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 reaso…
iPhones are hard to use
71–80 of 652 posts
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#72It'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…
No, it is not like touch-typing. That is a skill that won't be obsoleted when a vendor decides to change the user interface on a whim with the next OS release.
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#73There's a lot to unpack here, and a lot to disagree with, as I believe there's plenty of evidence Apple cares a lot about accessibility. Also harping on specific terminology like password vs passcode is not really productive in terms of improving the underlying UX, as the word gets translated into tons of languages which may or may not have the same level of nuance. While I don't necessarily agree with the premise, e…
3D Touch seems to be the Touch Bar of the mobile world.
Both are great ideas, but only sparsely exploited even by Apple, itself.
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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+hom…
The “Tips” feature (Swipe left from home) points you right to the User Guide downloadable from the Books app for the device. It also prompts you with this info shortly after you finish setting up the device. It’s a 600+ page manual that describes every single button, gesture, function, menu, for every preinstalled app on the phone. There’s a section that describes most everything that has changed in the newest iOS re…
The “Tips” feature (Swipe left from home)
I think this is sort of his point. How in the world am I supposed to know to do that?
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The “Tips” feature (Swipe left from home) points you right to the User Guide downloadable from the Books app for the device. It also prompts you with this info shortly after you finish setting up the device. It’s a 600+ page manual that describes every single button, gesture, function, menu, for every preinstalled app on the phone. There’s a section that describes most everything that has changed in the newest iOS re…
The “Tips” feature (Swipe left from home) I think this is sort of his point. How in the world am I supposed to know to do that?
Well there are many ways to get there, tap the Tips app that is preinstalled on the home screen on a newly setup iOS device. As I said, it also sends a notification shortly after device setup directing you there.
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Most people don't even know that they have a problem because they are unaware of what they should be able to do. They think that any preventable annoying behavior is the natural state of the machine. I was spending time with my parents awhile back and happened to look over to watch my mom try to communicate some content from a website she was looking at to a friend. She would go back and forth from the browser, to th…
Easy to complain about copy/paste functionality, but how else would you implement it?
I agree with most of the criticisms in the article, but copy/paste is just one of those things that is never going to be 100% reflexive or intuitive on a touchscreen.
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#77As someone who worked heavily in sales in the telecommunications industry, and having spoken to many customers of all ages. This article is not constructive at all, it's terribly fraught with emotion. The intrusive reminders of WiFi networks? Really, that required an entire paragraph? I can't remember the last time I was interrupted by it, probably because I switched it off on the welcome screen when setting up my device?
Nobody knows that they can swipe up or down on the screen? Tell me where Android shows you this during setup and tell that it's not the same with most devices.
This article should just be "Smartphones are hard to use".
Heck, there are features mentioned in the article that I don't frequently use, that doesn't mean I should nor that Apple has done a bad job at showing me.
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#78"Claudia, you are banned from here."?
Why is that popping up?
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#79My biggest difficulty is moving the edit cursor when trying to edit text. It takes too many tries to get it exactly where I want. I wish they'd add cursor keys...
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).
I use this all the time because it's convenient, but there have always been two things that frustrate me about it:
1) There's no way to scroll the text while moving the cursor by moving it to the end of the last visible line, the way there is with the cursor interface you get by directly touching and holding the text.
2) Sometimes when I'm doing this it will randomly select the word my cursor is over, and I've never figured out exactly what triggers this.
Re: iPhones are hard to use
#80It'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…
I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger. When I was younger a shiny thing would make me excited, take my eye and sort of fool me that this new thing is cool. I'd be excited to learn what the new thing was all about. I'd spend a few hours and figure it out. Back then apple was winning big with consistent and intuit…
I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger.
I don't mind learning a new interface or even coming up to speed with an entirely new UI paradigm, if there's something in it for me. But my objection is that as soon as I learn it, someone who is paid to look busy will change it for no reason other than to justify their role in the company hierarchy.
Obvious examples include almost anything from Microsoft ("Metro^H^H^H^H^HWindows 10 is awesome! You just don't like change!") or Google ("We have altered GMail. Pray all you want, we're going to alter it further"), but Apple is far from guiltless.
When that happens, it's hard to escape the feeling that your time is being wasted... and as you suggest, the older you get the bigger a deal that is.