

The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience Design - Yrlec
http://johnnyholland.org/magazine/2009/08/the-iphone-is-not-easy-to-use-a-peek-into-the-future-of-experience-design/

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mighty
_Pressing a button is an action that a gestural UI can communicate visually,
but there are a number of other actions that have no visual cue. Direct
manipulation gestures such as tap (on something other than a button), double-
tap, tap-and-hold, swipe, and pinch/zoom are far more difficult to
communicate. These rely on user experimentation and memory.

Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete.
If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to
anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that
they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a
clue._

I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a
Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above
criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that
nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because
the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an
iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You
can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running
--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.

It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom,
undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You
can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement
_at all_ is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a
pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy
requirements as much as they have.

~~~
aerique
Agreed.

My three year old picked up how to manipulate the planet in Star Defense[1]
straight away after seeing a friend of mine play it on his iPhone. Also Shape
Builder[2] (some kid's puzzle game) was immediately obvious.

She had a little harder time figuring out how a mouse works.

[1] note: I'm sort of affiliated since that friend's company made that game

[2] not connected to this game

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mechanical_fish
This is a very good essay that reminds me of my favorite passage of Jacob
Nielsen's, from "2D is Better Than 3D":

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html>

 _Note that 3D works for games because the user does not want to accomplish
any goals beyond being entertained. It would be trivial to design a better
interface than DOOM if the goal was to kill the bad guys as quickly as
possible: give me a 2D map of the area with icons for enemy troops and let me
drop bombs on them by clicking the icons. Presto: game over in a few seconds
and the good guys win every time. That's the design you want if you are the
Pentagon, but it makes for a boring game._

The guy does undersell the iPhone's usability, though. In particular, the key
phone feature -- dialing the name of someone on your contact list -- is _far_
more usable than an old-school dial telephone (where you have to remember a
number) and likewise far more usable than on a cheap cell phone (where you
have to do a lot of button-press scrolling, or use a numeric keypad to type
the letters of someone's name... which means you have to _remember_ the name
in advance.) Indeed, the iPhone has exactly what the usability folks have been
agitating for for years: A big flat list of people's names or pictures, where
you touch one and it immediately dials them.

I think the moral of that story is Pareto's Rule: if you nail the usability of
_one_ common feature, people will praise your device's usability in general,
even if the rest of it plays out like an adventure game.

~~~
dreish
The rebuttals to Nielsen's essay are also good:

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115_comments.html>

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khangtoh
What works 11 years ago might not have worked today. Same for user interface
design for the web. No one recognizes the drop down suggestion. User interface
evolves like technology, and without doubt, the iPhone is a class of device of
it owns that have never existed before any other. So I would give Apple the
thumbs up for creating an user interface that not only is fun but usable on a
revolutionary device.

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jsz0
I don't think tutorials are a good idea. Let the user figure it out by
themselves so they develop some basic intellectual curiosity to learn on their
own. It's not like there are millions of confused iPhone owners out there
completely baffled by the iPhone UI. It's pretty obvious stuff. Basic "learn
by mistake" experience exposes all the less obvious iPhone UI features after a
few hours of use.

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jvdh
It's funny to see the critique of iPhone usability go up and down. First there
was the critique that it couldn't do enough, there was no undo, no copy or
paste, no easy way to delete things, the UI was too much like it was on the
Mac.

Now that those features have been added and the UI for the iPhone has become
more distinct from the Mac, you get the critique that it is all way too
complex.

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dlevine
Maybe the iPhone could be easier to use, but it's much easier than a lot of
the phones out there. I have heard a bunch of people in their 50s and 60s
complain about the Blackberry Storm, and how difficult it is to use when
compared to the iPhone. It's fairly simple to figure out how to do the basic
stuff on the iPhone, which is really all most people are looking for.

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gregwebs
It seems like there is an obvious point left unsaid- touch user interfaces are
more fun. Sorry, no citation, this is just my impression. If you had to
operate the iPhone with a mouse and keyboard the experience would be entirely
different. It just seems a lot harder to try and make a website playful
because using a mouse is not fun.

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dgreensp
I think emphasizing "fun" and "playing" misses the point. Take a step back.
The web browsing experience on the iPhone is literally an order of magnitude
better than what came before. The screen is huge and gorgeous and responds to
your touch. The interface and apps, by and large, are super-slick and polished
in all respects. So of course it's "fun"! But these are also the reasons it's
tremendously "usable" as a device.

It's ridiculous to pick on the iPhone for its "swipe" and "shake" gestures,
declare it "hard to use", and look for some other adjective that doesn't have
to do with usability to explain its strengths.

