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iPhones are hard to use

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Re: iPhones are hard to use

#571

Post by sizzle »

I truly believe the iPhone has the most usable mobile platform simply for all their granular accessibility controls.

The author touches upon a topic that I also have seen and experienced countless of times in my life, which is the need for a better first-run accessibility settings onboarding experience for users that would benefit most (e.g. senior citizens), that also can be trivially skipped by more tech savvy users.

This new onboarding flow can be triggered by apple determining a person's first time ever signing into that model iPhone, under the assumption that most new users to the platform would benefit the most from becoming familiar with these accessibility features and where they live in the settings from the get go.

I know many senior citizens (including my parents) who would have greatly benefited from a heavy accessibility settings onboarding experience, due to many of the issues the author mentioned regarding eye sight and vision related age decline.

It's a shame that a company like apple, one that pioneered usability and human factors in designing products for people since their very beginning (see Human Interface Guidelines [1]), buries these crucial accessibility settings and makes them so difficult to reach for the people that need them the most.

I hope someone from apple is reading this and can champion this topic internally to improve the lives of senior citizens, cause we'll all be old some day scratching our head trying to use the latest and greatest iDevice...

[1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=573097

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#572

Post by tripzilch »

monkeynotes wrote: post #499

Most people know it's controversial to say "iPhones are hard to use" because most people feel that the iPhone, perhaps more than any other technological innovation in the past 20 years, made technology easy to access, use, and integrate with their lives. To say 'iPhones are hard to use' and then point out all the small edge cases of use as significant flaws is hyperbole in bad faith. The author is caught up in his ow…

What is the hyperbole? Should he rather have said "iPhones are not easy to use", as they clearly demonstrated?

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#573

Post by trimbo »

sbuk wrote: post #488
trimbo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> ...or trying gestures until something happens. That is a good definition of discovery...

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"

Article here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#574

Post by monkeynotes »

kettlecorn wrote: post #558
monkeynotes wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 run…

Some people are bound to struggle with any form of technology, no interface can ever accommodate all levels of expectation and comprehension. One size will never fit all, it's just not a reasonable expectation. If that is your standard for 'easy' then yeah, iPhones are hard to use.

Within the spectrum of all personal computing, ever, I think today's mobile devices are some of the easiest to use. Blinker yourself from the realm the devices occupy and set idealistic goals and maybe you can say 'iPhones are hard to use', but you are likely being purposefully obtuse, dishonest, or willfully naive.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#575

Post by luroc »

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…

A handheld engine-diagnostics module is not hard to use. Take it out of the box and drive in a nail with it.

Saying that there is something you can do with a device without an explanation doesn't automatically imply that it's easy to use. Ease of use is a metric for how much of the full potential of something you can utilize with as little instructions as possible. The article has a point that this ease of use is quite reduced when you are disabled or don't have prior knowledge of devices.

I'm not saying that the title couldn't be less sensational but simply saying that iPhones aren't difficult to use is wrong aswell.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#576

Post by hesk »

coldtea wrote: post #377
fit2rule wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS. There are three languages spoken in my household, by various family members. Changing the language dynamically for them would be a benefit, not a hindrance. Text size? Same - I often have to show something to my elderly family members, but digging deep into the menu's to find the Text Size sett…

> Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS. That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next o…

The fact that the vast majority don't use a feature does not make it less important for the people who do. That's the same logic as saying, I don't know, that face recognition only has a false positive rate of 1/1000. If you scan a million people each day you still end up with 1000 people falsely identified.

I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)

FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:

- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.

- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#577

Post by closetohome »

monkeynotes wrote: post #574
kettlecorn wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 run…

Some people are bound to struggle with any form of technology, no interface can ever accommodate all levels of expectation and comprehension. One size will never fit all, it's just not a reasonable expectation. If that is your standard for 'easy' then yeah, iPhones are hard to use. Within the spectrum of all personal computing, ever, I think today's mobile devices are some of the easiest to use. Blinker yourself from…

"Easier to use than anything before" and "hard to use" are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#578

Post by guy98238710 »

wvenable wrote: post #534
guy98238710 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the "Esc" key.

That generally means cancel, not back.

Indeed, but since opening dialog boxes was just about the only kind of navigation in apps back then, Esc effectively worked as a back button.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#579

Post by ashildr »

jacobush wrote: post #551
celeritascelery wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I lost count of the people who complained about their iDevices features not working properly because they intentionally (so they thought) turned them off. Having eg location services turned off by default and not ask about it will just lead to tons of people complaining that directions don’t work properly. And asking them the moment they open the builtin maps application will make them close the app because ‘it does not work’ and ‘there’s an error’ and ‘iPhones are so complicated’.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#580

Post by ashildr »

kall wrote: post #367
fit2rule wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its important enough to put in on boarding, its important to have it handily available through easy to access means during regular use.

You can put it in control center and have it be about as easily adjustable as brightness. It‘s not there by default and hard to discover, but adjusting your text size all the time really is a bit of a niche feature. I‘m really not sure what else Apple could do other than: - Asking during onboarding - Putting it in Display as well as Accessibility settings - Having a control center button

I really like this idea. Actually, I have it in control center on my iDevices, but I’m not sure if I had to turn that on.
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