iPhones are hard to use | Hacker News Reader

iPhones are hard to use

blog.fawny.org

976 pointsmrzool636 comments

Most of this article just lists semi-advanced features that people don't know about. I think that’s Apple’s intention...

Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way.

I’d be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how to improve the situation without compromising on ease of use.

(Regarding the WiFi thing...I agree this is a very annoying default setting, but I think a worse outcome is when a user shows up in their friend’s house and has no idea how to connect to the WiFi. Making the user go to Settings -> WiFi to disable this prompt means they’ve demonstrated they’ll be able to go back to that page to manually connect to a network in the future. If you turn this setting off on a friend's phone, be sure they still know how to connect manually.

(Though I do think iOS could be smarter and not prompt you to connect to intermittent networks while you’re driving around a city...))

I get that, but I do think that saying that text size is an advanced feature is just not true.

Loads and loads of people are older than 40. Loads of people just have weaker eyesight. Apple has really good accessibility tools, and it would make a _lot_ of sense for there to be a dedicated part of the onboarding for accessibility.

Text size is part of the onboarding now.

>Loads and loads of people are older than 40. Loads of people just have weaker eyesight.

Even so, all of those people have to change their text size just once or twice. They can look it up when they need to. It's not like it's a feature they need to use everyday.

Text sizing is addable to the control center, as are other accessibility shortcuts. That's about as fast access as I think it's possible to get.

Worth noting that there's a fair number of apps historically that don't really support text sizing. Until iOS 11, if you were using a non-system font, you had to do the resizing manually. They made it much, much easier to buy in to Dynamic Type in iOS 11, so hopefully this will get better over the next year or two.

Our of curiosity, how is the accessibility of Hacker News? I don’t know much about how to verify that. And I imagine threaded comment pages would be especially difficult to interpret non-visually

Couldn't optimal text size be determined by the camera (squinting) and machine learning?

not really 'good' tools, but they have tools for that that they should put forward

I think the points that are well taken are those around identity, relationships and contacts. I've been using iPhones for something like 8-9 years and I didn't know I could specify a contact as a specific family relationship. A while ago when I wanted to configure emergency contact information it took me a google search to figure out that I needed to find the Health app buried on the last screen of the phone.

At the very least, the emergency contact info should be stupid simple to find (I'd say top level in Settings). This isn't an "advanced" feature, it's a fairly vital and basic feature of a cell phone. Family relationship specification should be simpler too.

It's a niche feature that has been there since at least iOS 4, (or at least I've known about it since iPhone 4, when I had the time to meticulously comb through every app on my Phone), but it wasn't actually useful until several interations of Siri later.

Relationships is one of the features, to me that feels like Apple ended up building functionality on top of years after the feature was released, but since it was useless for so long nobody ever uses it.

Did you know not only could you specify your relationships, but other people's relationship's as well? I'm not sure if Siri lets you contact people this way ("Call John's mom"), but I wouldn't be surprised if a hidden update to Siri enabled this feature as well.

I'm sure that everyone has something that should be stupid simple to find.

It's a hard problem. Has anyone really solved it well that offers the use cases our current smart phones/computers have?

I'm not about to try it right now (don't want to mess up my contacts) but I'm pretty sure you can just tell Siri that "suchandsuch is my wife" and she'll update the relevant Contact cards for you.

The problem lies in what's semi-advanced to one is critical or basic to many others. Apple has been known to hide (aka. make subtle) basic operations. How often have you wanted to load a page in 'desktop mode' in mobile Safari? It's there, just invisibly so. The UI does not teach in the name of clean/minimal design which is Apple's way: form over function.

Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus.

Theres a lot of armchair design going on here. Obviously there is some sort of balance between showing the user too many options or not enough and making the important stuff obvious without cluttering the UI. I imagine if Apple had gone too far in the other direction (which they would never do IMO) that people would complain there are too many options.

There is definitely room for improvement though. There are some regressions that are too obvious. The recent regression that comes to mind is forcing the end user to go through extra taps to switch the camera between front and back during a FaceTime call when previously it was a one-button click

Personally, I use the "Request Desktop Mode" features lots! I also moved it so it's the very first option listed for quick access. But I wouldn't do that on my grandma's phone...

While 'desktop mode' is super useful the HN crowd, I don't think most users would benefit from it.

A non-technical user is probably only minimally aware that mobile and desktop sites might have different features at all. And even when you do use it, it might not have the desired affect. I might have been browsing around on "mobile.site.com" for a while and repeating my request with a desktop User-Agent is still going to get me the mobile version. (this happens to me on m.facebook.com) To fix this I have to know how to modify the URL to point to the non-mobile-only version...easy for this crowd, but not for the average user.

Certain CSS @media queries also don't seem to be affected by "Desktop Mode". (It only changes the User-Agent I believe?) So in other situations, it won't work no matter what and that's pretty frustrating/confusing/inconsistent if you don't know the details.

Even if I do succeed, a desktop webpage on mobile can be a pain with all the zooming and zooming out needed. Sometimes desktop sites don't even work properly on mobile browsers! Now...we understand the constraints, but all these details come together to make it a pretty confusing feature for the average user.

I think most users wouldn't get value from this so it's obscure by default...but for the technical types that love this, it's not too hard to figure out how to move this feature to a place where it's convenient to access.

Overall I think the current design is a pretty good balance all things considered.

(though I do wish the ability to move the desktop mode button to the 1st slot was more obvious. Definitely took me a while to figure this out)

Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. It wasn't until the third major revision of the OS that iPhones got copy+paste!

Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus

This reminds me that several versions ago, Windows stopped underlining the shortcut keys to the menu items by default --- taking away the only affordance to discovering that the keyboard can be used to more quickly activate the menus. I learned by accident long ago ("what's the Alt key for?"), and have used it since. In contrast, I remember trying to operate a Mac the same way but gave up experimenting with the Alt key and such to try to get the menus to show (I know about the shortcuts, but they are not easily discoverable/explorable in the same way that menus are) --- and only later found out that trying to operate the menus on a Mac from the keyboard is... not very intuitive and disabled by default (why!?!?):

https://superuser.com/questions/117549/use-the-keyboard-to-a...

https://superuser.com/questions/504111/how-to-select-file-me...

(I'm not sure if the above even apply to pre-OS X --- when I discovered the function of Alt and the underlined keys in Windows, it was the Windows 3.1 era.)

>The problem lies in what's semi-advanced to one is critical or basic to many others.

Well, that's not a dictum to design UIs by. This way everything becomes "critical".

At some point you just use statistics, and if something is critical to fewer people, you can give it lower priority anyway than what most want to use everyday.

Or clearing the cache in Safari. The only options I know is to go to the settings and then find the Safari app.

This is not so nice when you only want to reload the page while clearing the cached files.

Could have been something like a long press or double tap on the refresh button.

> How often have you wanted to load a page in 'desktop mode' in mobile Safari? It's there, just invisibly so.

Not a single time in the past 5 years or so. What's your point?

sorry to off topic - but how do you get safari to force desktop? I've been hacking URLS

"Form over function" is not "Apple's way". Apple's way is function, period, paragraph. And often, what "function" means is, don't bury the user under 200 options they will never use. Make choices. Be willing to say "no" to having every single option front and center.

Added to this is the obvious point that with a touch interface on a small screen, you cannot make everything obvious. It's impossible.

This article makes it clear why the major tech companies are so focused on making intelligent assistants and on using machine learning to make using software more contextual.

Our tech keeps getting more powerful, to the extent that the interfaces and sheer number of options outstrip the average person's capabilities to manage.

The problem with assistants and the like is that they hide features even more. On iOS you can browse through the apps and settings, on Siri you can't. Sure you can try some but there's a lot of "Why didn't I think of that?" options available there.

I think that instead of defending the design we need to focus on this problem:

-we have feature X but only 1% of users find it where 10 of users use it after someone else shows them how to use it. Maybe a feature that is only for 5-10% of users is advanced or niche but we need to design it better so this niche/advanced features are irrecoverable.

I do not know how to solve this on mobile, I know that some software on desktop has a tooltip dialog when you open it(with a checkbox to disable this feature) that presents some cool advanced feature, you can click Next and Next to see more and more advanced features. I seen this in Intellij, they also have a list of the actions you performed sorted by usage, so you can look at it later , notice you used action X the most and that you can speed it up if you learn or configure a shortcut

Settings having a search facility is helpful. Something like `apropos` that searches all installed apps and suggests matches seems like it would already be in the latest gen phones?

It's even anti-ergonomic in general to overload features. It's probably an easy frequency based relationship.

I don't think making your market small and extremely fragmented is call for innovation. Certain features should be available easier for the ease of the user. If you don't like the environment you're using, and you can't change it, you're being abused by the software.

I don't know about intention, I mean e.g. the Health app is pretty clearly on the primary means of launching apps. I think it's more of a matter of people not actually sitting down to learn and explore their device.

Mind you I do believe Apple should release a proper manual. Barring that, there's a series of iphone books, websites and magazines that will go over these features over and over again.

If people don't invest the time themselves, why should Apple bother?

Also why is Apple and the iphone singled out? It's the same rhetoric for Windows, where the start button is a mystery to the computer illiterate.

TL;DR educate yourself or don't get an iphone.

I do believe text size should be an option for the first configuration though (and if you give your old phones to other people, do a factory reset and let them run through that initial setup themselves).

It gets complicated with apps though, designers often don't keep the variable size text in mind. That feature - at least when I looked into it a few years ago - gives you fixed text sizes to work, which is fine for default looking apps but a bit problematic when you're implementing a certain style.

You can generally either dumb down the product that it has very few options to tweak (I call it a lazy engineer's choice), or you can design the product that it has the initial setting for average joe, then you can drill deeper into advanced settings if you need. Plenty of software does this right.

These type of complaints are the most common I hear from technical people that switch from android to iphone - the lack of customization, the product is on purpose 'dumbed down'.

I recently had to help my mother with some tech support. One of the things I needed to do was turn off the device - I had to actually Google how to turn off an iPhone X.

This is after me owning 3 generations of iPhone (3S-4S) and an iPad AND the family owning one of every main iPhone since 3S.

Is turning off the device an advanced feature?

> Is turning off the device an advanced feature?

I guess most people really never need to turn it off. Maybe when switching sim cards to not hotplug them?

Try downloading and playing an MP3.

Works just fine. Save to files. Open and listen in Files.

Ok, but honestly, where does Apple list the instructions for using iOS as well as the preinstalled apps? They believe their product is so easy to understand that people will just get it. But then they go and change things like where they put the autobrightness switch and even seasoned iOS users have to hunt for it. Or go on Reddit.