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mlLK
So who is gonna be the first to write the application that solves this guys
problem? I mean, he just laid out an interesting problem. I'm not even an
iPhone user but I'd be willing to bet you can't man most iPhone apps; here's
an interesting idea, unlike man, how about an application that takes the user
on an event-per-view tour of the application. I mean is there not a way to dig
into an existing applications events, am I missing something here, or is
accessibility really this big of an issue?

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GHFigs
_Not only do users have to learn and memorize what the device does, they have
to learn how each application makes use of those functions!_

Heaven forfend!

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tjogin
The iPhone is not easy to use, as compared to what other device that currently
exists?

~~~
mechanical_fish
I have a relative, old and nearly blind, who has a Jitterbug phone. It has
about seven buttons total, but three of them are the big buttons: a green one
labeled "Operator", a red one labeled "911" and a yellow one with an arbitrary
label (often marked "Tow" in the pictures). You can think of these as the
"call someone", "call the squad", and "call my best friend" buttons.

You really only _need_ the big green button to make calls. You press it and
you get a human operator who offers to complete the calls, either by accepting
a number, or a name, or (most likely) a name from the contact list that you or
someone else has set up in advance.

You can find the buttons in the dark. You can operate the phone without
vision. You don't need fine motor skills beyond finding one big button and
pushing it. You don't need to read numbers. You don't need to know how to
_read_ , period.

 _That_ is a device designed for usability. Of course, most of us don't want
one, because it is too boring and would make us feel kind of silly... which is
exactly this designer's point.

~~~
Retric
Talking to an operater to make a call is a long, slow, and complex process.
The only advantage is people are used to the interface but, it's not
inherently simple. And it has other usability problems for the spanish
speaking etc.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_Talking to an operater to make a call is a long, slow, and complex process._

Not when compared to trying to find an entry on the iPhone when you are
elderly and _blind_.

But, yes, it's got tradeoffs, like any designed object. This is why designers
get paid: There's no simple checklist of things you can do to make your design
good. It has to fit the use case. This is what the essayist is trying to say:
From a certain point of view, the iPhone has a lot of interface elements that
are hard to use. But, nonetheless, it meets a different important design
criterion: It's delightful to explore. There are interface elements that are
_incredibly_ obscure, ("Why have all the application icons started shivering
like they were cold?") but once you find them it's kind of thrilling, like a
magic trick, or an Easter egg. (I find those shivering icons highly amusing,
even if nobody has any clue what they mean the first time through.)

But not everyone wants that. The fact that no one design can suit everyone is
one reason why we want a diversity of options in the marketplace.

~~~
GHFigs
Not to contradict anything you said, but supposedly the iPhone is quite good
if you're blind: [http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/making-the-
iphone-...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/making-the-iphone-icons-
speak/)

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thenduks
To me it seemed like the author was just fumbly with his fingers. Triggering
undo and such. This information can be found online or in the manual so if he
would just rtfm it would be obvious how he caused the delete button to show
up.

Also, the other glaring example here is the one about the mail client refresh-
vs-reply arrows. Aren't these two icons the exact same icons used for pretty
much the whole history of the internet? Circular arrows = refresh; Left arrow
= reply.

New things sometimes require just a bit of effort because you aren't familiar
with it. In other words, easy-to-use != just like every other phone out there.
It's pretty close to a 'fundamentally new UI' - just because you don't grok it
within 5 seconds doesn't make it hard to use.

~~~
delayclose
>This information can be found online or in the manual

So can the information on how you should partition your hard drive for Linux
installation. Yet (historically) most people think Linux installation is a
usability disaster.

Or for another way of looking at it, do you really think that an interface
which requires you to go online (or read a manual) to figure out how basic
stuff like undo or delete work represents "good usability"?

Also, as the author points out, what is "refresh" supposed to do in the
context of a single message? Just because a symbol is familiar, it doesn't
mean its meaning is automatically clear if it's taken out of context. For
example, at my workplace recently got a new microwave that has a play/pause
button. In this case, it's relatively easy to figure it out but it still gave
me a pause.

~~~
thenduks
My point was that you can find the information online or in the manual _if you
don't get it_ , which this guy clearly does not. Some people have habits when
it comes to devices like this that are hard to break. If you're one of those
people, read the manual.

~~~
scott_s
I think you missed the point. The author is a person who designs user
interfaces. He knows that he can look up how to do what he wants to do by
referring to material outside of the device. His interest, though, is
designing user interfaces that don't require that.

~~~
thenduks
Fair enough, I'm just saying that maybe the fact that he's a UI designer is
what caused him to approach it in a way that most people don't. I've seen
people who know less-than-nothing about interfaces (aka, your average person)
get it without any help... And I'd say that is evidenced on a larger scale by
the positive reviews and general success of the product.

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cubicle67
before reading this, I thought I was going to respond with some witty retort
like "anecdotal evidence proves otherwise", but it's actually a very good
essay.

