

Designing "Mute" - iamclovin
http://www.marco.org/2012/01/14/mute

======
haberman
I've previously had exactly the same problem with the iPhone. I was singing in
a professional rehearsal and had switched the phone to silent, but somehow in
my pocket the iPod app was triggered to start playing some music. It disrupted
the whole rehearsal and it wasn't clear where it was coming from at first. I
was extremely embarrassed (and livid with my phone) when I realized it was
coming from my own pocket. I disrupted a rehearsal that was probably costing
$2000/hour.

I think Apple made absolutely the wrong choice here. The "silence" switch is
next to useless if you can't actually count on the phone being silent when
it's switched on.

You might ask why I didn't just turn the phone off. I put the phone in
"silent" mode when I still want to receive notifications via vibrate, so I can
look and evaluate whether I need to slip away and attend to something
urgently.

~~~
tel
But that's exactly the point of the article. An alarm clock is near useless as
well (for waking up anyway, that's why I use it) if it's silent just because
you told the iPhone to be silent. It'd be disastrous if I accidentally muted
my phone, failed to wake up, and missed a morning.

Really, you want a "don't annoy me or people around me" button, but that's
context sensitive. A design nobody has been able to implement yet. Apple just
made an educated guess at it here.

~~~
natesm
> Really, you want a "don't annoy me or people around me" button, but that's
> context sensitive. A design nobody has been able to implement yet. Apple
> just made an educated guess at it here.

My dumbphone pretty much did that in like, 2005 or so:
<https://s3.amazonaws.com/ns_pixels/blag/old-phone-volume.jpg>

~~~
mkr-hn
My dumbphone still does this.

------
jsankey
The problem I have with the iPhone behaviour is twofold:

1) The most common uses for mute are situations where you absolutely don't
want any sound (theatres, weddings, etc). The iPhone behaviour makes it much
more difficult to guarantee this than the obvious behaviour.

2) It complicates something that has an obvious default behaviour. It's no
longer a mute switch, it's a "mute non-explicitly-requested sounds switch".

I could see the iPhone behaviour being useful -- it's more flexible after all.
I just don't think it's worth compromising the common case.

~~~
snprbob86
In practice, it's a "Mute- all sounds, but don't frustrait me when I try to
watch a movie, or need to get to work on time -switch".

Theaters, weddings, etc. are absolutely not the only time you want to mute
things. A very large number of people work in shared offices and operate their
phones in silent mode all-day, every-day. I for one really appreciate that I
don't have to think about what state my mute switch is in when I get home
hours later and try to watch a YouTube video.

The common case is that your alarm is only ever set to wake you up in the
morning and your timer is only ever set when you're sitting around, waiting
for your dinner to be ready. It's very rare for you to set an alarm or a timer
which will affect a quiet group environment.

I don't think that a hard mute-always rule is worth compromising the common
case ;-)

~~~
jsankey
_In practice, it's a "Mute- all sounds, but don't frustrait me when I try to
watch a movie, or need to get to work on time -switch"._

This definition is fuzzy, and thus harder to understand, which was my second
point.

 _Theaters, weddings, etc. are absolutely not the only time you want to mute
things._

I didn't say these were the only times, I claimed this was the most common use
case. Granted, I don't have data to back this up, so perhaps I'm wrong. I'm
sure there are plenty of other reasons to mute, this just seems to be the
classi case that I anecdotally see the most.

 _I for one really appreciate that I don't have to think about what state my
mute switch is in when I get home hours later and try to watch a YouTube
video._

This is hardly a big problem, though, certainly not worthy of confusing
behaviour.

 _The common case is that your alarm is only ever set to wake you up in the
morning and your timer is only ever set when you're sitting around, waiting
for your dinner to be ready. It's very rare for you to set an alarm or a timer
which will affect a quiet group environment._

I agree you wouldn't normally have an alarm/timer set for these times. It's
probably a rare mistake, but an embarrassing and costly one! These aren't the
only ways that an iPhone will ignore the mute setting, though. This "feature"
gives you plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

~~~
pbreit
Is it really a "costly" situation? Really?

