There was no such comparison in the article. It merely provides good examples of the usability price paid to achieve its generality (lack of any affordances, etc.) and points out inconsistencies, lack of visual cues, etc.
I have a relative, old and nearly blind, who has a Jitterbug phone. It has about seven buttons total, but three of them are the big buttons: a green one labeled "Operator", a red one labeled "911" and a yellow one with an arbitrary label (often marked "Tow" in the pictures). You can think of these as the "call someone", "call the squad", and "call my best friend" buttons.
You really only need the big green button to make calls. You press it and you get a human operator who offers to complete the calls, either by accepting a number, or a name, or (most likely) a name from the contact list that you or someone else has set up in advance.
You can find the buttons in the dark. You can operate the phone without vision. You don't need fine motor skills beyond finding one big button and pushing it. You don't need to read numbers. You don't need to know how to read, period.
That is a device designed for usability. Of course, most of us don't want one, because it is too boring and would make us feel kind of silly... which is exactly this designer's point.
I think you have to divide the functionality by ease of use. Something that has 1000 features is going to be more difficult than something that only does 10. But if they manage to contain the complexity so that it's only twice as difficult to use, then they've done a good job, even though in absolute terms, some people will still prefer the simplest solution, rather than the best ratio of features to usability.
Talking to an operater to make a call is a long, slow, and complex process. The only advantage is people are used to the interface but, it's not inherently simple. And it has other usability problems for the spanish speaking etc.
Talking to an operater to make a call is a long, slow, and complex process.
Not when compared to trying to find an entry on the iPhone when you are elderly and blind.
But, yes, it's got tradeoffs, like any designed object. This is why designers get paid: There's no simple checklist of things you can do to make your design good. It has to fit the use case. This is what the essayist is trying to say: From a certain point of view, the iPhone has a lot of interface elements that are hard to use. But, nonetheless, it meets a different important design criterion: It's delightful to explore. There are interface elements that are incredibly obscure, ("Why have all the application icons started shivering like they were cold?") but once you find them it's kind of thrilling, like a magic trick, or an Easter egg. (I find those shivering icons highly amusing, even if nobody has any clue what they mean the first time through.)
But not everyone wants that. The fact that no one design can suit everyone is one reason why we want a diversity of options in the marketplace.
A Jitterbug does well to simplify phone calls for old/technology incompetent people.
But an iphone is hardly comparable. It is an ipod, internet browser, game machine, and cell phone. And the usability considering the multi use is FANTASTIC.
So who is gonna be the first to write the application that solves this guys problem? I mean, he just laid out an interesting problem. I'm not even an iPhone user but I'd be willing to bet you can't man most iPhone apps; here's an interesting idea, unlike man, how about an application that takes the user on an event-per-view tour of the application. I mean is there not a way to dig into an existing applications events, am I missing something here, or is accessibility really this big of an issue?
To me it seemed like the author was just fumbly with his fingers. Triggering undo and such. This information can be found online or in the manual so if he would just rtfm it would be obvious how he caused the delete button to show up.
Also, the other glaring example here is the one about the mail client refresh-vs-reply arrows. Aren't these two icons the exact same icons used for pretty much the whole history of the internet? Circular arrows = refresh; Left arrow = reply.
New things sometimes require just a bit of effort because you aren't familiar with it. In other words, easy-to-use != just like every other phone out there. It's pretty close to a 'fundamentally new UI' - just because you don't grok it within 5 seconds doesn't make it hard to use.
>This information can be found online or in the manual
So can the information on how you should partition your hard drive for Linux installation. Yet (historically) most people think Linux installation is a usability disaster.
Or for another way of looking at it, do you really think that an interface which requires you to go online (or read a manual) to figure out how basic stuff like undo or delete work represents "good usability"?
Also, as the author points out, what is "refresh" supposed to do in the context of a single message? Just because a symbol is familiar, it doesn't mean its meaning is automatically clear if it's taken out of context. For example, at my workplace recently got a new microwave that has a play/pause button. In this case, it's relatively easy to figure it out but it still gave me a pause.
My point was that you can find the information online or in the manual if you don't get it, which this guy clearly does not. Some people have habits when it comes to devices like this that are hard to break. If you're one of those people, read the manual.
I think you missed the point. The author is a person who designs user interfaces. He knows that he can look up how to do what he wants to do by referring to material outside of the device. His interest, though, is designing user interfaces that don't require that.
Fair enough, I'm just saying that maybe the fact that he's a UI designer is what caused him to approach it in a way that most people don't. I've seen people who know less-than-nothing about interfaces (aka, your average person) get it without any help... And I'd say that is evidenced on a larger scale by the positive reviews and general success of the product.
