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iPhones are hard to use

blog.fawny.org

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Re: iPhones are hard to use

#271

Post by userbinator »

karmakaze wrote: post #129
varenc wrote: post #110

Most of this article just lists semi-advanced features that people don't know about. I think that’s Apple’s intention... Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way. I’d be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how…

The problem lies in what's semi-advanced to one is critical or basic to many others. Apple has been known to hide (aka. make subtle) basic operations. How often have you wanted to load a page in 'desktop mode' in mobile Safari? It's there, just invisibly so. The UI does not teach in the name of clean/minimal design which is Apple's way: form over function. Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut ke…

Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus

This reminds me that several versions ago, Windows stopped underlining the shortcut keys to the menu items by default --- taking away the only affordance to discovering that the keyboard can be used to more quickly activate the menus. I learned by accident long ago ("what's the Alt key for?"), and have used it since. In contrast, I remember trying to operate a Mac the same way but gave up experimenting with the Alt key and such to try to get the menus to show (I know about the shortcuts, but they are not easily discoverable/explorable in the same way that menus are) --- and only later found out that trying to operate the menus on a Mac from the keyboard is... not very intuitive and disabled by default (why!?!?):

https://superuser.com/questions/117549/use-the-keyboard-to-a...

https://superuser.com/questions/504111/how-to-select-file-me...

(I'm not sure if the above even apply to pre-OS X --- when I discovered the function of Alt and the underlined keys in Windows, it was the Windows 3.1 era.)

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#272

Post by brianpgordon »

codetrotter wrote: post #87
screye wrote: post #32

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 pe…

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…

> 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.)

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#273

Post by Rjevski »

spikej wrote: post #269
Rjevski wrote: post #268

I agree with this post, but outside of a few specific things I don't think the issue is with Apple (or Android, or whatever). The issue is people; most non-tech people either don't care about learning how to properly use a tool they'd be using for the rest of their life, or are scared to for whatever reason. I'm not sure what the solution is. Dumbing down the UI for the lowest common denominator doesn't seem viable -…

On the other hand, there's Huawei that went with Advanced and Simple mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcalxGyLE1w And for aging parents, the simple mode works fantastically!

The downside of a simple mode is that it locks the user in and prevents them from discovering what "advanced" stuff their device can do; so essentially they're wasting money by having a 1k$ supercomputer in the pocket and intentionally it dumbing down to Nokia 3310 levels.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#274

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

lukeschlather wrote: post #270
wvenable wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went from iPhone to Android and struggled but now I have serious trouble using iOS devices. I'm now convinced the greatest UI innovation this century is the Back button. If IBM PC keyboards had a big dedicated "back" key the world would have a been a much better place.

I very rarely use iPhones but when I do I have no idea how anything is supposed to work without a back button.

I guess they end up being soft buttons on the screen.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#275

Post by new_here »

This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market.

Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone. Of course, there are things that can be improved (with many decent suggestions from the author that most power users would agree with) but based on the author’s mild annoyances and casual observations that elderly, visibly challenged or foreign language people do not always know about features that can help them, iPhones are now “hard to use”. That’s quite an unfair title. There’s zero consideration by the author of how many hundreds of millions of people perform so many of the same tasks (email, messaging and navigation) almost seamlessly everyday using an iPhone. Our human nature is to only notice things that ‘dont’t work’ though. It would be interesting to see how the same people mentioned in the article fare on an Android device.

This article reminds me of the time when the iOS alarm clock app had a bug that caused the alarm to go off one hour later on some random Sunday and it made headlines in all the tech press. Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found in the public Google Play store.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#276

Post by jodrellblank »

Terretta wrote: post #246
jodrellblank wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you even turn facial recognition off? Open the Photos app, search for "people", and it will pull up photos of people's faces. Tap on one to make a full screen picture, and swipe it up , it will show "Related" people and pictures. You can tap on someone to find more photos of them. Even if you never tagged them with names. (You can also search Photos for general terms, like "flower" or "snow" or "food", it's doing…

> it's doing image recognition on all pictures somewhere It's doing it on the device. An On-device Deep Neural Network for Face Detection Apple’s iCloud Photo Library is a cloud-based solution for photo and video storage. However, due to Apple’s strong commitment to user privacy, we couldn’t use iCloud servers for computer vision computations. Every photo and video sent to iCloud Photo Library is encrypted on the dev…

I didn't mean "might be in the cloud", I meant in the context of the parent poster saying "I will never use facial recognition or Siri" - Siri is a thing you have to call up to use it, but facial recognition is "happening somewhere in the device" without having to open the Photos app or any other app and ask it to run.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#278

Post by jpttsn »

mrzool wrote: post #43
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.…

> This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views. 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.

A name drop no less.

“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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#279

Post by peteretep »

new_here wrote: post #275

This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market. Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone. Of course, there are things that can be improved (with many decent suggestions from the author that most power users would agree with) but based on the author’s mild annoyances and casual observations that elderly, visibly challenge…

> This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market

Sure. But also, I'd say it's been written by a die-hard Apple fan who goes to Apple because they think they care. I was deeply skeptical of the article until I got some way into it.

You know you're the market leader when you don't get compared to other, shittier alternatives, you're getting compared to platonic ideals.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#280

Post by rabboRubble »

julianz wrote: post #102
fastball wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Open Mail 2. Click compose button How could that possibly be difficult of all things?

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.

It's from the older phrase "compose a letter". Since letters were replaced with email, the phrase became "compose an email".
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