
Great design from Apple on an interaction with Siri - joeyespo
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3308-great-design-from-apple-on-this-interaction
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minikites
That's one of the things I liked about the Android alarm app that I miss on my
iPhone; when you set an alarm and tap "Done", it would say "Alarm set for 9
hours and 22 minutes from now" (or whatever), a quick sanity check to make
sure you didn't confuse A.M. and P.M. or accidentally put in the wrong day.

~~~
eridius
In iOS the alarms are sorted chronologically, so if you have more than one
alarm set up, it's pretty easy to notice if you accidentally did PM because
your alarm ends up at the bottom of the list instead of the top.

Not that I'm saying this is better than what you're describing. I'm just
saying this in case any iOS users didn't realize that and it's helpful.

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georgemcbay
Android also sorts them chronologically, but that alone only helps if you have
multiple alarms (and a sufficient number that sorting gives you the needed
feedback).

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markbao
It's all about the little big details that reduce friction in user experience.
This attention to detail:

1) reduces errors and user frustration,

2) substantiates the thought in the user's mind that "the software will do
what I want", and

3) teaches users that the software will accomodate them, instead of requiring
the user to accomodate the software.

It would have been better, actually, if the dates also mentioned the day of
week, like "Thursday, October 21 / Friday, October 22". I'm more familiar with
what the day of week it is, but not necessarily what the date is.

If it mentioned the weekday, I would be able to answer "Thursday" immediately,
since I know that I intended it for Thursday, but I wouldn't necessarily know
that it was the 21st without looking at my watch.

~~~
__del__
>better, ... if ... also ... day of week

If I'm talking to robots after midnight, I don't know the date. This has been
proven by scientists.

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pazimzadeh
That's interesting. Source?

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Firehed
This is what causes my love-hate relationship with Siri: when it works, it's a
fantastic experience and gets little details like this spot-on; when it
doesn't, it's off by a mile. More frustratingly, it doesn't seem to improve
much between major iOS releases despite being mostly a thin client to Apple's
services.

To be fair, I generally prefer obvious failure rather than quietly doing the
wrong thing (which is what probably would have happened here), but even really
simple stuff like "take me home" only seems to work as expected half the time.

(I'm ignoring situations where the voice recognition fails outright, since
that's a totally different problem - this just relates to handling of
correctly-interpreted commands)

Like many others, I wonder what Apple's QA and user feedback processes look
like with Siri. Unlike Maps, there's no way (AFAIK) to report a crappy Siri
response, so while I'm sure they have stats on low-confidence speech-to-text
results, I'm not sure what they do to determine "you heard me right, but you
did the wrong thing" or "doing X instead of Y would have been a lot more
useful". As such I assume most of it is internal QA process, and Apple's
secrecy around new features (fortunately Siri no longer qualifies as such)
definitely hurts QA that requires a lot of real-world usage.

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nextstep
If you're aware that Siri is "mostly a thin client to Apple's services", why
would you expect it to update with iOS releases? If it's a thin client, it can
be updated (or not updated) at anytime on the server side.

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swalberg
I'm not positive it is.

If you are in Canada and ask Siri for something like "where's the nearest
coffee shop", in iOS 5 you get "I don't support that in Canada", but in iOS 6
you get the expected results.

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frontier
I'd assume the device version + iOS version + device ID is sent in the request
and Apple maps this to the corresponding Siri version/database/API.. there
would be no technical reason why iOS 5 can't see the same POI's as 6, only
whatever business policy Apple has decided to implement. eg. freezing updates
to the 5's database.

I'm sure the back-end processing is the same, but because 6 supports or will
support new commands, then they are running separate instances & databases
which results in varying update schedules.

As long as they don't restrict based on device model (only iOS version) then
I'm happy with that.

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esolyt
Actually, this isn't the best possible design. As others here have already
pointed out, a better design would be presenting the options as:

4 hours from now

28 hours from now

This one doesn't require me to know the current date and also works as a
sanity check to make sure I'm not confusing AM and PM.