------
akent
The solution is simple, just turn your damn phone off completely if you're at
a concert.

~~~
draggnar
but wouldn't it turn on automatically with an alarm? There should be a concert
mode or movie theater mode that really shuts off all alerts.

~~~
learc83
No it wont power itself back on if you actually power it off instead of just
turning off the display.

------
yesimahuman
I've lived with (though not mastered) both an iPhone and an Android device,
and I don't think either gets it right. With the iPhone, I was confused how to
set the volume of the alarm. The last I remember I would turn "on" sounds, set
the volume I wanted the alarm at, and then silence the phone before I went to
bed. I never actually learned how to do it and I never trusted it. With
android, I had to find how to set the specific "alarm" volume control, which
you can access if you try to select a ringtone for the alarm. I've found it
once and set it and I don't have to worry about it anymore, but it took too
long to figure it out and I didn't realize the alarm had its own volume
slider.

I'm of the opinion the official alarm and timers should be the only apps that
can violate the silence setting, and it should be painfully obvious how to set
the volume when you set the alarm.

------
droithomme
I disagree with the conclusion.

Mute is a temporary state that overrides previous requests to be loud. If
thought absolutely necessary that alarms should pierce the mute, then if there
are pending alarms when mute is engaged, it can alert the user at that point
and give them the option.

The real design problem seems to be the lack of vibrate mode on the iPhone.
Other phones do this to silently alert the user without disrupting a
performance, secret agent mission, or other situation requiring silence.
Vibrate mode solves this problem on other phones. If a phone designer chooses
to eliminate the vibrate mode function, that is his prerogative but it is a
design mistake to then make mute be non-silent as a result of a decision to
eliminate vibrate mode.

But wait a minute. The iPhone _does_ have a vibrate mode. Ah. Then there is no
excuse at all for this is there.

~~~
jopt
For many of us there are always pending alarms. A mute dialog would be a
severe pain.

To me, it's not such a problem to go into Clock and turn the alarm off if I
change my mind about it. I try not to give my device conflicting commands. I
wouldn't feed an S/R latch 1-1 when I expect it to give meaningful results.

------
pilif
The fundamental problem here is that libcrystalball doesn't exist yet:
sometimes you want mute to mute the alarms (in concerts, though why would you
need an alarm there) and sometimes you need mute to not affect alarms (when
getting up).

As far as I can see, there's no way to reliably detect the situation at alarm
time. Less and less as the time between setting mute and the alarm getting off
increases.

Warning the user when turning on mute doesn't help either because for one the
mute switch on the iPhone can be operated blindly because the phone wibrates
when you mute it, so usually you'd not look at the phone to mute it.

And even if you did check its display and it did show that warning: the
warning is totally useless for you most of the time (i.e before going to
sleep), so that you will quickly be conditioned to ignore it - just like the
security warnings in current OSes.

Or you are like me and have your phone muted for the majority of the time.
Showing me that warning two weeks before the concert wouldn't help at all.

No. I believe that the current design which optimizes for the common case (not
sleeping through the alarm) is fine. Just be mindful of this feature and check
the alarms before the concert starts, or if you can at all afford it, just
turn off the phone completely.

The hurdle of turning it off is as big as the hurdle of remembering to
correctly set a three-state mute feature, but the current two-state one with
haptic feedback has the huge advantage of simplicity.

~~~
chime
> As far as I can see, there's no way to reliably detect the situation at
> alarm time. Less and less as the time between setting mute and the alarm
> getting off increases.

Using the GPS, it can tell when I'm at home or work, when I'm driving or
commuting, and when I'm at a theater, hospital, or funeral home. So
technically, it should be possible to make the mute button work one way in
certain locations and another way in other locations. Whether this will
improve the user experience or not is another question.