They just changed the battery page in settings. Where's the tutorial? An obvious place would be apple.com/batteries but I don't see it.

In the user manual. Which is, btw, one of the very best user manuals you will ever see. It's very easy to find, and the fact you haven't found it tells me you probably didn't bother searching, since almost any Google search finds it instantly:

https://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone

And no: Apple does not "believe their product is so easy to understand that people will just get it". You just made that up. It's...surprising what people will claim sometimes about what Apple "believes" based on zero evidence. The fact is, Apple knows very very well what is easy and obvious, and what isn't. They have done rigorous study of all of this.

I'm not saying that Apple always makes the right choices, design-wise. But to say that they are blithely ignorant of the basic usability facts surrounding the most successful consumer product in world history is...a bit of a stretch.

The WiFi thing is made more complicated by how the Apple Watch works. It uses an adhoc WiFi connection to your iPhone, so you don’t want the toggle to disable that. And it would be confusing to have different behavior depending on whether or not your watch is nearby.

Apple Watch uses Bluetooth to communicate with your phone, not WiFi (unless it’s out of Bluetooth range, in which case it will connect to a known network if possible, then LTE if you own a cellular model).

Most people know it's controversial to say "iPhones are hard to use" because most people feel that the iPhone, perhaps more than any other technological innovation in the past 20 years, made technology easy to access, use, and integrate with their lives.

To say 'iPhones are hard to use' and then point out all the small edge cases of use as significant flaws is hyperbole in bad faith. The author is caught up in his own intellectual habit and not in touch with reality.

A better title for this article could be 'Simplifying complexity inevitably sidelines some of some user's needs'.

Or maybe "making the setup process easy hides some really important (and even safety critical) functionality". Or "popups are still bad and apparently we still need to say it" (referring to the wifi one). Or maybe "some current edge cases should be center cases".

I don't think that his point is an overly broad indictment of the iphone so much as an analysis of where many of its more common flaws actually lie. I've seen so many criticisms of trivialities around colors in the calendar, but little analysis of what real people with basic knowledge don't know.

The fact that it is so iPhone centric leads me to believe that the author is a fan. I don't consider this bad faith at all.

Do you really believe "iPhones are hard to use" faithfully represents his overall critique? Objectively iPhones are not hard to use. Do you really feel that an iPhone's ease-of-use is reasonably compared to a "handheld engine-diagnostics module for Daewoo cars"?

The fact that an iPhone can literally be used out of the box with no user-manual (unlike an engine-diagnostic unit) is testament to its simplicity. I don't even know why I am arguing this point.

Does iOS get everything right? Nope. Is an ongoing conversation about UX important? Of course. My point is not that the author may or may not bring up some valid points, it's that he hung his whole piece off of an self serving, insincere title and sensational premise.

More and more we are declaring that there is so much noise on the web that it's ok to bait users with nonsense titles. Just a couple comments down someone advocates this. If you let principles like sincerity and honesty slip just to get attention you've let a piece of your integrity go which in turn mars what you are actually saying.

If what you are saying isn't interesting enough to warrant an interesting title, maybe you aren't as smart as you think you are, or what you have to say is less important than you think it is. Either way, don't hijack the attention of others to validate your own ego, work harder and earn the attention honestly.

But then nobody would read it

Well sure, the profit-motive explains clickbait (or in this case, wanting readership; I see no ads).

We should still keep it off HN. I expect the headlines to work for me, not for the author.

Yeah, the OP made a good point, but it is really true of most persuasive writing, IMO.

There is one way to solve this problem. Apple knows which users are new and which are not because of iCloud. Just allow new users to schedule a class at a nearby Apple Store at the Welcome screen when users login to their iPhone for the very first time.

I like your idea of identifying if you are new via iCloud registration. I think this event should trigger an extended first-run setup flow that hits all the major accessibility features under the assumption that most new users would benefit from becoming familiar with these features from the get go and how to access them in the future. I know many senior citizens (including parents) who would have greatly benefit from an accessibility settings heavy onboarding experience, related up many of the issues the author mentioned regarding eye sight and vision related age decline.

This is not necessarily true. My parents had a Mac with an iCloud account and managed to purchase an iPhone from Verizon without ever logging into their iCloud account. It's one of the reasons I moved away from Verizon. They prioritized the sale of the device over making sure that people understood what they were buying and how to use it. Luckily, the iPhone is user-friendly enough that they were able to use it fine but they were never even asked if they wanted to enable iCloud and eagerly said yes when I mentioned what that meant.

Sounds a lot like you're saying blindly, that Apple is without any design flaws because look what they've introduced to the world.

What is the hyperbole? Should he rather have said "iPhones are not easy to use", as they clearly demonstrated?

I think the main issue is that he's singling out the iPhone as if it, outside of any other smartphone, is somehow more difficult to use than any other ultra-complex piece of technology and then proceeds to demonstrate that, poorly IMO, by pointing out several edge cases that the majority of users will never experience. His first example, case in point, is that users are never asked about text size when that's demonstrably not true. New iPhone users are presented with that during on-boarding and existing users have already made that choice. Changing it is in the settings. It's not Apple's or Samsung's or Nokia's fault if someone has another person set up their device for them and choose their preferences. The WiFi example is another one. The entire premise of those features is that users prove that they're capable of navigating to the manual selection of that feature because they need to do that at least once in order to turn the auto-discovery off. That's very intentional.

There'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, especially when compared with the competition, I will say that iOS has not gotten easier to use over time. Features like 3D touch are implemented inconsistently both at the hardware level, and in the UX — Worst is how undiscoverable they are. Here's the crazy part: Apple is about to release the iPhone XR, their 1 and only phone without 3D touch!.

It's gotten worse. Screens keep getting bigger, but more and more functionality keeps getting hidden behind undiscoverable swipes and taps. I've been an iPhone user since the 3G, I used to program computers for a living, and I don't have a reliable mental model of what the available gestures even are these days. I'm reduced to randomly tapping and pressing and swiping like some sort of idiot.

I'm generally dismayed at the state of UX in general, and mobile UX in particular, these days.

It feels like we have regressed a lot from where we were in the "golden age of the desktop". I mean, we actually had standards for things - remember CUA? And UX was designed in a way that made it so that once you learn a few basic tricks (like double click and drag and drop), they would work everywhere, and they would do so consistently. Consistency, in general, was key to the UX of that era. Some things might not have been as easy to access as they are today, but all things could be found where you expected them. Even the menu hierarchy was largely standardized.

Now, even if you stick to one particular platform, it often changes the concepts radically within 4-5 years; and many of those aren't even consistently applied. Worse yet, instead of fixing the mess, the UX designers just keep piling more and more stuff, like Apple's "3D touch".

> but more and more functionality keeps getting hidden behind undiscoverable swipes and taps

I think the issue is that Apple keeps adding functionality to iOS, but seldom removes functionality. So all these "non-essential" features end up relegated to harder to discover actions.

I feel the same. And when I learn how it works I get it but it doesn't rub right to me, I say to myself weird. I think it's apple without Steve Jobs super crazy attention to detail and the overall feel of it degraded over time.

3D Touch seems to be the Touch Bar of the mobile world.

Both are great ideas, but only sparsely exploited even by Apple, itself.

For what it’s worth, I use 3D Touch pretty much every day. The number one usage for me is moving the cursor around while editing text. I actually did it while writing this post; I decided I wanted to add a comma after “worth” at the beginning and did so easily with this feature.

"3D Touch seems to be the Touch Bar of the mobile world."

No, it is the right-mouse click of touch interfaces.

I've read on a lot of sites that 3D touch is going away with the next flagship.

No it won't. Pressure sensitivity is built into the hardware. 3D Touch is just a feature of that hardware functionality. Unless they get rid of the hardware, which doesn't seem likely since it's used for other things, 3D touch is probably here to stay.

This is highly likely, since most people (off this site) don't seem to use it and one of the newest phones omits it.

I have been an android-windows user for the longest time, and using Apple devices is among the most difficult things I've had to do.

I have used windows phone, linux, chrome OS, Blackberry's palm-like UI over the years, but I have gotten the hang of each over a small period of time. Apple devices however, are simply counter intuitive for me.

Apple seems to design UI for 2 types of people.

1. Old Apple users 2. The person whose phone use is the same as it was 15 years years ago + an app launcher

Because of those, I have seen 2 negative trends in their UI/UX design :

1. Sticking to old but familiar (for Apple customers) ways, even if they are cumbersome. (itunes) 2. Front loading everything that is heavily used by a layman (their launcher and quick setting menu), and hiding everything else behind a bevy of menus in settings.

If you have not grown up thinking like an Apple user and want to do anything advanced (my demographic), then their interface is incredibly alienating. The only other time I have felt this way has been when using SnapChat. (although Snap's was a lot more egregious than Apple)

I used an iPad for 2 months this Summer, and swapped it out for a Fire HD 10. As much as the iPad was fast, I can't be happier to be back to familiar territory in Android (even if it is on 5.1 Lollipop)

Granted, that my demographic may be the minority, esp. in the US. But, I can't help but feel, that the incessant praise showered on Apple's devices is partly because of the greater familiarity people have with those devices. And, that Apple won't fare as well if they were to be evaluated by an audience unfamiliar with their brand and devices all together.

> Apple won't fare as well if they were to be evaluated by an audience unfamiliar with their brand and devices all together.

Haven't they spent the last decade expanding into new markets successfully though? And from what I gather their new customer retention and satisfaction is among the best in the industry.

People like to explain away Apple's success as merely the product of "fanboys" they've had for decades, as though the same 10 million guys who bought the first iphone are somehow responsible for the 50+ million phones apple sells each quarter. The truth is simpler: (1) yes they do have many loyal customers and (2) those customers keep buying Apple products because they have good experiences with them. It's also true that their design priorities are not universal and some are especially ornery for power users. But the idea that their UI design is inherently bad seems off and the fact that people keep copying them [1] seems like the best evidence.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17988564/chinese-phone-s... , money quote: "judging by the accuracy and specificity of the rip-offs, the camera app from iOS 7 has a serious claim to being one of the most influential software designs of the past decade."

When the Android phones came on the market, I was extatic. Linux, in my pocket!

However, Android did not live up to my expectations at all. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but Android was not it.

After a while I came to understand that for me personally Android was a bad fit, and everything I had envisioned about running Linux on my phone was ill-adviced. Linux and FreeBSD are my main two operating systems I run on my own computers and servers, and I would not trade them for anything in the world on my main laptop, main desktop and servers. But on phones neither have anything to offer that is of use to me actually.

