
The Problem with the iPhone's Home Button - joshuacc
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/07/14/the_iphones_home_button/
======
modernerd
He's right. The default Home button behaviour should be to go the first page
of the SpringBoard. The current behaviour even appears to contravene Apple's
own iOS Human Interface Guidelines:

"Give people a logical path to follow. Make the path through the information
you present logical and easy for users to predict."

and:

"In most cases, give users only one path to a screen."

From:
[http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UserEx...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/UEBestPractices/UEBestPractices.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH20-SW5)

~~~
christoph
One trick Apple clearly miss here (IMO) is not having the "Home" screen
centered. On iOS devices, page 1 is always at the far left.

i.e.

Screen 1 -> Screen 2 --> Screen 3 ---> Screen 4 ----> Screen 5

On a lot of Android launchers, you can have page one centered.

i.e.

Screen a <\--> Screen b <-> Screen 1 <-> Screen x <\--> Screen y

What's the benefit? I can get to my two most used screens both within 1 swipe.
In fact the most swipes I need to access any of my five screens (from the
Home) is 2, on iOS as above it's 4 (for the same number of screens). You could
argue that some people use "Search" so much it negates this, but I think
search should be accessed in a slightly different way to how Apple have it
programmed in now anyway.

~~~
dpark
> In fact the most swipes I need to access any of my five screens is 2, on iOS
> as above it's 4

That's the best-case scenario. Another scenario is that you don't have perfect
memory and don't always recall where all 80 (5 screens of 16) of your apps
live, so you go to the right looking for an app, and you don't find it, so you
then have to go to the left, for a total of 6 swipes. I'd bet that this is a
pretty common scenario for most people with enough apps to fill 5 screens.

~~~
CoffeeDregs
All this discussion of swiping presupposes that it's reasonable to organize
things iOS-style. I think that it isn't.

1) I organize my Android's 3 screens by function: (left) Scheduling/Tasks,
Home, (right) Social stuff. On each screen are a relevant widget (or two) and
related apps.

2) The Android app drawer is much more useful than iOS's app pages because the
app drawer is arranged _alphabetically_ , is continuous and is organized top-
to-bottom. I use the drawer about 10% of the time and, when I do, I don't need
to "recall where all 80 apps live" because I recall the alphabet.

    
    
        ... a total of 6 swipes.  I'd bet that this is a 
        pretty common scenario for most people with enough
        apps to fill 5 screens.
    

Agreed. But only on iOS.

~~~
dpark
> 1) I organize my Android's 3 screens by function: (left) Scheduling/Tasks,
> Home, (right) Social stuff. On each screen are a relevant widget (or two)
> and related apps.

But then the question of 4 swipes vs 2 is kind of moot. You're not using 5
screens to store apps, so comparing your setup to iOS isn't apples to apples.

Personally, I setup my 3 screens (iOS) to have 1. Stuff I use a lot, 2. Stuff
I use a little, 3. Stuff I barely use. This works well for me, and going to a
left-center-right model wouldn't gain me anything (I expect that it would cost
me instead).

> 2) The Android app drawer is much more useful than iOS's app pages because
> the app drawer is arranged alphabetically, is continuous and is organized
> top-to-bottom. I use the drawer about 10% of the time and, when I do, I
> don't need to "recall where all 80 apps live" because I recall the alphabet.

This is debatable. There's something to be said for not forcing alphabetical
order. It comes down to personal preference, though.

~~~
rodh257
If you don't want it in alphabetical order, put the apps on your home/launcher
screens and organize them how you want. The app drawer is only a fallback for
apps that aren't commonly used (therefore, they need to be in a logical order
as you aren't likely to remember where they are)

~~~
onemoreact
IMO, the left swipe + a letter to search is easer than the app drawer when you
actually have a lot of apps. Most common apps, fit on the home screen swipe to
the right once for folders of lesser used apps or swipe left once to search
for a half remembered app.