"To me it seemed like the author was just fumbly with his fingers. Triggering undo and such. This information can be found online or in the manual so if he would just rtfm it would be obvious how he caused the delete button to show up."
You do realize that this is the developer's classic response to a usability issue? The user is just clumsy/stupid/lazy/ignorant/blind/stubborn [pick one]. I'd agree that you can't make UI decisions based on one person's reported problem, but the correct response is not "RTFM" but "This issue should be tested in a usability lab with a reasonable cross section of the target market".
"This issue should be tested in a usability lab with a reasonable cross section of the target market"
That's the thing. It was. And it works for everyone I've ever met, including my wife and my parents who are the polar opposite of 'technical'. I'm not making baseless claims of the user being [insert one of the choices], it was based on my (rather extensive) experience with the device and users of it.
Note that 3D works for games because the user does not want to accomplish any goals beyond being entertained. It would be trivial to design a better interface than DOOM if the goal was to kill the bad guys as quickly as possible: give me a 2D map of the area with icons for enemy troops and let me drop bombs on them by clicking the icons. Presto: game over in a few seconds and the good guys win every time. That's the design you want if you are the Pentagon, but it makes for a boring game.
The guy does undersell the iPhone's usability, though. In particular, the key phone feature -- dialing the name of someone on your contact list -- is far more usable than an old-school dial telephone (where you have to remember a number) and likewise far more usable than on a cheap cell phone (where you have to do a lot of button-press scrolling, or use a numeric keypad to type the letters of someone's name... which means you have to remember the name in advance.) Indeed, the iPhone has exactly what the usability folks have been agitating for for years: A big flat list of people's names or pictures, where you touch one and it immediately dials them.
I think the moral of that story is Pareto's Rule: if you nail the usability of one common feature, people will praise your device's usability in general, even if the rest of it plays out like an adventure game.
Pressing a button is an action that a gestural UI can communicate visually, but there are a number of other actions that have no visual cue. Direct manipulation gestures such as tap (on something other than a button), double-tap, tap-and-hold, swipe, and pinch/zoom are far more difficult to communicate. These rely on user experimentation and memory.
Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.
I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.
It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom, undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement at all is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy requirements as much as they have.
My three year old picked up how to manipulate the planet in Star Defense[1] straight away after seeing a friend of mine play it on his iPhone. Also Shape Builder[2] (some kid's puzzle game) was immediately obvious.
She had a little harder time figuring out how a mouse works.
[1] note: I'm sort of affiliated since that friend's company made that game
before reading this, I thought I was going to respond with some witty retort like "anecdotal evidence proves otherwise", but it's actually a very good essay.
It's funny to see the critique of iPhone usability go up and down. First there was the critique that it couldn't do enough, there was no undo, no copy or paste, no easy way to delete things, the UI was too much like it was on the Mac.
Now that those features have been added and the UI for the iPhone has become more distinct from the Mac, you get the critique that it is all way too complex.
It seems like there is an obvious point left unsaid- touch user interfaces are more fun. Sorry, no citation, this is just my impression. If you had to operate the iPhone with a mouse and keyboard the experience would be entirely different. It just seems a lot harder to try and make a website playful because using a mouse is not fun.
What works 11 years ago might not have worked today. Same for user interface design for the web. No one recognizes the drop down suggestion. User interface evolves like technology, and without doubt, the iPhone is a class of device of it owns that have never existed before any other. So I would give Apple the thumbs up for creating an user interface that not only is fun but usable on a revolutionary device.
I don't think tutorials are a good idea. Let the user figure it out by themselves so they develop some basic intellectual curiosity to learn on their own. It's not like there are millions of confused iPhone owners out there completely baffled by the iPhone UI. It's pretty obvious stuff. Basic "learn by mistake" experience exposes all the less obvious iPhone UI features after a few hours of use.
Maybe the iPhone could be easier to use, but it's much easier than a lot of the phones out there. I have heard a bunch of people in their 50s and 60s complain about the Blackberry Storm, and how difficult it is to use when compared to the iPhone. It's fairly simple to figure out how to do the basic stuff on the iPhone, which is really all most people are looking for.
I think emphasizing "fun" and "playing" misses the point. Take a step back. The web browsing experience on the iPhone is literally an order of magnitude better than what came before. The screen is huge and gorgeous and responds to your touch. The interface and apps, by and large, are super-slick and polished in all respects. So of course it's "fun"! But these are also the reasons it's tremendously "usable" as a device.
It's ridiculous to pick on the iPhone for its "swipe" and "shake" gestures, declare it "hard to use", and look for some other adjective that doesn't have to do with usability to explain its strengths.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadYou really only need the big green button to make calls. You press it and you get a human operator who offers to complete the calls, either by accepting a number, or a name, or (most likely) a name from the contact list that you or someone else has set up in advance.