I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I use my iPhone for web browsing, watching videos, making music, playing some games, taking photos, 2nd factor auth, sending and receiving money, SSH client in my pocket, GPS with updated maps, listening to music, writing down notes, setting alarms, keeping track of my schedule, keeping in touch with people, creating PDFs that are indistinguishable from the scan a full size flatbed scanner would give me. The list goes on.

Everything I thought I wanted when I imagined having Linux in my pocket turned out to be a distraction. When I need Linux or FreeBSD, I have my laptop, desktop and servers for that.

Anyway, the point is to say that I don’t identify with the two groups of people you said are their target audience, but I find myself a very happy iPhone user.

But I am not married to Apple, and I am a loyal customer only because of 1. their stance on privacy and security and 2. their product fits me so well.

If they mess up with my trust then they will lose me as a customer. If they make changes to iOS that make using it bothersome, they will lose me as a customer.

I had nearly every iPhone until the LG G5 came out and I switched to Android. Whenever I use my wife's phone I honestly feel like an idiot because I can't figure out 3d touch and a bunch of the other features since I missed their 'introduction' of sorts and don't know that they exist or how they are supposed to be used.

I feel the same way, but in reverse.

I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G and have built apps for it. I know iOS inside out. I recently started a new job where the vast majority of our customers use Android. I therefore chose my work phone to be Android, so I could use the same platform that our customers use.

Wow - is it confusing! Nothing is intuitive, and I genuinely find it very hard to use and get into a rhythm with. It's a Galaxy S9, so hardly a "bad" Android phone.

My takeaway is that so much of the way we use our devices, especially our phones, becomes muscle memory. Android is not badly designed, neither is iOS, it's just that I've built up a decade's worth of muscle memory, coming from hundreds of interactions a day with the device, that switching to a different paradigm is going to feel jarring.

What a ridiculous response. Man used to using Android find iOS frustrating, predicts doom for Apple.

When iPhones first came out they were a dream to use - but I think that was largely because they didn't do very much. Picking up an iPhone 3GS (the first one I saw in real life) the interface was fast, intuitive and accessible.

However, as more features were added, Apple's desire to keep things appearing to be simple and clean, and their refusal to increase screen size, meant features get hidden away, behind swipes, long presses and double presses from different parts of the screen. I find iPhones really hard to use nowadays - even though they now have a lot of features which stopped me from buying them initially.

Very strange experience. As far as sharing anecdotes go I have witnessed two people coming to Apple without previous experience and having zero problems. You yourself state how happy you were to go back to familiar land of Android. So it may be, that Apple is not an issue here.

You realize 15 years ago was 2003.

I'm the same way. I've gotten used to using a Mac for work; there are the few things I need to know how to run, and I've more or less figured those out. Even after that, though, I was utterly useless last week trying to send an email for my mom on her iPhone.

This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market.

Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone. Of course, there are things that can be improved (with many decent suggestions from the author that most power users would agree with) but based on the author’s mild annoyances and casual observations that elderly, visibly challenged or foreign language people do not always know about features that can help them, iPhones are now “hard to use”. That’s quite an unfair title. There’s zero consideration by the author of how many hundreds of millions of people perform so many of the same tasks (email, messaging and navigation) almost seamlessly everyday using an iPhone. Our human nature is to only notice things that ‘dont’t work’ though. It would be interesting to see how the same people mentioned in the article fare on an Android device.

This article reminds me of the time when the iOS alarm clock app had a bug that caused the alarm to go off one hour later on some random Sunday and it made headlines in all the tech press. Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found in the public Google Play store.

> This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market

Sure. But also, I'd say it's been written by a die-hard Apple fan who goes to Apple because they think they care. I was deeply skeptical of the article until I got some way into it.

You know you're the market leader when you don't get compared to other, shittier alternatives, you're getting compared to platonic ideals.

> This article reminds me of the time when the iOS alarm clock app had a bug that caused the alarm to go off one hour later on some random Sunday and it made headlines in all the tech press.

Android alarm going off one hour earlier in Brazil also got some press attention today. https://androidcommunity.com/brazils-dst-change-inadvertentl...

>This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market.

My phone cost $300

> Compared to the accepted norm that malware apps are almost routinely found in the public Google Play store.

To add to the author's list of things that iPhone users don't know that Apple keeps hidden, several orders of magnitude more iPhone users have been infected with malware than Google Play Store users despite the Play Store having several orders of magnitude more users.

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malw...

Given that it is reported on a very well known Apple blog and Apple released a statement on the issue I don’t think you can say they are hiding it.

So a quick google for xcodegohst brings up a Wikipedia page and widespread main steam news coverage (including BBC), with quotes from Apple - literally not hidden at all.

That is flat-out untrue. There are several orders of magnitude more Android users that have been infected with malware than iPhone users. In fact, there have even been Android phones that were compromised within the supply chain and released into the wild. You're either being disingenuous or you're using a very narrow definition of "infected".

> Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone.

How long ago? Should they sit on their laurels and do nothing? Or what if they have made progressively worse and worse decisions with regards to UX?

What they did a decade ago doesn't matter if what they currently produce isn't that simple usability.

Ok, I need to say it. This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views. This is a problem with not just all smartphones but all rapidly evolving technology products. Do you think you could hand an android phone to one of those example cases and have them do any better with it?

Also half of the time I am in an apple store I am helped by someone who needs to use the accessibility features to check me out/in. I think it is awesome that Apple dog foods their products that way.

> This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views.

This article has iPhone in the title because it talks specifically and exclusively about iPhones.

Of course there's always a lot of improve with UI and UX on all devices, but this article focuses on iPhones.

Almost all of it can be applied to not only Android phones but also Mac, and Windows. The problem is that everyone needs a slightly different set of features to be at the front. There is no way any software maker can surface the features a user needs for everyone. At some point the user has to take responsibility and learn the tool they bought. If it was anything from a coffee machine, to a tractor, the user has to learn how to use it, and also use it all to it’s full capacity. With accessibility issues this is harder I know, and yes Apple should put text size settings in the set up process.

Also maybe phones could be more proactive in pushing the user to do stuff differently. Eg if the user keeps googling Facebook to get there it could suggest typing directly or showing a message about what bookmarks are.

But the title of this article is definitely click bait. I know I clicked on it indignantly thinking “maybe but no more than other phones”. Whereas if it had been “phones are hard to use”, then “lets look at the iPhone”, the chances I clicked on it would’ve been lower as I would’ve though “yeah you’re probably right”

It’s actually a pretty good article, that made me think about my job, just would’ve been nice to see examples from other platforms for comparison.

I disagree unless you are saying: 1. Only iPhones can adjust text size. 2. Only iPhones have mapping functionality 3. Only iPhones have a voice activated digital assistant. 4. Only iPhone have a health app.

These are all common smart phone features. They only pertain to iphones because of the title and the author uses specific examples of otherwise generic problems in the context of iphone use.

I would say only iPhones have apple stores with classes specifically geared towards teaching the novice user how to use their phones.

A name drop no less.

“McDonald’s is dead cows.”

“Too much Smirnoff will get you drunk.”

It implies comparison to the competition, and cheats it’s way in front of an audience that wants to compare products.

This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views

Don't you think it has iPhone in the title since the author is an iPhone user so the article is about iPhones? Every example he gives in the article is specific to an iPhone.

Maybe the article could be generalized to other smartphones, but the author's experience is with iPhones, that's what he wrote about in the article, so it seems appropriate for the title.

These are all common smart phone features. They only pertain to iphones because of the title and the author uses specific examples of otherwise generic problems in the context of iphone use.

I would say only iPhones have apple stores with classes specifically geared towards teaching the novice user how to use their phones.

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+home to power+volume down, or whatever it is now.

If you have a feature but nobody knows how to use it, is it really helpful?

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 release.

> Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have

You would not have needed a manual in the past. Discoverability used to be a core tenet of the Apple HIG. Now that's apparently gone, and we're reduced to hunting through a "Tips" app or trying gestures until something happens.

I wholeheartedly agree that more accessibility focus and ease of adoption for novices is something the industry as a whole should focus on.

Historically large manuals do not help users use the device better. Ex. How well do you know how to use the advanced features of your microwave?

I would say apple is the least bad at this. They offer classes, every release has “What is new” progressions when you launch. Over time this is going to be an increasingly difficult challenge, as tech develops on a platform it builds on its previous patterns. You get to the point where some competence is assumed (correctly or wrongly). When I get into a car there is no display that tells me “this is a steering wheel, it turns the wheels in proportion to how much you twist it”.

The lack of a manual is quite interesting.

They could easily include one but instead they encourage people to come to the Apple Stores and discuss the problem with a Genius. This in turn encourages people to look at at new products and get premium 1-1 support that you don't get from other vendors.

Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have.

My biggest gripe with Apple products is that usability is a freaking treasure hunt.

This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views

While I don't disagree with you, in the United States it feels like more and more the term "iPhone" is used to mean "smart phone." Like how people use the brands TelePrompTer and Dumpster as generic terms.

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I've heard the phrase "Android iPhone" twice in public.

Microsoft have done a pretty good job with Windows 10 when you first set it up.

By default it reads out all the prompts for setting up your PC with Cortana, so if you wish you can setup everything via voice. I haven't ever tried it, so can't comment on how well it works, but it seems like a good start...

Android certainly handles joining wifi better.

My mum is 68 now. I first got her a windows phone. I taught her how to make calls. That was it. Then a month later I got a string of text message.

Hello

Son

This

Working

She worked out how to send texts.

I upgraded her to an old iphone. I sent it to her in the mail. She worked out everything including how to take photos. I told her about LINE and she found the App Store and downloaded it.

Her phone died so I bought her an android cos I couldn’t afford the iphone.

She can’t figure it out at all. She had to go to the store to ask how to connect to wifi. How to use the play store, etc.

I thought cos she went iphone > android she would be able to pick it up. That isn’t the case.

iPhones may have hidden features. But they are a lot easier to pick up than an android phone by a Long shot as far as I’m concerned.

Once you get used to one O/S, the other becomes harder, because instead of just not knowing any of the conventions, you've actively trained the wrong ones.

My mum went from Windows Phone to iPhone without issue. I didn't have to teach her anything about the iPhone. To me that suggests either Windows Phone / iOS are similar (they aren't) or intuitive.

I also propose that people's behaviors become less variable as they age, and thus they are less likely to spontaneously discover new pathways.

My parents have an Android tablet -- I'm not sure when they got it but they've had it for years. They needed new phone so I got them an iPhone and an iPad. I figured it had to be easier for them than an old Android but they trouble with the sort of same things -- connecting to Wifi, getting email, etc -- so they mostly continued to use that tiny old Android tablet.

After 6 months number of "send from my iPad" messages is finally starting to increase.

Both my parents had a similar experience migrating from Microsoft Windows to Macos. It literally opened a new world for them.