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aquark
But you don't need to know the current date to know which one comes first.
Well, unless the dates were in the past.

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brianpan
Great point. I think Fried's example is a little confusing to us because we
don't remember right now what days Oct 21 and 22 were. But in the context of
the interaction it should be fairly clear that, "Oh, it's just after midnight,
Siri's confused because I actually meant today not tomorrow." The actual dates
(21 vs 22) wouldn't matter, the two days Siri is trying to choose between is
obvious in the moment.

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whalesalad
My only complaint with this is that I often have no idea what day it is. I'd
love it if it added the day of the week as well. "It's after midnight, did you
mean today, Tuesday, or yesterday, Monday the Xth day."

I too have seen this a handful of times and thought, "Wow, that's really
clever Siri!" only to realize a few seconds later that Oct 21st vs Oct 20th
does not help me and I am still screwed. Then I cancel out and go look at the
calendar day and then re-sirify it.

Then again I am not that smart.

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shasta
Hint: You don't need to know the date to know which option to pick.

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papalalu
maybe you do if you're close to falling asleep.

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runemadsen
I wonder what the workflow is in the Apple teams that allows them to catch
stuff like this. Is this the work of a single, smart programmer, or a good QA
team?

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pwthornton
It's most likely from a strong culture of interaction design and usability
testing. During the design process, you usually do usability tests with would-
be users and they can help illuminate issues with your design. In this case,
it may have even been during testing that a person said, "well that's not what
I meant by tomorrow."

Pretty much every time I do a usability test or study, random users catch
small things like this that help make a product much better. When you design
without feedback, you have your own mental model of how everything is supposed
to work. But you're the designer and the expert, and users are not. They often
find different ways to use your product than you intended.

~~~
philfreo
But it's even more impressive because you could do usability testing all day
long (during work hours) and never catch this issue. It's when someone's
_really_ using it where something like this comes up.

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nicholassmith
I'd imagine someone was dogfooding and had an 'ah hah!' moment when they hit a
similar issue. Often the best way to spot anything missing.

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pws5068
I've also benefitted from this condition once but it would have been helpful
to show a day of the week beside the date for added clarity.

Did you mean Sunday October 21st, or October 22nd?

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zaidf
Boy I can't wait for the day when we look at this screenshot and chuckle that
it was even needed. My problem with Siri and others is that if I have to
_look_ at the screen after every command, it kills away a huge chunk of the
benefit. If Siri was a human, it is the equivalent of having the human repeat
what he heard every time you made a request to confirm he understood you
correctly. That would be annoying. And often just easier to do it yourself.

This is one area there is massive room for innovation. I'd give it a few years
before we can say a command like "hey iphone, text mom that I am home" and
within seconds, hear back "done!". I'd know with confidence that the right
message was sent. Even more importantly, I'd be able to do all this without
needing to lift my phone, or have to get closer to the phone or speak too much
louder than whispering the request to an assistant.

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sturmeh
Whilst that may seem like intellegent design, you'll notice that you can't see
the current date anywhere on that screen without making assumptions.

This screen would make me feel uneasy and over-analyse the options. (Does it
mean yesterday or today? today or tomorrow?)

It would be nice if it also showed the day of the week on each option.

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acangiano
Discussion on Reddit from a month ago:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/10f3al/clever_siri_if...](http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/10f3al/clever_siri_if_its_just_past_midnight_it_asks_you/)

In that thread, I commented:

In my opinion a much better question would be "Do you mean in 9 hours?". If
you say yes, set it for today. If you say no, then it's tomorrow.

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sturmeh
I think

"Alarm set for 9 hours, is this correct?"

Is less intimidating for the user, this way they aren't being asked to
calculate something, rather being asked to confirm a calculation.

The difference is trivial and subtle.

~~~
acangiano
Sure, this is even better.

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keltex
Does anybody know how "Google Now" handles this?

