot because I can't figure out 3d touch and a bunch of the other features since I missed their 'introduction' of sorts and don't know that they exist or how they are supposed to be used.
You shouldn't be downvoted for this. I was missing new apple features for years, until I started browsing the apple subreddit. There are a lot of hidden features.
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's no "show me these tips later" option either, so they never learn the new features.
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.
When iPhones first came out they were a dream to use - but I think that was largely because they didn't do very much. Picking up an iPhone 3GS (the first one I saw in real life) the interface was fast, intuitive and accessible.
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.
Very strange experience. As far as sharing anecdotes go I have witnessed two people coming to Apple without previous experience and having zero problems.
You yourself state how happy you were to go back to familiar land of Android. So it may be, that Apple is not an issue here.
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.
Smartphones have a new batch of kindergartners joining technology each year. There's also another group of beginners a little further down the river that never really received the best onboarding experiences that are available today.
Many of the items outlined in this article could be included in the phone setup wizard like other settings.
Apple clearly needs to hire this guy. The only thing I disagree with is forcing people to learn many features during the setup process when you get your new phone. Pretty much nobody I know likes to sit there and read user manuals or be forced to watch videos or however that'd be represented.
Holy crap I was not expecting to ever have to figure out a term for "like a TERF, except a man". I wonder if he is one of those straight-laced gay dudes who whines about how all the people out there being flamboyant for Pride celebrations give a bad name to all the gays.
"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.
Who is this guy and why he is so oblivious to his own bias ?
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.
Joe Clark has been writing about web accessibility for nearly twenty years. If he’s not the world’s leading authority on digital accessibility, then he’s at least one of the most influential writers on the topic.
My biggest difficulty is moving the edit cursor when trying to edit text. It takes too many tries to get it exactly where I want. I wish they'd add cursor keys...
For iPhone, you can force-press on the keyboard (on newer phones), or just long-press on the space bar. On an iPad, you can use two fingers on the keyboard
Yup! perfect example of what the blog post author is talking about (I knew force touch but not space bar / two fingers- thanks for that, super useful on iPad )
Another hidden UX: you can long press the keyboard and it'll turn into a touchpad that you can use to move the cursor (still not as easy as cursor keys but much better than the long press and drag method).
I use this all the time because it's convenient, but there have always been two things that frustrate me about it:
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
iPhones (and all smartphones and tablets) are magic wands. You have to know the spells.
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.
>What can press-and-hold do that people don’t know about?
>Directly move a scrollbar. (Fails most of the time due to tiny narrow hotspots you’re expected to hit on the first go.)
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?
> If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not), on the setup screen for every iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch would be a step you could not skip wherein you have to choose your preferred text size.
iPhones literally do have an unskippable screen during setup that prompts you to choose a text size
One of the complications is the different way of making text big. For example most of the examples in this discussion is about changing it in Settings -> Display -> Text Size, which I have found largely useless.
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.
But the folks needing the setting are letting the employee at the mobile carrier store glide through all that for them so that the new phone is immediately ready to use.
I've been thinking about the more general problem of feature/solution discoverability lately.
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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadOn 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.)
† https://support.apple.com/manuals
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...
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).
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)
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.
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.
Many of the items outlined in this article could be included in the phone setup wizard like other settings.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.