OH, I got my mum a Macbook Air, best thing I ever did, I talked her through setting up Team Viewer, I setup her icons so she had only what she needed. Then I've never done anything more. She finds all her recipes online, does emailing, finds her tv shows. Mum and Dad no longer argue over the TV now.

The old Windows computer caused lots of arguments and angry text messages with me. I'm not a fan of mac os, but best thing ever for my parents.

I don't know. I am a senior developer in my 40s. I have been using Android since G1 phones came out. The few times I tried to use iPhones I couldn't do anything, pretty much everything I needed was counter-intuitive and I had to ask someone. How to switch to a different app? How to go back to previous screen? How to change wifi or other settings? How to setup or switch on/off an alarm clock? And many other things that I just couldn't find.

I'm 34 - my first smartphone was an iPhone 3G. I upgraded through the 3GS and 4, then moved to Android and didn't come back until the iPhone X.

The X's interface is so different from my old 4 that it took a few days to get adjusted, but I can honestly say that I like it better now. I can't think of anything I miss about Android at this point.

My first smartphone was an Iphone and I hated the shit out of that thing. Everything was so unintuitive, nothing works unless you know exactly what arcane input sequence you need to perform on the device's single button and you cannot do anything not approved by Apple™®©, such as installing normal apps, or even stupid shit like, I don't know trying to get your data off your phone without getting apple's malware all over your computer.

I recently switched to iOS from Android after years on Android. I'm coming from being a daily macOS user for almost a decade. I would argue that iOS should no longer be considered the more "user friendly" of the two. That might have been the case years ago, but iOS seems to expect prior experience with what I can only guess are iOS paradigms specifically.

Almost every important action I need to take in an iOS app is hidden behind a gesture. In Android apps, gestures are value adds. They make on-screen actions or actions accessable through contextual menus quicker to accomplish for the experienced user. In iOS they're essential to accomplish some tasks.

I agree. Android seems to have more consistent UX for apps regardless of developer. Back button is such a key input that I always feel trapped in iOS, where as on Android everything feels intuitive and multitasking is a breeze.

Swiping on the screen from left to right is the iOS back button.

The new Android gesture navigation is their first huge step towards ruining Android's UX.

Can you give some specific examples? I’m so thoroughly baked into iOS that I don’t notice these potential issues.

Examples, please? I disagree that anything essential is hidden behind gestures.

I think the height of this is the iPhone's home button (which is gone in iPhone X, but regardless).

It has 6 functions, on a single button, based on how light or quickly you press it - single click, long press, double click, single tap (lighter then a click), double tap, triple click (if enabled)

All tech is hard to use. All our interfaces expect a certain amount of familiarity with abstract concepts that have little to no relation to the real world. Most people get by because they memorize the most obvious processes (how to save a file) and build their own largely incorrect mental models that happen to give the correct results most of the time (assuming a consistent environment). As soon as something minor breaks or changes, these models become completely useless.

I've had somebody come to a PC repair shop for columns being the wrong size in Thunderbird. She wasn't a dumb person, but it's clearly a deeply flawed and incomplete understanding of the interface and computers in general that led to her inability to cope with the entirely new state of her desktop (yes, I'm still talking about the columns).

> If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not), on the setup screen for every iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch would be a step you could not skip wherein you have to choose your preferred text size.

iPhones literally do have an unskippable screen during setup that prompts you to choose a text size

https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/pu...

Display Zoom is a different setting than Text Size.

One of the complications is the different way of making text big. For example most of the examples in this discussion is about changing it in Settings -> Display -> Text Size, which I have found largely useless.

As someone with reading glasses the useful thing is to make text big in the web browser which you can do sometimes in Safari by clicking reader view stipes top left and then the aA thing top right. Took me ages to figure that.

And also not an option on all devices.

But the folks needing the setting are letting the employee at the mobile carrier store glide through all that for them so that the new phone is immediately ready to use.

That's a different problem.

In the modern day I would really avoid using "autism" as a negative descriptor or analogy in published works like this, as much as I may say it in private contexts to friends.

100% agree. I stopped reading when I saw that. What exactly is "Windows autism" exactly? My autistic son would like to know... And I would encourage you not to say it in private contexts with friends either.

Last night, while putting my children to sleep, I tried to change the volume on my wireless headphones and instead called 911. It also woke up the children because it makes a loud noise like a car alarm. After I cancelled the impending call to 911 (I hope), it switched to trying to call my wife instead.

I can see a case where this would be valuable, but I'm not an old man and not likely to be in an accident where the only thing I can do is press the not-the-volume side of my phone a few times. On top of that, it was only a year ago that this was an inconspicuous shortcut for disabling your Touch ID from an attacker or the police. Now it makes an alarming in what might already be a tense situation. If you have an iPhone, you probably want to review your "Emergency SOS" settings to better understand what the few remaining buttons on your phone do.

A number of years ago, I was employed by an Apple Retail store. I don't know how it is now but when I started (in 2010), they would hold employee-led workshops on the basics of iOS devices and how to customize them.

By the time I left, they had completely revamped those workshops to be mere Q&A sessions. My biggest gripe about these Q&A style workshops is that most of the people attending weren't aware of what questions to ask.

> 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 the message, to the browser, to the message, reading and typing. I asked her "Does that site block copy paste? Why aren't you copy pasting?" She gave me a blank look. I showed her that copy paste was a feature and it blew her mind.

She didn't think that she had a problem because she didn't expect copy paste to even be a function on a phone (as she is not a confident computer user either).

And now dumber than ever. At least on my iPhone 6s with the latest update. Now you have to go through 2 screens to send a photo to someone in imessage, whereas before the most recent photos were easily accessible. And on facetime you have to pull up a menu [that covers the entire screen] to flip the camera around, and if you accidentally hit it a couple times theres no way to know which way your camera is facing without closing the menu.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was feeling old when I became confused by the facetime pull up menu and accidentally disconnected the call, unable to figure out if the camera was flipped, and how to get back to the call.

Accessing the recent photos is now accessed directly as one of those "iMessage App" icons that appears in the ribbon above the keyboard. However, the UI change is annoying and I constantly open the camera (though you can also get to recent photos by tapping the icon at the upper left of the camera, when inside messages).

I'm still on iOS 10 (I know, I know) because I can't handle how they butchered that perfect control center.

Two screens to send a photo sound like a bit of a hassle.

On my Sony phone I can take a photo, press the "share" button to get a context based share menu and my most recent signal/email contacts appear right at the top ready to send without leaving the camera app at all. If I want to send it to someone not on that list I have to get into another screen but not two.

The Facetime menu sounds quite crazy and very "un-Apple".

I see my mother struggle quite a bit with her iphone as well and she wants a dumb phone again but I think that would happen with an android too!

If you let the app bar show above the keyboard, you should be able to select photos by tapping on the appropriate icon in that row, which will show your latest photos. I agree that it is a usability regression but this option was better than always having to tap twice to attach a photo.

To take a photo and send it, tap the camera icon, to attach an already taken photo, tap the photos icon.

As 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.

Apple (used to) market the ease of use of the features of iOS very heavily. iPhones don't get a pass because Android phones are complicated as well since Apple (used to) stress that they were so much better than the competition.

Nowadays I notice Apple mostly just markets the new shiny. The XS commercial is a masterpiece of vapidity, they don't even pretend it's anything but brand.

It'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 for a couple of weeks, but from then on I could touchtype. It was not such a massive burden. But most people I see are still painfully hunting and pecking, even people who use a computer all day long in a professional capacity!

I know there is much more that Apple and other manufacturers could do to make things better, and definitely they should be doing those things, but the main problem IMO is that people are just lazy. They want their phone to do complicated things, but they don't want to spend the time to learn how to do those things.

It would be good if there was easy training for these things though, maybe some kind of beginner courses? I know some community centres/libraries have courses for beginners and older people... But most people just expect to automatically be able to use a smartphone with no training, knowledge or effort.

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 intuitive interfaces, operations. As I got older i started to prioritize what I want to learn in a different way. Now all I want from the phone is to be a tool, not the other way around. A good tool but not something I have to learn over and over. And especially when I know these changes were made for.. the sake of change, to sort of give the impression of innovation I'm even less incentivized to take a course to teach me how to use a phone. And most of the time these changes make my life harder... e.g. remove the tactile button trend. I'm willing to bet that the 1 button will return at some point as an "innovation". Someone here mentioned the mental maps that people build when learning a system. If you mess with that mental map for a few generations you end up with frustrated users. We know what game these companies are playing: force people to upgrade through planned obsolesce. If it's real upgrades such as better performing cameras, faster ram, etc, I will eventually upgrade. But if they're forcing these changes through updates that we cannot turn off, we have a problem.

It's not like typing at all. Typing is fairly obvious: hit the button with the letter you want, and it will always be in the same place, so maybe you don't have to look too often; anyway lots of people will teach you to type. Cute cats (paws), Mario, Mavis Beacon.

How can you learn to press and hold , or press harder, or shake the phone, or whatever else when there's no manual, you don't even know there's some other way of interacting, there's no getting started video, etc. I firmly believe that if companies actually wrote a manual for their software, they would ocassionaly make things more obvious, so it would be easier to write the manual.

Yes, a lot of people wouldn't read the manual, or wouldn't understand it, but not providing a manual means those few that would read it can't.

The standard layout of a keyboard has remained completely unchanged for literal decades. It doesn't update every year with invisible gestures, nor does it remove keys that used to be there in favor of those gestures.

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.

"Seriously advanced security features like two-factor authentication (which kind? Apple offers two) are exactly the sort of thing only experts who don’t need them will ever set up."

Hmm. This is a reflection of the author's bias towards not having the features he likes on the Iphone be more in your face, and the features he finds annoying are labelled as useless.

The two factor ID, is there as a CYA for Apple, so they won't have to deal with the fallout of their users' accounts being compromised. Those are the types of features prioritized and forced. The same goes for touch ID, in addition to it making new purchases a seamless and more effortless process, it also helps deal with chargebacks and the like. When I use touch ID to call a Lyft, I have esseentially 'signed' the CC receipt of that transaction.

The other features he finds annoying, may be annoying to many people, but those are key features that most people would otherwise not turn on, and as a result have a poor experience with wifi. the list goes on.

Two Factor Auth is not a CYA.

It effectively prevents phishing attacks and helps mitigate weak/reused passwords.

Everyone should have it turned on. If you don't have 2FA turned on, it's just a question of time until someone downloads all your nudie pictures.

Phones are computers now. We can't expect everyone to know AND USE all of the features. Many of the features are obscured on purpose.