------
ohyes
Counterpoint: I have fat fingers, I mis-click apps a lot. Sometimes I just
graze safari or something when I am scrolling. Current functionality takes me
back to the place where I left off. I easily click the app that i actually
wanted.

Imagine my frustration when I mis-click an app, and instead of taking me back
to the place where I was just a moment ago, it warps me back to the first page
of applications. I have to rescroll through a few pages of apps.

After doing this a few times, I curse Steve Jobs' name and hurl the device
from the driver's side window... lamenting the day I bought it. I hollar to my
driver. He snaps his whip, urging my fine brace of stallions on-wards... to my
local Verizon store where I purchase The Jitterbug: a testament to Human
Interface Guidelines and ease of use.

~~~
jankassens
I also thought about mis-clicking. This could be solved with a small timeout
(say 1 second) before the home button has the new behavior and brings you to
the first screen.

~~~
dpark
Baking in a magic threshold seems to be a worse option. No matter where you
set the threshold, it's going to sometimes feel like the 'screen 1' vs 'last
home state' choice is random (and wrong).

~~~
LukasMathis
However, Apple already does this in other cases. If you leave the Settings app
and go right back in, you'll find it exactly the way you left it. If you wait
(I'm not sure how long, could be hours), you'll start at the top of the app
again.

~~~
dpark
That bugs me, too.

------
parfe
I have a similar problem on my Droid X. Sometimes the back button goes back a
page (such as in a web browser) or while reading a message back will go to my
contacts list (in google talk or google voice).

But sometimes, in the same apps, the back button might take me back to the
home screen (If i answered a message from the notification bar), or a previous
app if something launched a browser.

It's incredibly aggravating that the behavior changes, and especially so as
Android devices have a home button! Back should be constrained to a specific
application. Otherwise in google talk I have no reliable way to get back to my
contacts and usually have to make a trip back to the home screen to directly
launch the talk app.

~~~
dolinsky
I think the presence of a hard back button in Android is something that iOS is
sorely missing. Whenever I switch from using my Droid X to my iPad I am
constantly looking for the 'back' button, especially when installing an app
from inside the Apple App Store (I find it very annoying that iOS kicks you
out of the App Store and brings you to a seemingly random home screen just to
show that it's now installing an app).

The back button in Android does have the fault of not always being consistent,
but that is due to it being usable by the developer of individual apps. I find
it extremely useful that I can be doing something in Tweetdeck, click a link
which opens up my browser (Dolphin HD), view the full article, and then just
press the back button to go right back into Tweetdeck. That's just not
possible on iOS.

Also, long-pressing the back button in certain apps (like Dolphin HD) provide
a nice shortcut to quitting the app (instead of keeping it running in the
background), which helps on battery life.

~~~
Encosia
The four-finger swipe to switch between apps more or less fixes that issue.
I've had the four-finger gestures enabled on mine for a couple months, and
they really are a noticeable improvement.

~~~
dolinsky
I find the 3 and 4 fingered swipes, especially on the smaller screens of the
iPhone/touch devices to be pretty inconsistent and not very natural from a
hand gesture perspective. I'd also suggest that 'more gestures' isn't what the
average consumer is going to find as useful.

I'm also not looking forward to the first gesture requiring the use of my big
toe.

------
panacea
If the iPhone had a home button _and a back button_ , this wouldn't be an
issue. But adding a physical back button is completely anathema to Apple's
DNA.

Similar to the lack of out-of-the-box right-click functionality with their
meece.

~~~
tibbon
But the back button (if I'm remembering right) on the Android (which is always
there) isn't always consistent in its functionality. In some apps it does one
thing, in some apps it does another. At least the home button is more
consistent.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Android has both a home and a back button.