You can find the buttons in the dark. You can operate the phone without vision. You don't need fine motor skills beyond finding one big button and pushing it. You don't need to read numbers. You don't need to know how to read, period.
That is a device designed for usability. Of course, most of us don't want one, because it is too boring and would make us feel kind of silly... which is exactly this designer's point.
Not when compared to trying to find an entry on the iPhone when you are elderly and blind.
But, yes, it's got tradeoffs, like any designed object. This is why designers get paid: There's no simple checklist of things you can do to make your design good. It has to fit the use case. This is what the essayist is trying to say: From a certain point of view, the iPhone has a lot of interface elements that are hard to use. But, nonetheless, it meets a different important design criterion: It's delightful to explore. There are interface elements that are incredibly obscure, ("Why have all the application icons started shivering like they were cold?") but once you find them it's kind of thrilling, like a magic trick, or an Easter egg. (I find those shivering icons highly amusing, even if nobody has any clue what they mean the first time through.)
But not everyone wants that. The fact that no one design can suit everyone is one reason why we want a diversity of options in the marketplace.
But an iphone is hardly comparable. It is an ipod, internet browser, game machine, and cell phone. And the usability considering the multi use is FANTASTIC.
Also, the other glaring example here is the one about the mail client refresh-vs-reply arrows. Aren't these two icons the exact same icons used for pretty much the whole history of the internet? Circular arrows = refresh; Left arrow = reply.
New things sometimes require just a bit of effort because you aren't familiar with it. In other words, easy-to-use != just like every other phone out there. It's pretty close to a 'fundamentally new UI' - just because you don't grok it within 5 seconds doesn't make it hard to use.
So can the information on how you should partition your hard drive for Linux installation. Yet (historically) most people think Linux installation is a usability disaster.
Or for another way of looking at it, do you really think that an interface which requires you to go online (or read a manual) to figure out how basic stuff like undo or delete work represents "good usability"?
Also, as the author points out, what is "refresh" supposed to do in the context of a single message? Just because a symbol is familiar, it doesn't mean its meaning is automatically clear if it's taken out of context. For example, at my workplace recently got a new microwave that has a play/pause button. In this case, it's relatively easy to figure it out but it still gave me a pause.
You do realize that this is the developer's classic response to a usability issue? The user is just clumsy/stupid/lazy/ignorant/blind/stubborn [pick one]. I'd agree that you can't make UI decisions based on one person's reported problem, but the correct response is not "RTFM" but "This issue should be tested in a usability lab with a reasonable cross section of the target market".
That's the thing. It was. And it works for everyone I've ever met, including my wife and my parents who are the polar opposite of 'technical'. I'm not making baseless claims of the user being [insert one of the choices], it was based on my (rather extensive) experience with the device and users of it.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html
Note that 3D works for games because the user does not want to accomplish any goals beyond being entertained. It would be trivial to design a better interface than DOOM if the goal was to kill the bad guys as quickly as possible: give me a 2D map of the area with icons for enemy troops and let me drop bombs on them by clicking the icons. Presto: game over in a few seconds and the good guys win every time. That's the design you want if you are the Pentagon, but it makes for a boring game.
The guy does undersell the iPhone's usability, though. In particular, the key phone feature -- dialing the name of someone on your contact list -- is far more usable than an old-school dial telephone (where you have to remember a number) and likewise far more usable than on a cheap cell phone (where you have to do a lot of button-press scrolling, or use a numeric keypad to type the letters of someone's name... which means you have to remember the name in advance.) Indeed, the iPhone has exactly what the usability folks have been agitating for for years: A big flat list of people's names or pictures, where you touch one and it immediately dials them.
I think the moral of that story is Pareto's Rule: if you nail the usability of one common feature, people will praise your device's usability in general, even if the rest of it plays out like an adventure game.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115_comments.html
Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.
I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.
It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom, undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement at all is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy requirements as much as they have.
My three year old picked up how to manipulate the planet in Star Defense[1] straight away after seeing a friend of mine play it on his iPhone. Also Shape Builder[2] (some kid's puzzle game) was immediately obvious.
She had a little harder time figuring out how a mouse works.
[1] note: I'm sort of affiliated since that friend's company made that game
[2] not connected to this game
Now that those features have been added and the UI for the iPhone has become more distinct from the Mac, you get the critique that it is all way too complex.
Heaven forfend!
It's ridiculous to pick on the iPhone for its "swipe" and "shake" gestures, declare it "hard to use", and look for some other adjective that doesn't have to do with usability to explain its strengths.