I thought that when I read, "He (a senior citizen) also thought he had to use the Gmail app to read his Gmail"

Like what do you want, an unskippable popup about the difference between email providers and email clients, and instructions on configuring IMAP and SMTP on a 3rd email app? That would only lead to more fear and confusion. The Gmail app is fine.

Yes. If any smartphone vendor exposes all of its settings front and center right now, then people would just throw their hands in the air and quit right there and then.

I am not overly fond of how Apple does things but they are doing a so-so-okay job trying to pander to the least-common-denominator.

There is a difference between feature use and phone usability. A lot of people seem to give Apple a pass on usability because Apple are stylish, or the marketing says they're brilliant, or something.

How many hours does the author think it should take to set up an iPhone? If they want every toggle and every accessibility option presented at device setup, with enough explanation of what each one does and how to use it, it’ll take at least 2, probably more since the elderly tend to use technology slower.

You know what the author didn’t mention? That with any Apple device you can go in for a 1:1 session or a class on usage, and the people running them will walk you through everything. They’re also good at identifying people struggling to use the device in various ways and know about all the accessibility options, which in general are more plentiful and much better supported in iOS than Android.

My mother got an iPad after years of owning only android devices, went in, and not only did they walk her through it, but they let her know that a new iOS release would be coming out soon which would change a few things, and invited her back to a second session after that change if she was at all confused.

> The gold standard here is Undo. You have to shake your iPhone (or giant iPad Pro) to undo an action. You discover this by accident as you get up from a restaurant table with your phone in your hand, only to be greeted with an Undo Typing dialogue box. Unless you are an expert, you have no idea what just happened.

Wow I have been an iPhone user for many years now, spend several hours a day using my phone (according to their new screen time metrics), and I did not know this!

I agree with this post, but outside of a few specific things I don't think the issue is with Apple (or Android, or whatever).

The issue is people; most non-tech people either don't care about learning how to properly use a tool they'd be using for the rest of their life, or are scared to for whatever reason.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Dumbing down the UI for the lowest common denominator doesn't seem viable - it would completely kill any productivity (try to do your job with the children's toy equivalent of your usual tools), and I'm not even sure it would solve this - the "target market" of such change would most likely also get annoyed by it (I noticed that the people we're talking about are outright not interested in spending any time setting up their device, so a 50-step setup screen is unlikely to sort out the issue).

Maybe the solution is to let "natural selection" take its course; eventually you'll be expected to know how to operate these devices if you want to function in society. And honestly that's fine by me. There are already tons of things you are expected to know if you want to operate in today's society (social skills, managing your finances & administrative tasks, etc) and everyone seems to be doing fine with that.

On the other hand, there's Huawei that went with Advanced and Simple mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcalxGyLE1w

And for aging parents, the simple mode works fantastically!

Who is this guy and why he is so oblivious to his own bias ?

He says that few people understand AirDrop, Apple Pay, iMessages Apps. Even though we have numbers on Apple Pay adoption (people do understand it) and we know how much Apple invested on Animoji (many younger people love apps).

Also does he know Apple has anonymous telemetry ? They don't guess what is popular or not. They know.

Joe Clark has been writing about web accessibility for nearly twenty years. If he’s not the world’s leading authority on digital accessibility, then he’s at least one of the most influential writers on the topic.

I think you're confusing 'number of people using something' with actual usability.

Just as everyone learned to use Windows because it was everywhere, people learned to use iOS. That does not necessarily mean it's especially good.

One thing I have come across in trying to explain phones to older people is that they have difficulty grasping the difference of cellular vs. WiFi and where they can and can't use data.

I have a parent who is terrified to use the internet while on WiFi because they don't want to get a huge bill at the end of the month. I have done some explaining to reduce that anxiety and I'd like to tell them not to worry about it, but frankly, iOS doesn't help at all, both in terms of managing data, communicating how much LTE data you are using, etc.

I know others who spend hundreds of dollars extra per year on "unlimited" data plans even though they have no need for it. But it's easier than trying to manage their data. Imagine how many people who don't understand data usage are spending hundreds of dollars annually on data plans they don't use "just to be safe" because the phone company might send them a $5K bill if they accidentally misconfigure their phone to allow Netflix access to cellular.

If iOS wants to be layman-friendly, there has to be a better way of handling data and communicating to a user what the status of their data usage is. This is just one example.

Get people onto unlimited data plans with a limited amount of fast data. Most (all?) US carriers have a plan like that, although I don't know how common they are overseas. You can usually pick how much fast data you want, and if you go over, it's not the end of the world. Sometimes I've had phones that didn't have matching lte bands, so the 'slow' data rate was faster than what I could manage anyway.

Since iOS doesn't know your plan billing dates, this is up to the carrier. Verizon, as much as I despise how much I pay them, has a fantastic app that does exactly this (show used data this billing cycle), which after installation is in your notification center, one swipe away.

I'm okay with Claudia being banned from the page. I still would like to not get reminded every time I set down my mouse on your site...

Not sure what you're talking about, I don't see any mention of a Claudia on the page.

However, I am now dying to find out who she is, and why she was banned...

My 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...

For iPhone, you can force-press on the keyboard (on newer phones), or just long-press on the space bar. On an iPad, you can use two fingers on the keyboard

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).

A couple of things I absolutely hate about Apple's products:

1. Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for the same article again.

2. Some apps don't allow me to open a url in Chrome, for some reason I have to do it in Safari. And why can't I delete Safari altogether? How's it's different from Microsoft and IE in the 90s?

3. There's no easy, automated way to disable background running, bandwidth consuming apps while connected to hotspot in macOS. This should be obvious I don't want to backup 30GB of data to Backblaze while on my data plan.

> Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for the same article again.

Apple would very much like you to have the experience that apps do not change when you leave them. There are a couple ways that apps break this model, though: if they use a lot of memory, iOS will kill them in the background. In any case, apps are supposed to have state restoration to get back to where they were when you last left it, but few apps implement this correctly.

> Some apps don't allow me to open a url in Chrome, for some reason I have to do it in Safari. And why can't I delete Safari altogether? How's it's different from Microsoft and IE in the 90s?

Safari is the system browser. I believe the difference from Microsoft is that iOS is not a monopoly?

If you haven’t discovered this, TripMode handles #3.

https://www.tripmode.ch/

The problem is the "perpetual novice" sentiment.

Smartphones are sold with the underlying assumption that 'user friendly' equates to zero training or learning. The idea is that UI is so intuitive that you can simply pick the phone up and use it.

It's clear that this novice strategy has upper limit respect to the number of features.

If you spend $500 on a device that you use more than your car or computer, maybe you should spend 6-12 hours to learn it. People take courses in woodworking, knitting, why not smartphones.

> If you spend $500 on a device that you use more than your car or computer, maybe you should spend 6-12 hours to learn it. People take courses in woodworking, knitting, why not in smartphones.

I completely agree with this. And if you're not willing to learn how to use a device, why would you buy one anyway?

First couple of paragraphs were appeal to authority, followed by anecdotes about what makes an iPhone hard for old people after which I stopped reading.

The title of this article is click-baity. "I think iPhones are hard to use if you're old or disabled" would have been better but that doesn't drive readership, I guess.

>There are people who know what address bars are but not search bars, so they go to google.com

I've been forced to do this recently on android. In chromium, the default search engine has location permissions by default. No way to disable this without patching and recompiling chromium. So if you leave google as your default search engine, which is what it ships with, google (i.e., *.google.com) gets location permission. So my workaround has been to set AOL as the default search engine. When I really want to google something, I have to go to google.com.

Not sure I agree with the majority that's been said there and I say that despite replying from a Pixel now. I think most critique there had little to do with Apple and isba general tech-has-advanced-so-far problem that some demographics might struggle to stay on top of everything new. The same things apply to my Pixel phone. Currently my biggest annoyance is that in the latest update they changed the WiFi button in the top menu to turn on/off WiFi instead of opening the list of available networks. Now I need to long press it to open up the menu and I see that my wife struggles to do that now. Some things will always be difficult for people. My grandma also struggles with a contact less payment card and personally I don't see how chip and pin is easier than a quick tap with the card but she swears it's easier to her, so what can I do!?

On the one hand, I agree with the author. A lot of iPhone features have serious discoverability issues, and I am constantly googling how to do certain things on my iPhone. After probably thousands of hours spent using an iPhone, I just learned today (from this article) that you can shake to undo.

On the other hand, my mother who in her 70s recently got an iPad and an iPhone and is able to engage more confidently with those two devices than any PC or laptop she owned in the 30 years prior. And my son who is 4 years old is able to move around between and within apps fairly effortlessly - without even knowing how to read.

So while there are definitely some things that could be improved in iOS, I think it's also important to recognize that the iPhone has ushered in an era of unprecedented usability for the general public.

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 reasonable article about usability, but it doesn't give me a good feeling.

I truly believe the iPhone has the most usable mobile platform simply for all their granular accessibility controls.

The author touches upon a topic that I also have seen and experienced countless of times in my life, which is the need for a better first-run accessibility settings onboarding experience for users that would benefit most (e.g. senior citizens), that also can be trivially skipped by more tech savvy users.

This new onboarding flow can be triggered by apple determining a person's first time ever signing into that model iPhone, under the assumption that most new users to the platform would benefit the most from becoming familiar with these accessibility features and where they live in the settings from the get go.

I know many senior citizens (including my parents) who would have greatly benefited from a heavy accessibility settings onboarding experience, due to many of the issues the author mentioned regarding eye sight and vision related age decline.

It's a shame that a company like apple, one that pioneered usability and human factors in designing products for people since their very beginning (see Human Interface Guidelines [1]), buries these crucial accessibility settings and makes them so difficult to reach for the people that need them the most.

I hope someone from apple is reading this and can champion this topic internally to improve the lives of senior citizens, cause we'll all be old some day scratching our head trying to use the latest and greatest iDevice...

[1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=573097

The author is right, but for the wrong reasons. Conventional app design on mobile devices (not just iPhone, Android is particularly bad about this) puts all the interactive UI elements in difficult to reach corners of the phone/tablet. It's especially apparent when trying to use a device one-handed, which admittedly is becoming more difficult as OEMs engage in a pissing match of who can build the biggest phone[1]. I get the need for keeping content centered and scattering UI elements around the four corners, but could they perhaps focus on a single corner so you're not constantly fumbling around with the hardware in your hand(s) to reach the various areas you interact with most? Ergonomic best practices are wholly ignored in every device I've ever used.

[1] https://kneeland.me/2011/10/07/2010s-smartphone-screens-are-...