The inconsistency you talk about only happens when authors poorly create their
applications. Android's entire multitasking functionality is built on top of a
stack of activities, which is easiest to think of as a stack of screen views.
I start at my "desktop", click on my Photo Gallery, decide to share an image
using Dropbox, and it takes me to choosing a Dropbox folder. That's roughly
three activities or so (depending on how many screens within each app I have
to go through) all on a stack. Built properly, if I decide I don't want to
share on Dropbox while choosing a folder, I would just hit the back button,
it'd pop the Dropbox folder browsing screen off the stack, and take me back to
browsing my Photo Gallery. Poorly-created apps will try and "recreate" their
internal activity stack when they're not supposed to. Let's say that getting
to Dropbox's folder browser if I were to launch the app independently took
four activities in and of itself. If Dropbox was poorly written, it would try
and recreate that natural flow of previous activities when you're just trying
to do a share, so hitting the back button won't take you to the Photo Gallery
from sharing.

Sorry, it's complicated to explain but makes perfect sense when you're
actually using a device. The tl;dr is that if app developers don't suck the
back button's behavior is seamless and consistent.

~~~
dpark
If it's complicated to explain, then it's complicated.

Android's back button strikes me as an interesting idea that doesn't really
work. If it depends on application X doing the right thing in order for the
experience using application Y to be pleasant, then it seems pretty broken.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Again, people who've never used it think it's complicated. It's really not,
and it's extremely intuitive as soon as you start using the device.

In the same vain, any poorly-written application on any device that doesn't
conform to UI standards and guidelines will drag down the experience when
using that device. This isn't a problem unique to Android, but it's more
obvious when apps violate it due to how multitasking is built into the OS from
the ground-up.

~~~
dpark
If it's not complicated, why do some Android users complain about it? If it's
as intuitive as you say, shouldn't everyone be happy with it?

As for poorly-written apps dragging down the experience, I don't think that's
necessarily a given. Obviously if you have a crappy app, then using that app
sucks, but that crappy app shouldn't also make the experience of using other
apps crappy.

~~~
nlogn
>If it's not complicated, why do some Android users complain about it? If it's
as intuitive as you say, shouldn't everyone be happy with it?

Don't you think this is a silly argument to use against Android's back button
when the post we are commenting on is a complaint about iOS's home button? By
your logic, that should indicate that the home button's behavior is not
intuitive and complicated... you know, because somebody complained about it.

~~~
dpark
Except I never said that iOS's home button behavior is "extremely intuitive"
or assert that only people who've never used it find it complicated. Of
course, I also didn't give a long description of the iPhone's home button
behavior, say that it's really complicated to explain, and then say it's
intuitive....

Obviously some people disagree with the iPhone's home button behavior. Then
again, they're not complaining that it's too complicated to understand, merely
that it's not the ideal (or perhaps "correct") behavior.

------
Shenglong
I've been using iPhone for a year, and this seems perfectly intuitive for me.
Maybe this is a bad assumption - but most people have common applications on a
page or in a folder. Remembering home screens should make it easier to access
other applications that are USUALLY used with the current one.

For example, I group all my work (let's say .doc, .xlsm, .ppt) into one
folder. When I exit or alt tab, should it switch to the last thing I was on,
or should it go to my desktop?

You only need to hit Home once anyway and the bit about the double tap is a
little silly. A simple tap on the screen will get you out of the folder, and a
finger swipe is a reliable method to change screens. I use my phone A LOT:
text, email, twitter, fb, linkedin, lal, bloomberg, fxtrade, google voice,
skype, and calender on a daily basis... and it's organized in patterns, so it
minimizes browsing time.

------
monochromatic
Apple should hire this guy. He eloquently described something that's bothered
me for a long time about my phone, and the solution he came up with was one
that hadn't occurred to me... but now that he's mentioned it, it seems clearly
like the right answer.

------
algoshift
Apple's insistence on trying to overload one and only one button with all of
this functionality is the real problem. I understand "cool" design. However,
you can't beat hardware buttons and controls when used correctly. The iPhone
should have several buttons. Gamers would LOVE this. It should also have a
scroll-wheel on the side. I've had several devices with scroll-wheels, most
notably blackberry phones. I happen to think that they are fantastic. Need to
scroll through your contacts? You can do it with ONE hand. Use your thumb to
scroll and click the scroll-wheel button to select.

