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iPhones are hard to use

blog.fawny.org

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Re: iPhones are hard to use

#31

Post by brokenmachine »

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#32

Post by screye »

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#33

Post by j45 »

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#34

Post by camtarn »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #18

Apparently Claudia is banned from there.

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#35

Post by adeptus »

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#36

Post by threeseed »

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#38

Post by threeseed »

rkho wrote: post #20

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 questi…

> 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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#39

Post by bobthepanda »

pcmoney wrote: post #21

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.…

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?

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#40

Post by brokenmachine »

adeptus wrote: post #35

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.

Well that's the real problem, isn't it? People are way too lazy to actually do any kind of learning that is necessary to use a complicated device.
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