I think this article doesn't grapple with just how hard it is to solve any of the problems it brings up. Of course if you're sitting next to someone, observing them doing something wrong, and telling them exactly how to solve it, then you can improve their process. You can say the same thing about how most people use computers - it's even a meme that techie folks have a hard time watching non-techies use computers because they never use shortcuts etc.

The problem that Apple has to deal with is how to teach people without having 1-on-1 time with every single user to watch what they're doing, and this article offers no solutions for almost anything. (Except for asking for a few things to be part of the on-boarding process, which semi-solves some issues - text size is now part of the on-boarding process, but often, the person using the phone is not the same as the person setting up the phone, especially with older users I imagine).

With the new FaceID features, I could see it being a nice touch if iOS were to ask users if they want to increase text size if it senses the user always holds the phone ridiculously close to their face and/or constantly squints.

Beyond that, I don't know how much of a responsibility it is for the phone to push its accessibility options on everyone after initial setup.

It would be fascinating to see this from the Apple designer's point of view. I'm certain that this is a political problem inside Apple: how much priority each feature/module gets, how many pixels they can have, and how much exposure they get at the website, etc. iPhone (or any product really) is the product of politics as well as its technology.

There are persistent bugs in common functions also. E.g. in messages attach a photo, press the left arrow and then come back to the conversation. The photo will be messed up (XS with the latest update).

Good UI/UX designers (like Apple have) will classify interactions into: Obvious, Easy, Possible.

Take the iPhone camera;

Obvious: taking a picture with the shutter button

Easy: switching between front and back cameras is easy to discover

Possible: switching between HD and 4K (in the settings menu - possible to discover.

Unless your product is as simple as an office stapler, some parts of it will be non-obvious, that's fine.

The concealment of features is why my severely disabled mother was able to use an iPad in the last years of her life to watch TV shows, send emails, and FaceTime with her family.

It's sad to see that many people here in the discussion are not trying to critically assess the subject matter in proper context and rather targeting the article author about his bias or why he dedicated a whole paragraph to a certain issue. Seriously? We can all do much better than this.

What is the proper context?

There are at least two kinds of ways different people use their devices: people who actively discover everything their device is capable of, and people who don't do that, because they are afraid to break things. My parents, for instance, are the latter ones. I am the curious "electronic computer stuff" guy, just because I explore my possession to the fullest.

However, Apple makes it as easy as any Android vendor to explore their devices, except that on any Apple iOS device it is the same system, and almost the same tricks. Not so on myriads of Android devices.

I must admit the bit that some features are indeed hidden, so that I cannot find them exploring. Sometimes I read an article about iOS devices and discover functions I didn't know my iPhone could do.

Are any of these issues handled better on Android phones?

I currently own both Android and iOS devices, and have used both for years.

I think the single "Omni-Pull Down" from the top works way cleaner than the now 3 seperate pull from side of screen actions. I actually find pulling up from the bottom difficult and frustrating.

Swipe to dismiss, tap to open makes so much more intuitive sense than swipe to open.

Text editing / selection does what I expect way more often.

Android doesn't bug you about Wifi access points by default.

This one is controversial, but I think a visible always available back button is a huge accessibility win even if it's sometimes inconsistant in behaviour.

Also, the Google Assistant at this point is probably 10 times more accurate and understanding than Siri. I have a pretty standard midwestern accent and Siri understands almost nothing I say to a pathetic degree. I use Google Assistant to do probably about half of the quick things I want to do on my phone like set alarms and such. I don't trust Siri to do anything.

A lot of things of course are worse just because they vary between manufacturers and even individual phones.

The fact that many OS components are replaceable is a double edge sword. My dad for instance somehow installed a dialer that made him dismiss an advertisement before he could answer his phone. He had no idea how to get rid of it and assumed he had broke his phone.

I'm not too familiar with Android phones but having tried out my parents' Androids (and watched them use the phones) I gotta say everything is hidden there as well.

Maybe Android is a bit more consistent, because there is universal 'undo', plus the idiom of three vertical dots on the top right for 'more actions'. But subjectively I've found that Android has even more 'randomness': you are trying to get something done, something else opens, then something pops up... it's all deterministic of course, but not intuitive, so it feels accidental.

Some are (drag and drop, multi select) and others aren't (discoverability, some UI/UX choices)

considering the market share in the US for android at above 80% what do you think the reason might be other than the one you just asked about?

> "Scroll to the top by tapping the clock. (Who would possibly discover that by accident? Somebody had to tell me about it.)"

Dang, this finally explains a "bug" in one of our apps. (We primarily do web apps, so we don't have in-depth knowledge of platforms)

Does anyone else notice the title attribute/tooltip on the <body>? Am I the only one wondering who Claudia is or why she was banned?

Also title: <body id="APOSTOPHES-body-id" title="Claudia, you are banned from here">

Claudia had to do something awful.

Yes, it's very distracting.

> You really need to tell the phone, and/or Siri, who you are and who your family members are. This involves creating a contact card (what’s that?) for yourself and linking to it. Then all your family members need their own cards, and you have to laboriously specify their relationships to you.

I insist this is not an optional or nice-to-have feature.

For a usability expert, I'm surprised he cares so little about the actual intentions of people to use the phone. I can imagine a lot of non-technical users who would get pretty mad if their new phone blocked them from proceeding until they've personally asked aunt Betty to fill in her personal data.

I think he means the user should create/amend contact details for their family members.

Title should have been "iPhones are hard to use - For old people", it's bad for them, but it's not the fault of the iPhone itself, I bet if you give them any other piece of technology it will be equally hard for them.

You are right in pointing out that it could be better, I think that the "Tips" app can have a dedicated section for accessibility features and video tutorials on how to use certain features of inbuilt apps.

They could also have an app dedicated to Accessibility features, pull out the existing accessibility settings from Settings app and show them one at a time in a UIPageViewController inside that app.

This is just silly. News flash: software UX isn't perfect, and it never will be.

When you have a phone that can do 10,000 different things limited to a screen a few inches wide, of course it's going to be harder to do some things than others. And there will be some inconsistencies and some annoyances.

It's not like any other phone is obviously way better. Yes there are plenty of UX things that could be improved... but "iPhones are hard to use" is a clickbait title, and the content is just a totally random laundry list of one person's annoyances. Doesn't really seem like HN material.

This article and most of the comments just scream "I don't like new/different things!" or "I don't know how to do x therefore it's a terrible implementation"

Here is a recent annoyance. I use bluetooth headphones and a bluetooth speaker. I want my bluetooth headphones to never be louder than $x, I want my speaker to have the full volume range. There is only one volume control (under Settings > Music > Max Volume) for the whole phone, and that doesn't seem to control max volume for notifications/other apps. This frequently leads to me leaving the max volume on high, then shocking my ears with a super loud noise. I should be able to control max volume per device. I use Sony MDR-XB950B1 headphones btw.

Mine remembers volume per device when I switch between them.

Whatever level I left a speaker or headphones, that's where it starts next time I connect, completely separate from whatever I have the built-in speaker set to.

Mine doesn't have a cap per device, but I'd have to manually click up on that device to get louder than I left it.

First time I realized it was remembering all these different listening volumes, I was pretty amazed.

I can change the volume on my headphones independently from the phone so I have it in low. Mine are brandless Chinese headphones btw.

I've been thinking about the more general problem of feature/solution discoverability lately.

Sometimes people will stumble onto solutions, or someone they know will mention them, or they will actually be bothered enough to search for a solution. But it pains me to think of all the instances of problems that could be avoided if we could do a better job of bridging the knowledge gap.

That applies to me too when I discover something and wish I had known about it far earlier. I try to actively search for solutions, but sometimes you aren't even aware that something is a problem.

Ask any owner of an iPhone X how to turn off their phone...bet most won't know how.

How often do most users have to turn off their phone?

Smart phones are hard to use, not just iPhones. They are as bloated with features as an enterprise software that offers licenses by the seat.

Apple could probably do a better job with some of their design decisions, but that's the nature of iteration and making decisions. Nothing is so absolutely perfect it literally fulfills a person's every wish and dream. Of course there's opportunity for improvement - that's why there's been 12 versions of iOS and things still change.

People are different. That's part of designing for an audience - software design needs to balance micro and macro level affordances. Extremely customizable isn't always extremely pleasing. 'You can please some people most of the time, but you can't please everyone all the time' (or something like that).

This is a case where someone isn't pleased. Some claims are true, while others are hot air. Based on the author's blog, they enjoy being a self-righteous asshat on the internet. If the author strives to bring points to light in an abrasive and inflammatory manner, rather than a sensible and constructive dialogue, then at least he has that working out well.

I think Apple could do a better job onboarding people to iPhones. For example they could check to see if you’re interested certain aspects and queue up tutorials that drive extracting settings that would help; but at the end of the day the iPhone does so much more than it did in 2007 & the 2007 version was so much more capable than all preceding phones. The biggest challenge Apple faces is figuring out how to explain thousands of features … and that’s before you install any 3rd party apps.

Steve Jobs called it “an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator” … that was hard to swallow (or learn), but today that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If you’re fortunate enough to understand the majority of the features you shouldn’t be embarrassed by the ability to help someone figure out the myriad features and details …

Are iPhones hard to use: absolutely not … unless your expectations are off the charts and you think a device that complex should require no effort.

That said, it would be funny if Apple eventually launches a device called iPhone that only makes phone calls.

My top 5 annoyances:

- Too many features I'll never use, that mostly can't be removed. Less is more.

i.e. I'll never use Siri or facial recognition. Never owned a bluetooth device. "Screen Mirroring" What? in the Control Center. Yet those and more always in the way, sometimes draining battery.

- When radios are off to save energy, constantly nags about connection with modal dialogs that prevent use of the home button.

- Can't use it as a flash drive (w/o grudging workarounds)

- Insists on using white backgrounds at night. Night mode saved my life but would prefer a dark theme at night. Clock is the opposite, hard to read in the day time. All hardcoded.

- Can't disable the always accidental swipe from top stuff I'm never interested in.

Btw, thanks to the author for linking to how to disable apps in iMessage, just more clutter I didn't want. Totally unintuitve, BTW.

Bonus: There's App and Microphone icons in the iMessages entry field that take up 1/3 of the space. Don't use Apps there and might use the microphone button once a year. Hit it mistakenly often.

Can you even turn facial recognition off?

Open the Photos app, search for "people", and it will pull up photos of people's faces. Tap on one to make a full screen picture, and swipe it up , it will show "Related" people and pictures. You can tap on someone to find more photos of them.

Even if you never tagged them with names.

(You can also search Photos for general terms, like "flower" or "snow" or "food", it's doing image recognition on all pictures somewhere). iOS 11, 12 at least.