Touch is neat, but it is also a PITA. Typing on iPhone or iPad is decidedly
decades backwards with respect to hard-button keyboards. In addition to this,
if you regularly communicate in multiple languages it is impossible to use the
auto-completion feature and, therefore, you are relegated to making horrible
spelling mistakes.

I like the devices for what they've done to push tech forward but it'd be nice
to see Apple put out a new iPhone with something like a clamshell design and a
real keyboard along with some multi-function buttons. It would make the
platform so much more useful and easy on the users.

------
S_A_P
At first read, I found myself disagreeing with his assessment, mainly because
app folders have allowed me to have a single page of apps. I do find that the
state of the folder remaining open is slightly annoying. As to his point, I
agree with him when I think that home should bring you home, not to almost
home.

As a counterpoint to this, I do find that I use the same 3-5 apps most of the
time on my phone so double clicking home as actually most efficient as I can
double click and tap to get to where I want most of the time, though sometimes
I do need to swipe through the list a page or two.

------
zuppy
I have a different problem with that button: it brakes on all ios devices that
I own. I broke it on a 3g, on a 4 and now i'm very close to do that again on
an ipad. In the past, I had to push it just when I wanted to exit, now there
are many new actions assigned to it.

~~~
smackfu
Yeah, my friend had a new iPhone 4 left in practically useless state after 4
months due to the button going bad. Apple replaced it under the warranty but
that's not good. (It could easily have happened out of warranty.)

~~~
randomdata
iOS 4.3 has the four finger gestures to simulate the home button if you enable
it, and 5.0 is rumoured to have gestures to replace all of the physical
buttons.

No excuse for rapidly failing buttons, of course, but it will allow out-of-
warantee devices to continue to be functional without costly repairs, which is
good news.

~~~
khafra
My home button is failing. I hadn't heard about finger gestures to simulate
it, but it'd be really nice to be able to exit an app without 30 seconds of
repeated pressing.

------
jinushaun
I like the physical home button (as opposed to Android's capacitive buttons),
but I do agree that it's way too overloaded with functionality. Single click.
Double click. Click and hold. App switching is a chore and takes way longer
than it should to complete a task. However, more buttons is not the answer.
iOS needs WebOS's multitasking gestures badly.

~~~
bgruber
for the record, there are plenty of android phones that use real physical
buttons for those 4 buttons at the bottom of the android screen. using
capacitive buttons is a manufacturer choice.

------
dgeb
I've always found the tactile experience of physically pressing the home
button to be disruptive to the iPhone experience. I'd rather see them do away
with it entirely, widen / lengthen the screen, and switch to a breadcrumb
style navigation bar.

Imagine a swipe up scenario from the bottom that would show your full location
using symbols (and allow you to navigate back with a press): Home > Home
Screen 4 > Running Apps > Current App Home > Current Page in App

~~~
gfodor
On the iPad, you can avoid the home button altogether. A 3-fingered squeeze
gets you to the home screen, and a 3-fingered upswipe gets you the task list.

~~~
dgeb
Thanks for the tips - quite useful! However, I think that this reliance on
gestures means that the usability gap will widen between those who are "in the
know" and those who aren't. If iOS developers only use the shortcuts, they may
not notice the annoyances of the default experience.

------
evilswan
Good analysis.

I've definitely noticed the creep of more and more being added to the Home
button in subsequent iOS releases.

I've not seen iOS 5 yet, but I hope that no more functionality is triggered by
the button.

~~~
Xuzz
I think it now also closes the "Notification Center". (And the diagram also
missed one usage, as spotted by @rpetrich: it also closes an iAd.)

