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iPhones are hard to use

blog.fawny.org

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Re: iPhones are hard to use

#241

Post by __david__ »

pcmoney wrote: post #126
mrzool wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree unless you are saying: 1. Only iPhones can adjust text size. 2. Only iPhones have mapping functionality 3. Only iPhones have a voice activated digital assistant. 4. Only iPhone have a health app. These are all common smart phone features. They only pertain to iphones because of the title and the author uses specific examples of otherwise generic problems in the context of iphone use. I would say only iPhon…

If I were the author and I was only familiar with iPhones then I would be extremely wary of making claims about other phone OSes that I didn't have as much experience with. Nothing in his article says that other phones don't have these problems—he's merely asserting that iPhones do.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#242

Post by Terretta »

paddy_m wrote: post #122

Here is a recent annoyance. I use bluetooth headphones and a bluetooth speaker. I want my bluetooth headphones to never be louder than $x, I want my speaker to have the full volume range. There is only one volume control (under Settings > Music > Max Volume) for the whole phone, and that doesn't seem to control max volume for notifications/other apps. This frequently leads to me leaving the max volume on high, then s…

Mine remembers volume per device when I switch between them.

Whatever level I left a speaker or headphones, that's where it starts next time I connect, completely separate from whatever I have the built-in speaker set to.

Mine doesn't have a cap per device, but I'd have to manually click up on that device to get louder than I left it.

First time I realized it was remembering all these different listening volumes, I was pretty amazed.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#243

Post by SubiculumCode »

" Very advanced, very tuned-in people learn about, and learn how to use, new Apple features by watching them being demonstrated onstage during Apple keynote events.

Then there’s everybody else. "

I've never cared to watch a keynote, but I am a fairly advanced user. Makes me feel like the author lives in a bubble...not that his many points aren't well taken aor wel stated.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#244

Post by Operyl »

snuxoll wrote: post #172
throwawaywindev wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WiFi thing is made more complicated by how the Apple Watch works. It uses an adhoc WiFi connection to your iPhone, so you don’t want the toggle to disable that. And it would be confusing to have different behavior depending on whether or not your watch is nearby.

Apple Watch uses Bluetooth to communicate with your phone, not WiFi (unless it’s out of Bluetooth range, in which case it will connect to a known network if possible, then LTE if you own a cellular model).

Unfortunately true even in the case of Watch updates. That’s why the trick to make it faster is to kill Bluetooth via Settings.app after it starts downloading an update. Easily half the time spent waiting!

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#245

Post by rtpg »

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…

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.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#246

Post by Terretta »

jodrellblank wrote: post #213
mixmastamyk wrote: post #115

My top 5 annoyances: - Too many features I'll never use, that mostly can't be removed. Less is more. i.e. I'll never use Siri or facial recognition. Never owned a bluetooth device. "Screen Mirroring" What? in the Control Center. Yet those and more always in the way, sometimes draining battery. - When radios are off to save energy, constantly nags about connection with modal dialogs that prevent use of the home button…

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 device before it is sent to cloud storage, and can only be decrypted by devices that are registered with the iCloud account. Therefore, to bring deep learning based computer vision solutions to our customers, we had to address directly the challenges of getting deep learning algorithms running on iPhone.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/11/16/face-detection....

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#247

Post by sho »

hkai wrote: post #233

Is that true that mostly Chinese people use Assistive Touch? I've seen them doing it and I couldn't figure out why.

It's certainly not only Chinese, although perhaps the author lumps all asians into that category. It's certainly very common in China and South East Asia.

I actually find it quite interesting. At some point, it's true, the home button was a common point of failure on iphones - and a kind of memetic "folk wisdom" idea was born that everyone should use the assistive touch button instead. This idea, which "everyone knows", persisted (and persists) long after the actual issue had been fixed. I am still seeing it today with iPhone 8 users! Hopefully the advent of FaceID finally puts it to bed.

Another good example of the genre is the "common knowledge" that you let your phone/laptop battery run down before recharging, and don't keep it constantly plugged in. Might have had some validity back in the days of NiCad - actively wrong advice in the age of LiOn. But the meme persists...

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#248

Post by thanatos_dem »

How many hours does the author think it should take to set up an iPhone? If they want every toggle and every accessibility option presented at device setup, with enough explanation of what each one does and how to use it, it’ll take at least 2, probably more since the elderly tend to use technology slower.

You know what the author didn’t mention? That with any Apple device you can go in for a 1:1 session or a class on usage, and the people running them will walk you through everything. They’re also good at identifying people struggling to use the device in various ways and know about all the accessibility options, which in general are more plentiful and much better supported in iOS than Android.

My mother got an iPad after years of owning only android devices, went in, and not only did they walk her through it, but they let her know that a new iOS release would be coming out soon which would change a few things, and invited her back to a second session after that change if she was at all confused.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#249

Post by brokenmachine »

toast0 wrote: post #194
brokenmachine wrote: post #31

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 fo…

It's not like typing at all. Typing is fairly obvious: hit the button with the letter you want, and it will always be in the same place, so maybe you don't have to look too often; anyway lots of people will teach you to type. Cute cats (paws), Mario, Mavis Beacon. How can you learn to press and hold , or press harder, or shake the phone, or whatever else when there's no manual, you don't even know there's some other…

It's the same in that it is a set of skills that you need to spend time to learn. That's the point I was trying to make. I learned touchtyping in a couple of weeks. I guarantee someone with motivation could learn the basics of a smartphone in that time.

I agree there should be a manual. My phone (Samsung) has an almost useless pdf manual available.

But I also think that most people do not spend anywhere near the time necessary to learn how their phone works or how to use it. They wouldn't read the manual even if it was available. They don't watch the intro videos that play when you first start your phone out of the box. They expect to just get it out of the box and it to magically be completely usable for them.

There's lots of ways they could learn those things you mentioned. Libraries and community centres often have courses for beginners. There's youtube videos. There's books. There's endless websites. Nothing makes most techies special except the motivation to google the things they don't know. Most people don't even try, and just muddle along with what little they already (don't) know.

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