People have the same sorts of problems with most non-trivial devices. In the extreme cases mentioned in the article the solution is the same that the author discovered: some who knows, teaches someone who can benefit. There isn't an obvious solution to this problem in general that wont make the system harder to use for intermediate/expert users.

Bah. Dumb article. All phones are hard to use. Nothing is really mechanically intuitive anymore, except for some well-designed mechanical things.

Phones can only go so far to give use good, mechanical intuitiveness. Press a button, see what it does. Now make an object to 500 different things and obviously only the most important things for the majority of the population will be easy to access, even if it’s not intuitive, because of icons.

Basically this forced us to move from mechanical thinking to something less concrete (digital, non-analog) which is something many older people and those with disabilities may have a harder time adapting to.

Android, iPhones, “smart” TVs, they are all confusing to some extent.

The problem isn’t iphones or androids, the problem is how we design things. The digital world is still very bad at doing things intuitively for a brain that starts life in a very physical, mechanical world.

A lot of this seems valid. At the same time, I think massive customer misuse/misunderstanding is the reality for almost all widely used software.

Maybe I'm projecting, but the "solutions people" at the company where I work have endless horror stories of how "people actually use our software".

Apple clearly needs to hire this guy. The only thing I disagree with is forcing people to learn many features during the setup process when you get your new phone. Pretty much nobody I know likes to sit there and read user manuals or be forced to watch videos or however that'd be represented.

I don't think Apple need to hire someone so publicly transphobic. https://blog.fawny.org/category/tranny/

Well that's the real problem, isn't it? People are way too lazy to actually do any kind of learning that is necessary to use a complicated device.

Ok, so we put the change font button always in sight? What else are we going to put in the UI?

I also thought I needed the Gmail app? didn't Google stop with any open protocols? (xmpp, imap, carddav?)

An iTouch? Please... And should Apple change their core UI for everyone because some people are almost blind? Sure they can be accommodating, perhaps a button can be placed somewhere, or better a Siri instruction for people with poor sight to activated a more clear UI. But don't change the UI for everyone because of this.

Would Siri understand a mispronounced street name? Who asks their phone for directions anyway? And why does she need help when the street is already on her screen? What at that point would help her? Seems like the iPhone was pretty helpful.

Ok, I'm starting feel sorry I even gave this any attention so I'm going to stop.

I think Apple intention was for people to grow with iOS. iOS has added more and more features, but if you started with an earlier version, and kept updating there are only minor changed to learn each time. Jumping into an iphone these days would be hard for someone coming from no smartphone.

I grew with IOS, loved 6 through 9, even 10 but with exceptions. I highly dislike the current version though

This article just outlines power-user features that most people don't know anyway. They aren't really important. Even then, most of the arguments that he makes are very anecdotal.

Take for example a senior using an iPhone:

My grandmother, 77 years old, has had her iPhone for 2 years. Prior to that, she had no mobile at all and has not used a ton of technology through her life.

She learned to use her crucial apps: Mail, Safari, Notes, Calendar and Contacts by herself.

She will only ask if there are different ways of doing things if she can't figure it out by herself—which is very rare.

I agree that Settings can be cluttered to navigate, but it's also assumed that it's not an app that people use every day. Taking that into account, the General tab is usually where you find what you need when it comes to changing most settings anyway.

> If somebody told you your Home button was going to wear out, hence you turned on AssistiveTouch, you were lied to.

Actually, this happened on my wife's iPhone 5. Granted, they don't actually exist anymore (or at least aren't buttons), but it very much did happen.

Such a great point about diversity: they're not. Apple products allow you to live the life a 24 year old silicon valley hipster. Granted Apple is making a _ton_ of money off this target audience however, so it's hard to criticize their approach

Completely agree with the objective usability points mentioned in this.

This is what Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman both of whom were first few interface designers are Apple, also wrote the Human Interface Guidelines. https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9743996/apple-designer-i...

https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

and also later Don Norman independently

Both my parents and my grandmother use iPhones now and I do notice the limited functionality they are comfortable with but I believe the problem goes beyond the iPhone and into general tech literacy. I taught my dad to use 1Password then noticed he never uses the biometrics to log in, then reveals the password and memorizes it instead of copy pasting. He definitely set up touchID and has interacted with text before yet in this context forgot they both exist. I wonder if some of these examples like the map direction example are about the same. People who know better just forgetting parts of functionality depending on the context of the problem.

What I find hardest about iPhones are the intentionally hidden/obscured things. If I want to access a file, or copy an arbitrary file to the iPhone, its response is "What are these 'files' you speak of?"

These aren’t necessarily only iPhone “issues”, they apply to other mobile devices as well. Balancing which settings are visible and which aren’t is tricky. But one thing I’m upset with and that’s the death of the manual. I shouldn’t have to rely on 3rd party life hack style videos and articles to figure out useful features. I’m not expecting (or wishing) to see 100+ page paper manuals to make a comeback, but I’m also not happy with flimsy, pretty support pages which only scratch the surface. I want to see detailed and well designed documentation with useful illustrations on how to do things.

> seniors... chest pain...

Quick, if you could change one UX that would maximize the numbers of lives saved, what would it be?

(For the purposes of this thought experiment you get to force all users to watch a 30 second educational video one time.)

Quick, if you could change one UX that would maximize the numbers of lives saved, what would it be?

Change the human brain response to eating vegetables and exercise so they felt good, while any other "food" and lazing around was unbearable?

Reader mode for all sites is amazing - I never knew I could do this. My default behavior for anynweb article has been to hit the reader view icon in safari every single time.

My biggest gripe about iOS is how terrible autocorrect is. Even as I type this, iOS is aweful at predicting what I'm entering when I miss the letters. When I had an Android phone I was always delighted that big G was so good at getting my words right and at predicting what I would type next so I could speed up my input just by selecting the right words at the top of the keyboard. Impossible to do with iOS.

Reading one of the referenced articles by Don Norman [1], I find this statement immediately true...

> "What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product? Apple could have designed its phone so that the majority of people could read and use the phone without having to label themselves as needy, disabled, and requiring assistance."

...as just a few days ago I reluctantly traded in my iPhone 6 for the iPhone XS. So far, I cannot get over not having a home button. (since it was mentioned below, I just want to point out that my gripe isn't about not wanting to adapt to a new interface; it's about what Don brought up). After exploring the OS menus for a while I found that, I could add a button to the screen that mimics to a small degre, much of the functionality of the home button Apple previously entrained me on. Of course this option is tucked under the accessibility preferences. In fact, I found a half-dozen 'features' under accessibility that I decided to turn on.

Pic: http://bit.ly/iPhoneXS_accessibility

Note that the floating home button is labeled AssistiveTouch. Here is a really short video I just made attempting to use this slippery-ass button...

http://bit.ly/iPhoneXSdemo

Hopefully I can adapt to the default XS patterns soon, so I can turn off some of some of these accessible features, apparently intended for the iPhoneXS-disabled. I'm just wondering why these things, which to me just seem like user preferences or options are nested under the accessibility tab. Then again, maybe Apple is trying to tell this 6th-year phd student that I'm no spring chicken, so hurry up and graduate already.

[1] Don Norman article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

Are you complaining that after getting a new device, it’s taking you a while to get used to it?

"Apple never admits it makes mistakes." Best sentence on the page.

Hardly news. Most companies don't.

My iPhone usability peeve is the lack of an authoritative, comprehensive reference manual. I know lots of intelligent people who lack “technical affinity” but are nevertheless perfectly capable of reading.

The iPhone gets a lot right in terms of discoverability and usability of 90% of its functionality, but that last 10% is frustratingly hard to find definitive answers for.

There’s also a further 10%: The functionality you think the iPhone might or should have, but doesn’t. Good luck getting any official source to confirm though. You are left to trawl helpless forums.

I can see a few good points being made here. But I don't think if someone can't use a device properly, that it's the manufacturers fault for making it hard to use.

Also, I think there are many points being made that are either down to people being told incorrect information, or them just being plain wrong.

Regarding using Spotlight to search for apps/files: "Find a spot in Springboard (what’s that?) with no apps or folders." This is wrong, you can swipe down even over apps or folders.

"The simplest task that is functionally impossible to do (also on Macintosh): Play exactly one song." Wrong

"Apple Pay. Inscrutable and scary even in countries that have had chip cards forever, like Canada." This is not Apple's fault. Here in the UK, we've had a very good chip&pin system, which was updated to wireless readers a few years ago. And Apple Pay just works with them automatically. You'll find it hard to find a place that doesn't support it. I've heard that it's completely the opposite in the US, but does that mean the iPhone is hard to use? Also, it prompts you to set this up when you first use the phone.

"Because Apple calls its passwords passcodes, nobody has any clue at all that you can use an alphanumeric password instead of a string of six digits." Oh really.

I could include many other quotes here, but it's getting boring. But there is one point that is just absolutely fundamentally stupid - "If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not)". There is no way you can say Apple doesn't care about accessibility.

Another point I'd like to make - Even if there's an "advanced" feature like AirDrop, using Siri to schedule a meeting, or using an Apple Watch to receive directions, on your phone, it doesn't mean you will know how to use it immediately. And that is not by default a bad thing. But anyway, I think a lot of these features are easy to use. For example, when using the share sheet, AirDrop automatically appears at the top of the view. With names and images of nearby devices/contacts. Surely it couldn't be more intuitive?

Maybe when people spend large amounts of money on something, they should put more effort into learning how to use it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I don't think if someone can't use a device properly, that it's the manufacturers fault for making it hard to use.

It absolutely, completely is. What pointers to the hidden features, or more information, are built into the very trivial onboarding phones provide? What quick reference leaflets are in the box? What brightly printed card with a QR code to the downloadable beginners guide, or full manual is there? What getting started app or link is there on the home screen?

None at all.

My microwave, stereo, car, kettle and lawnmower all included more get you going guides, links, sometimes PDFs, sometimes proper paper guides. For trivial often single purpose items.

Search for a user guide for a phone, or Android/iOS and you'll get shitty third party sites and/or programming guides for developing apps. Apple happen to have a really comprehensive one, that's not exactly mentioned anywhere, that you can download into books. They could include it on all phones for zero effort and loss of a tiny amount of storage.

Tech manufacturers should be deeply embarrassed.

No need to include a 3 volume printed manual set, just a card or two signposting current, relevant resources. A simple app on the home screen would suffice too.

> Maybe when people spend large amounts of money on something, they should put more effort into learning how to use it?

Maybe the resources could be subtly telegraphed to the people when they spend large amounts of money on something. Like just about every other category of product in existence manages to a far fuller degree.

Most of the points in this article are just wrong (e.g. font size asked for and configured during initial setup; WiFi alerts are not enabled by default).