------
crgt
I'm an iOS dev (approaching a million downloads), and fully half of our
support requests are from people who don't understand how the mute
functionality on their device works - particularly the side switch on the
iPad. It's not a big deal for us since we've got a templated response at this
point and it only takes a minute or two for us to send a response, but there
are clearly a number of users out there that don't understand how the mute
functionality is intended to work.

~~~
iamclovin
I agree we've had that problem with our app Denso as well (a video app) -
people would complain that videos play but with no sound and almost always it
was because people had the device muted.

We eventually shipped an update which ignored the mute setting while video
playback.

------
narkee
I'm not exactly sure how it did this, but my old Nokia 5800 used to sound
alarms, even when the phone was turned off.

The device would power on somehow, alarm would go off, you would silence it,
and the device would be off again.

------
dminor
> When implementing the Mute switch, Apple had to decide which of a user’s
> conflicting commands to obey, and they chose the behavior that they believed
> would make sense to the most people in the most situations.

> That’s good design.

Choosing one of two conflicting commands _without warning the user_ is
terrible design.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
How would you warn the user?

I was surprised by the behavior initially, but now I far prefer it. I spend
far less time worrying about vibrate mode with my iPhone because I don't have
to worry at night when I go to bed that my alarm will go off in the morning.

There is no perfect design for this, just tradeoffs. I appreciate the
tradeoffs Apple made in this case.

------
pbreit
One guy's iPhone accidentally goes off and people think Apple made a horrible
design decision?

Andy and his supporters are wrong. The iPhone (and Android apparently) does it
right.

First, it's not called the "mute" switch. Apple refers to it as the "ringer"
switch.

It works the way it must for the alarm clock to have any value at all.

Andy's Case A (oversleeping) would be all to common and potentially
disastrous. Andy's Case B (an Ebay alert during an "important" meeting) is
silly, contrived and inconsequential.

3-way switches, bedstand modes and sound profiles are all idiotic.

------
kemayo
It's interesting that the controversy is completely centered around the
iPhone. The behavior described for mute is exactly how Android's alarm app
works as well. So it's not Apple going it alone in some quixotic quest to
enforce their own twisted idea of how this should work on users in defiance of
the rest of the industry.

I'm delighted with this behavior, because it perfectly meets one use case of
mine: I want to set my phone to silent mode when I go to sleep and have it
stop making notification sounds, but still beep to wake me up in the morning.

~~~
kalleboo
The Android alarm actually has an option in settings to choose if you want the
alarm to override silent or not.

~~~
kemayo
Now you mention it, I vaguely remember seeing that. The overriding is the
default though, right?

------
pat2man
The physical mute switch was one of my favorite features when I switched from
a Blackberry to an iPhone. It seems to work exactly how I want it to.

The only time when I want something different to happen is when I lost my
phone and I want to call it from another phone. Luckily the "Find My Phone"
service is now free and solves this.

It might be nice to expose the alarm while muted feature somewhere in the
preferences but it seems like a relatively small problem.

------
fonzie
A good solution to the iPhone's mute issue would be a _gasp_ Blackberry-like
_gasp_ 'nightstand mode'.

Though it would not have saved the day in this instance, it would be a good
implementation. So many times I do not want all my apps alerting me with push
messages and emails and texts; I just really want phone calls or alarms to
come through.

~~~
prodigal_erik
That sounds about right. Hell, I should be able to drop a phone on my
nightstand and have an inductive charger switch it to "do not disturb, except
for alarms and calls or urgent messages from certain people". Is it the future
yet?