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Off
Got this: <http://ompldr.org/vZzZtNA>

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myko
I believe if you don't say 'tomorrow' it will work correctly. It is pretty
annoying.

I'd test it myself but I sold my Galaxy Nexus on Craigslist, waiting for the
Nexus 4 to be released.

~~~
Off
Yes, it did work: <http://ompldr.org/vZzZtaA>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Which means you'll have to sleep after midnight if you want your Android phone
to wake you, or wait for an update (like Sleeping Beauty.)

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keeperofdakeys
Android alarms work a bit differently to what you are thinking. The basic
alarms are set around times, and when the time comes around, the alarm goes
off. So as long as it's after 9:01 am when you use this command, the alarm
will go off at 9am the next day correctly.

To deal with days the alarms have a 'repeat' option, listing which days the
alarm should go off. Google Now can't handle these kinds of alarms yet. If you
needed an alarm for a specific day then you'd probably use calendar alarms,
however I don't think they're fully linked into Google Now at the moment.

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tbrock
I constantly check this website for nice little touches that usually go
unnoticed: <http://littlebigdetails.com/>

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S_A_P
Maybe this was apparent to everyone using Siri, but today I asked it/her "Who
is my girlfriend?" it replied what is your girlfriends name? I told it It then
set the alias "Girlfriend" to her and now I can say "Siri send a message to my
girlfriend saying I love you"

which I think is totally awesome. Im late to the Siri party though...

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ComputerGuru
I just want to point out that this must be a recent innovation, because only
two weeks ago I got screwed over by telling Siri to create an appointment
"tomorrow" after 12am, and she booked it for the day after and told me she
created the appointment for "tomorrow" (no date).

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epaga
One time I had to set my alarm for 4am (early flight) and Siri said, "OK, but
don't wake me up!". On the one hand that's pretty funny of course, but on the
other hand, I think it's a helpful sanity check for you to make sure you
didn't actually mean 4pm.

~~~
ygra
On the other hand, 4 and 16 are hard to confuse ;-)

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cecilpl
This is the difference between a programmer's understanding of "tomorrow" and
a user's.

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eridius
My girlfriend insists that, as soon as the clock ticks over to 12:00AM,
"tomorrow" means a full 24 hours later. I still insist "tomorrow" doesn't
change up until you sleep (or stay up all night).

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nicholassmith
Funny, me and a few friends have the same logic of 'if you've not slept it's
the same day', thought we were just odd as I've come across no one else that
had the same opinion.

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sukuriant
My friends do something similar, so you're not alone. I think it's just
something that night-owls do.

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daladd
When I first saw the Siri Query, I was anticipating it would try to
disambiguate A) remind me (to inflate my tires tomorrow) (at 9:00) vs. B)
remind me (to inflate...) (tomorrow at 9:00). I guess I was overthinking it.

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altrego99
This seems common sense to me, I would most likely have done it this way if I
were designing a voice operated alarm module. Hence it follows Apple is
already likely to have a patent on it.

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aviswanathan
Someone once said that the best things about good software are the things you
don't notice but improve your life. Case in point here.

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corwinstephen
I wouldn't call it great design. I'd call it lack of bad design. I feel like
asking which day you're referring to is an extremely obvious step in selecting
a time. The fact that we're surprised by it is a testament to how terrible
most productivity software is.

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jheriko
This is why everyone should test things... stuff like this falls out of good
testing if you miss it on a first pass. :)

some people could learn from that idea - even if they already hire 1.5 testers
for each programmer.

(yes i mean microsoft)

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pmtarantino
Excellent. I would love to know who, from Apple, suggests this details.

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jonmc12
This particular feature may been less a function of Apple design philosophy
and more a function of Siri being built on top of a contextually-sensitive
disambiguation engine.

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jamesrcole
Yeah, it's not about the literal details, but how the user perceives the
details.

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IheartApplesDix
I love this post so much. Please upvote onto front page so more people can be
made aware that Apple and Siri exists, and they are the bestest.