~~~
ugh
I just tried and it indeed closes the notification center. Wow. That just
seems wrong.

~~~
evilswan
+1 Damn!

------
mrseb
Aza Raskin has written about the Home button before:
<http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-problem-with-home/>

And other iPhone buttons, too:
<http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/in_my_recent_article_about/>

------
yesimahuman
I found the iPhone search functionality basically useless. Having search be
part of the home screen made my experience worse.

~~~
pinko
That's funny -- I love it. I rarely swipe off the home screen; I just find it
easier/quicker to launch all other apps by name. Usually just takes a
character or two, since it seems to prioritize past selections when sorting
search matches.

~~~
artursapek
How many home screens do you have? I don't use many apps so mine is kept to
one screen so I can get anywhere in just a few taps. I just get annoyed
everytime I overclick onto the search screen. It's hard to believe Apple
doesn't allow its users to disable it.

------
hnsmurf
Remembering state intuitively makes sense because the real world remembers
state. Apple uses a lot of real world metaphors, such as the inertial
scrolling, for this reason.

------
lukeschlather
I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the search button and the menu
button is, but I really hate using a phone that lacks hardware back and home
buttons.

~~~
jokermatt999
Search is somewhat optional, but I guess it got its spot because of Google. It
is pretty useful, and I use it all the time, but that's just my behavior.

Menu brings up options for what you can do in an application. For example, in
the browser, hitting menu brings up the URL bar and bookmark button (which can
also be reached by scrolling to the top of a page), as well as a bottom row of
icons with "New window", "Bookmarks", "Windows" (tabs, basically", "Refresh",
"Forward", and "More" which contains all the esoteric options for a browser. I
guess this could also be put at the top of a browser, but having a handy menu
button to bring it up is quite nice for screen real estate. Think of it sort
of like hitting alt when you're in a full screen browser to bring up the menu.

~~~
fpgeek
What can irritate me about the menu button is that you don't know whether
there's anything available unless you press it. It is particularly annoying
when you think options should be available and they're not (or they're not
where you think they should be).

Honeycomb cleans this up with the action bar. The action bar is on top of the
screen and contains whatever actions are currently available. If there are
more actions available than what can be fit in the bar, then they get put in a
visible overflow menu. The key improvement here is that the action bar is
(almost) always visible, so you can quickly glance at it to see what actions
are possible (rather than the more complex menu-button flow).

------
jrockway
The problem is that it's not the "Home Button", it's the "Back Button".

I use Android, but I do see the value of the single-button UI. Although it may
not be the "get me home ASAP button", it is easy to learn what happens. The
only thing you can do with the phone is press that button. That makes it very
easy to learn what's going to happen, and it's easy to predict what will
happen in the future.

~~~
cdcarter
But, it is the home button! It always takes you to a variant of the home
screen, and a given app can't change it's behavior. If you click a link out of
an email, it doesn't take you back to email, it takes you to the home screen.
Just, some random folder on some random page.

~~~
artursapek
It ignores apps and goes back through your history in the home screens, hence
the randomness you mention

------
rchowe
I find it interesting that this is a reversal from the days of the spatial
finder[1] in OS 9: Apple is implementing the spatial metaphor and people don't
want it compared to when they took the metaphor away and people complained.

[1] I can't find a great link to describe this. Suffice to say the paradigm
was that each folder had a new window and the windows stayed where you put
them.

------
molecule
another problem: iOS waits to see if you're going to press the home button a
second time, and this pause effectively introduced a performance regression to
the User Interface. thanks, Apple!

------
buff-a
I'm somewhat wary of jumping into an issue that is obviously extremely
personal and emotional for people, but this remark struck me as odd:

    
    
      You can’t even resort to just hitting the home button
      blindly a bunch of times, because if you hit it too
      rapidly, the iPhone will interpret it as a double-tap.
    

What I find odd is that double-tap is the number one way that I launch apps.
The author mentions the double-tap as if its a bad thing (in the context of
finding an app to launch) and yet double-tap is the way to get to the
recently-used apps to display.

I can't fault him on the other points, but this seemed like a blind-spot.