As for this article, there seem to be conflicting expectations. Demanding
attention is the point of an alarm, so I for one do not expect "mute" to imply
"and cancel all my meeting reminders or let me oversleep". Another comment
proposed a theater mode, and maybe that should mean "no noise whatsoever for
the next N hours, warn me if it means deferring an alarm".

~~~
epochwolf
> Another comment proposed a theater mode, and maybe that should mean "no
> noise whatsoever for the next N hours, warn me if it means deferring an
> alarm".

It's called off. Hold the top button and the home button and you'll get a
screen that lets you power off the iphone completely. To turn the phone back
on just press and hold the top button for a few seconds. :)

------
blago
The mute button in iOS has a worse problem: the ability to be repurposed to
lock orientation. I say this from my own experience having developed a popular
(paid) app and dealt with angry customers complaining that it doesn't have
sound.

After a little research it turned out that people often don't even know that
their device is set to lock orientation, and sound is muted. And how would
they - knowing that, other developers purposefully IGNORE mute and so they
don't have to deal with a BROKEN feature. I did the same...

I just got tired of explaining to my clients that my app is actually fine,
it's the other apps (that have sound) that are broken.

------
chamius
My main problem with the "mute" is that there is no visual indication
whatsoever on the front of the device that it is enabled. So you have turn the
phone on its side and peer at that teeeeeny little orange dot (even harder if
you have any sort of case).

One of the very few ways the wonderfully designed iPhone is arrogantly
"broken". An Android-like (gasp!) icon on the toolbar would be nice.

~~~
jopt
Toggle the switch. Vibrates when going into mute, with a large visual for
luck. There _is_ a notification area icon that tells you if you have a wake-up
alarm set.

------
jopt
There are pros and cons of this. I would be late for work every other day if
the iPhone did "mute" like my old Nokia. Here, this one guy's musical
performance was disturbed.

I would probably make the same call as Apple: if you set an alarm and it
doesn't go off, you're in more trouble mor of the time than if you set an
alarm, forget it, and mute your phone.

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frankydp
Design - Protecting users that expect things do what they say, from
themselves, since 1976.

~~~
jopt
That's not the issue here, because when setting an alarm "doing what they say"
is to play the alarm.

The user gave the device two conflicting commands, and it has to decide which
of them to honor.

~~~
teyc
It would be more intuitive for hardware switches to trump software ones.

For instance, if I push the power off button on my mains, I mean it. Not
obeying this directive is the province of HAL.

------
SeanLuke
"Mute alarms or don't" is a false choice. The right way to do this is
straightforward. When the user presses mute, if an alarm is scheduled and
DontShowAgain is false, then pop up a window and ask the user how he wants the
alarm to be treated. If the user also checks DontShowAgain, set it to true and
never show the window again.

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mkramlich
One obvious solution is to have, say, an extra flavor of mute. Say a soft mute
and a hard mute, where soft works like the current iOS mute and a hard mute
which is a true absolute mute. And give the user a physical switch or in-
software toggle between them.

Next problem.

~~~
jopt
Simplicity trade-off.

~~~
mkramlich
very likely their thinking, agreed.

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mikeash
I consider myself to be a pretty advanced user, I program for Apple platforms
professionally, I've had an iPhone for years, and before I read this article I
had _no_ idea that the alarm didn't respect the mute switch. Makes me
extremely grateful that I don't use the built-in alarm. When I flip the mute
switch, it's because _I don't want the phone to make any noise_. An exception
for music/movies makes since, because I'm requesting it right then and there.
An exception for alarms makes no sense to me, as it's something you set
previously and, as the unfortunate concert-goer experienced, something you may
have forgotten.

That switch on the phone has one purpose in life: to keep my phone quiet when
I'm in a situation where I don't want it to make noise. Alarms really should
not override that.

~~~
pbreit
If that were the case, it would render the alarm totally useless for people
like me who frequently or always silence the ringer.

And, oh yeah, it's not called a "mute" switch on the iPhone. It's the "ringer"
switch.

~~~
mikeash
The fact that the current behavior is essential for some and completely
unexpected for others shows that the whole thing needs more work, I think.

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gcb
Awful conclusion.

If the user gives conflicting commands, tell them so.

That's responsible design.

Or, avoid it, by making the switch 3 state. 1St mute: user is telling to
silence all, except alarms. 2nd, user is disabling all sounds, whatsoever,
even if he turn on noise fart app.

That's good design.

~~~
pbreit
3 way switches are terrible design.

It's not conflicting is the switch is referred to as the "ringer" switch, as
Apple does.

~~~
gcb
I'm not even sure 3way switch is the best solution. My point is: solve it.

Don't hide behind a explanation. If a few user have the problem, it's bad
design. Period.

