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iPhones are hard to use

blog.fawny.org

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Re: iPhones are hard to use

#551

Post by jacobush »

celeritascelery wrote: post #482
jacobush wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make the onboarding so simple they don't need help?

Honestly I don’t think it could be any simpler. The problem is some of the questions it asks about privacy and the cloud are beyond the scope of many people. But these questions need to be asked.

It can't be simpler but the questions are not simple?

So don't ask them. Default to a non privacy invading mode. Ask the questions later of people who wants the features.

I don't buy "this is the pinnacle of ease of use" and we can't get further.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#552

Post by lightyrs »

merlinsbrain wrote: post #116
lightyrs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Heh, I did not know about either of these. How did you discover them? It’s kinda like the “tap the clock to scroll to the top” feature, I think I discovered it by accident one day.

Yeah, like many of the UX gestures I perform on my iOS devices, I discovered this one by accident.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#554

Post by LyndsySimon »

simonh wrote: post #345
jtokoph wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet the end users are not setting up the phones themselves and the younger people doing the setup skip all of the prompts except WiFi.

Not if you do it in an Apple Store, at least in my experience.

Siri says that the nearest Apple Store to me is 265 miles (a 4h 38m drive) from me.

It seems a bit of a stretch to ask everyone around me to drive go there every time they get a new phone.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#555

Post by LyndsySimon »

daxelrod wrote: post #448
isostatic wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a customisable control centre might be good. I often turn mobile data on and off (when I'm abroad), and it's a minor pain going into settings. On the other hand I hardly ever touch Bluetooth, and never use airdrop or airplay mirroring.

You can do this from Control Center. 3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control. Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...

I had no idea widgets in the Control Center responded to 3D Touch/long press.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#556

Post by badwolf »

mszczepanczyk wrote: post #542
saagarjha wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for the same article again. Apple would very much like you to have the experience that apps do not change when you leave…

> Apple would very much like you to have the experience that apps do not change when you leave them. There are a couple ways that apps break this model, though: if they use a lot of memory, iOS will kill them in the background. In any case, apps are supposed to have state restoration to get back to where they were when you last left it, but few apps implement this correctly. You're probably right. But Facebook isn't…

To be fair... Facebook often refreshes in the web while you're reading a post, only to find it disappeared from your timeline, only to be found again a year later when someone comments on it and Facebook remembers you want to see it again...

(sorry for the semi-off-topic rant)

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#557

Post by fireflash38 »

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…

> Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone.

How long ago? Should they sit on their laurels and do nothing? Or what if they have made progressively worse and worse decisions with regards to UX?

What they did a decade ago doesn't matter if what they currently produce isn't that simple usability.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#558

Post by kettlecorn »

monkeynotes wrote: post #541
_ea1k wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe "making the setup process easy hides some really important (and even safety critical) functionality". Or "popups are still bad and apparently we still need to say it" (referring to the wifi one). Or maybe "some current edge cases should be center cases". I don't think that his point is an overly broad indictment of the iphone so much as an analysis of where many of its more common flaws actually lie. I've se…

Do you really believe "iPhones are hard to use" faithfully represents his overall critique? Objectively iPhones are not hard to use. Do you really feel that an iPhone's ease-of-use is reasonably compared to a "handheld engine-diagnostics module for Daewoo cars"? The fact that an iPhone can literally be used out of the box with no user-manual (unlike an engine-diagnostic unit) is testament to its simplicity. I don't e…

I took no offense to the title myself.

“Hard” is obviously a definition that’s relative and varies from person to person. Maybe you could define it as some sort of objective metric where you poll people about ease of use, but then your definition of hard becomes subjective.

For a lot of people any tech is hard relative to the rest of their life, including the iPhone. My mom is very much not computer savvy and she runs into so many problems with her iPhone that would otherwise be obvious to tech users. When you really think about her problems often there is some unintuitive design choice causing it.

My point is that “iPhones are hard to use” is a very true statement for many people. I don’t think the author was insincere.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#559

Post by cmurphycode »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #262
rtpg wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that, but I do think that saying that text size is an advanced feature is just not true. Loads and loads of people are older than 40. Loads of people just have weaker eyesight. Apple has really good accessibility tools, and it would make a _lot_ of sense for there to be a dedicated part of the onboarding for accessibility.

Text size is part of the onboarding now.

I suppose a nice compromise here would be to make an intelligent decision whether to bring up a prompt asking if you want to change the font size. For instance, if the FaceID detects that your face is farther or closer from the screen than normal, or that you're squinting.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#560

Post by kipchak »

tk75x wrote: post #507
askafriend wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact function is duplicated by long pressing on the space bar. This has been there since iOS 11, I believe. So you don't actually need 3D Touch to have the benefit of the awesome cursor UX.

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 t…

To use more charitable marketing speak Apple definitely strongly uses a second mover advantage, maybe with some secret sauce thrown in.
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