~~~
kobepanda
I totally agree. As has been established elsewhere, most users only use 3-6
applications on a regular basis. Double tapping the home button bring up my
most recently used applications along the bottom of the screen one of which is
probably the one I want (not sure where the author got the idea that double
tapping the home button brings up the search screen-- old version of iOS?).

------
pkamb
I have a similar issue with many iOS apps I use occasionally. I'll start up
the app, weeks after last using it, and instead of the app's main screen it'll
take me somewhere deep in the app. The screen where I last left off, weeks
ago.

I don't care about that task, that was weeks ago. I'm opening up the app to
start a new task right now. Take me to the main screen.

Safari has a similar issue. It will constantly save the last search you did.
Every time I want to search, I have to delete the old search term first. Even
10 days after searching that term. A 2-minute timeout would be better.

~~~
Hisoka
Is this a fault of the app design or the iPhone? It seems it's up to the app
to determine the last open date and switch back to the home screen

------
9999
I group my applications roughly around similar functionality (language
learning apps on one screen, games on another, utilities on another, etc.).
When I use the home button to return to the SpringBoard, I usually want to
open an application from the screen I launched from, not an application from
the first page (which are in all likelihood accessible from the task switcher
anyway). So Apple's way works for me.

------
vectorpush
The real problem with the iPhone home button is that it requires a metric ton
of force to register the depression.

------
fictorial
I would like a different SpringBoard in which there's just a single vertical
scrolling list of icons with the app name to the right instead of the current
horizontal pages and app groups. This list could be sorted by last-used-date
or alphabetically. Hit the home screen once to go to this list.

------
dkberktas
If you have many pages or folders, going directly first page will make start
from scratch every time you hit the home button which for me very annoying.
Say I am reading news from CNN app, when I close the app, I am expecting to
see the news folder for BBC.

------
tobylane
Everyone needs some basic instructions on how to use something, in this case
it's what is a click or a double click, what a slow double click does. When
you simplify it that much it makes perfect sense to remember which springboard
page you are on.

------
gabiruh
Is this guy nuts? I'm on iOS 4.3 and I only need to hit the home button twice
in a row to get from Safari to the home screen. One hit to send Safari
background, and another hit to scroll from the current screen to home screen.

~~~
kissickas
If so your Safari is not in a folder.

------
Cyph0n
Good point. It always bugs me when I hit the home button and end up in one of
my custom folders when I actually needed something from the home screen.

Perhaps a Cydia developer could make a tweak to avoid this problem?

~~~
jevinskie
Check out HomePage on BigBoss. It goes to page 1 instead of the last viewed
page. Unfortunately the last time I tried it it had some bugs with open
folders but that may be due to InfiniFolders.

~~~
Cyph0n
Thanks for the heads-up.

------
micampe
I'm willing to bet that if it always put you back to the first screen, he
would be saying that the Home button makes you lose context.

Design is always trying to find the best compromise.

~~~
LukasMathis
I'm willing to bet against you. Do you have access to an alternate universe
where we can test your claim? :-)

~~~
micampe
Sure, let me dig out the one where I'd win.

(parallel conversations here ;)

------
NormM
Absolutely agree. How do we communicate this to Apple?

------
vxpster
For comparison, a visual guide to the Android's home button:
<http://i.imgur.com/JHlPD.png>

------
zentechen
I don't quite recall but isn't there a setting that you can change the
behavior of Home Button, both single click and double click?

------
ralphsaunders
I don't have an iPhone, but I thought holding the homebutton down returned you
to the homescreen, making this a non-issue?

~~~
sapphirecat
On my iPod touch, holding it eventually gets you to a flaky voice control
system. I also have the option of setting up a11y functions on triple click.

Once I got used to it, the home button is okay, but it can register anywhere
from 0-2 clicks for any given press. That is the bigger issue: I never truly
know where I'll end up even if I do know how it should work.