Apart from that, I agree that iOS has too many hidden features and — first and foremost — too many interactions that you must know exist and you can’t find by just glancing at the screen (which is defined as mandatory in Apple‘s User Interface Guidelines).

So, yes, their products get worse. But, no, not like described in this article.

When I think about iPhone useability issues I'm always reminded that it still doesn't have an easy way to undo autocorrect mistakes.

The best you can do is shake the phone and if you don't drop it it might undo for you ...or it might just redo the bogus autocorrect when you retype the word.

Whole websites are devoted to ridiculing people for sending text messages with "hilarious" autocorrect errors in. Still Apple can't or won't improve it.

IPad Air 9.7". Notification centre on lock screen used to have two columns. I used to fill the screen with widgets and have it as a dashboard. Now due to various updates I'm stuck with one column and half the screen wasted. It's even worse on iPad Pro 12.9".

There's no apparent way to fix this bad UI design.

So now I have a raspberry pi do the same task with no issues. Bonus feature is that no update can remove this functionality again.

"Apple could make their phones easier to by forcing you to go through a mandatory seven-hundred step process before you could start using one"

'Claudia, you are banned from here.'

Jesus christ talk about intrusive annoyances akin to dissociative anesthesia. Stop trying to be quirky and random.

"Claudia, you are banned from here."?

Why is that popping up?

because it's in the title attribute for the page's body element. unless you mean "why would somebody do that to their website," which I don't have an answer for.

I think the big part of the problem is that people don't know what their device or software can do and what is possible to do with it.

Once you show people how to use a certain feature they get on quite easily.

Insane amount of productivity is lost because a lot of people don't feel comfortable with their digital tools and think they have to live with whatever default settings are.

" Very advanced, very tuned-in people learn about, and learn how to use, new Apple features by watching them being demonstrated onstage during Apple keynote events.

Then there’s everybody else. "

I've never cared to watch a keynote, but I am a fairly advanced user. Makes me feel like the author lives in a bubble...not that his many points aren't well taken aor wel stated.

> They picked the bigger fonts they’d needed all along. They were so grateful it was embarrassing.

They probably changed it back once he was gone.

Is that true that mostly Chinese people use Assistive Touch? I've seen them doing it and I couldn't figure out why.

It's certainly not only Chinese, although perhaps the author lumps all asians into that category. It's certainly very common in China and South East Asia.

I actually find it quite interesting. At some point, it's true, the home button was a common point of failure on iphones - and a kind of memetic "folk wisdom" idea was born that everyone should use the assistive touch button instead. This idea, which "everyone knows", persisted (and persists) long after the actual issue had been fixed. I am still seeing it today with iPhone 8 users! Hopefully the advent of FaceID finally puts it to bed.

Another good example of the genre is the "common knowledge" that you let your phone/laptop battery run down before recharging, and don't keep it constantly plugged in. Might have had some validity back in the days of NiCad - actively wrong advice in the age of LiOn. But the meme persists...

Can confirm. Many a time the owner of an iPhone has had to shift the floating dot around to show me something on their screen. Such an eyesore...almost as bad as the notch.

The term “Windows autism” is pretty repugnant.

Smartphones have a new batch of kindergartners joining technology each year. There's also another group of beginners a little further down the river that never really received the best onboarding experiences that are available today.

Many of the items outlined in this article could be included in the phone setup wizard like other settings.

I think the UX of the iPhone's text message app can be improved, in that after I come back from a conversation to the list, it has no visual clue for me to identify which was 'currently selected'. sometimes the text messages are similar and hard to distinguish them from each other in the list view.

I have an iPhone 7s for work and a Xiaomi A2 for personal.

Not going to lie but the iPhone hands down is a pain in the ass. Battery life is shite compared to the China phone, the thing constantly goes to emergency menus in my pocket or tries to tap pay for shit.

Reception on it is AVG at best (both phones on same network) and it's general usability sucks. Like can't even just plug it in to transfer files, the fingerprint sensor has about 1/3rd the hit rate of my China phone, the thing can't shoot video while in a phone call, hell I can't use my earbuds for hands-free while it's on the charge because it has no headphone jack (oh and the stock headphones are about the tinniest worse quality sound I've had in half a decade). Christ I could rant for dayz but you get the point the list goes on.

Tbh all these things suprise me, I've avoided iPhones like the plague for moral reasons but I figured/assumed the phones would have decent usability. Apparently I was wrong as I have been forced to discover thanks to work.

I would have to agree with the article, shit that is simple and fairly easy to do elsewhere becomes a tedious task W/ iPhones.

I don't mind if this gets shot down, but I completely agree with the article.

The level of complexity is far too much for me. What Apple seems to think are obvious things (Eg UI interaction elements) are not obvious to me.

A thoroughly frustrating experience.

iPhones (and all smartphones and tablets) are magic wands. You have to know the spells.

Any of the hundreds of capabilities that are made easy and obvious, cause other capabilities to become more obscure and harder to enable and even know about.

Meh, the article seems like a clickbait joke article, the advanced features in iphone are kept that way, that is how Mac has always been. Easy for most and special features tucked in plain sight.

There are so many different ways to control silence/non-silence/vibrate, I have to admit I don't get it at all:

- Main volume control

- Ringers and alerts volume control

- switch on side of phone

- Do Not Disturb mode

- Sounds => Vibrate on Ring

- Sounds => Vibrate on Silent

An article full of on the subway anecdotes rings pretty hollow to me.

> The gold standard here is Undo. You have to shake your iPhone (or giant iPad Pro) to undo an action.

The most useless of the bunch, maybe that's why nobody even bother to mention it?

"the Apple “ecosystem” reeks of the kind of Windows autism that repels Macintosh supremacists". Damn. What did Apple users or autism ever do to you?

Does iphone/ios have a notification history, where one can see past notifications and revive any notifications that had been dismissed by mistake?

Sounds like these people need Windows Mobile™ phones.

They failed to mention the flattening of the UI and the textualization of everything, which served nothing other than make things harder to find.

ios phones, android phones, windows phones, mobile phones are ageist. No ifs or buts. I was happy to read this, it needs more attention. mobile phones have forgotten that they are phones. I find that 'contacts' apps, which you'd think would be the heart of the whole thing, quite unintuitive. User interfaces in general have a long way to go, imho!

I use Android for everything mobile. (nix based). MacOS for everything else.(nix based) Whatever is nix based works ;) Questions?

iOS is just as nix based as macOS.

LOL

Anyone who wants to add more steps you cannot skip during setup is completely lacking in credibility when it comes to user interface. QED.

My biggest gripe, how about a standardized back button, that is always in the same place and works the same in all places.

iPhones don't come with comprehensive instruction manuals, do they? (I know my Android didn't)

I wonder if the FaceID technology can eventually detect squinting and suggest a font size increase?

Couldn't Apple A/B test a feature in a client subset before releasing it wildly ?

That title font is hard to read.

In summary, people do not RTFM. If people RTFM, the phone would be easy to them.

Substitute the word “Samsung” in place of Apple and you get the same article.

No, they are not. By design.

> Windows autism

yikes

I’m not sure about that! But I’m pretty sure it’s hard to buy :D :D

After 10 years of using iphones android is hard to use for me.

There is some horrible ableism in that post.

iPhones have hit the point that their main target audience is people who have 4+ years of experience using iPhones.

>it stands to reason that passwords don’t have to use the characters on an American computer keyboard. Even Apple did not know that for a time.

Is this true?

It's 2018 and iPhones can't send a high res message to the vast majority of smart phone users. It's a joke perform.

Click Bait Article.

Is this satire?

Why don’t experts need two factor authentication?

As others have said, whatever the author has written could apply to any smartphone from any vendor and any OS. And there's a whole lot of room for improvement in iOS (only Apple has to decide that these are priorities). The small screens and touch interface pose many limitations on how to convey things to users and enhance discoverability. I doubt if anyone wants a phone that bothers them for an entire hour teaching them how to do certain things. It's already quite painful setting up a new iOS device and having to re-download all apps on a slow connection (with the removal of app transfer from device to iTunes about two years ago).

Some more observations:

1. The author mentions the manual on the Apple Books Store but doesn't even mention the Tips app that's been around a few years and shows some neat tips to discover some (not all) features. Apple ought to expand on this one more.

2. Some of the issues that the author lists are not easy to solve without having a long, tedious and difficult to use onboarding process when the device is first powered on. It also sounds like some of the examples he quotes are about people where someone else did the onboarding and forgot to setup certain things correctly when handing the device over to someone else. How can iOS or any OS solve these issues? The onboarding process, by some measures, is already long and incomprehensible by many lay people. For example, what exactly is "Location services" or "Notifications"? Taken to an extreme, some concepts (not these) are almost impossible for a device to explain to people. They're only a little bit more easier for people to explain to people. Computers are difficult for most people. Not everyone needs to know everything or every feature. But people learn over time because there are others who teach them things.

3. Also, telling people that they can ask the iPhone for directions and that Apple should make sure people know about it is a catch 22. In India, Apple Maps cannot even find well known locations in major cities or provide directions to many places. Siri doesn't understand the Indian English accents (yeah, there are different accents depending on where the user is from within the country) well. Apple would have to know how good some of its services are and decide to tell people or not tell people or completely disable them in certain places. In this example, should Apple not tell users in India about Apple Maps or about Siri? Should it wait until another major release when these services are better? What defines "good enough" or "better"? Maps is almost useless in India, but Siri is not completely useless. It has some utility.

4. While writing a rant is easy, I wish the author had also spent some time on providing some suggestions or solutions for at least some, if not all, of the issues.

5. Email this to people at senior executives at Apple. That's something the author could've done after writing this post.

>What can press-and-hold do that people don’t know about? >Directly move a scrollbar. (Fails most of the time due to tiny narrow hotspots you’re expected to hit on the first go.)

I couldn’t get this to work.

>Show a magnified absolute-centred duplicate of nearly anything onscreen you cannot actually manipulate, like whatever is in the title bar. (Try pressing and holding on the battery icon.)

Neither this one.

Do I need some obscure accessibility setting for these?

There are some third party apps with custom scroll bars that can be directly moved. Maybe that's what OP found?

I couldn’t get either to work too. Maybe they took them out in iOS 12? I have scrollbarred before on prior Ios releases

You can put it in control center and have it be about as easily adjustable as brightness. It‘s not there by default and hard to discover, but adjusting your text size all the time really is a bit of a niche feature. I‘m really not sure what else Apple could do other than:

- Asking during onboarding

I assume if I want to see if it's possible to change the font size I'd go to the Settings and look there.

Not sure how much hidden there it is. It could be more obvious, but I'm not sure how.

BTW pushing every setting in your face is also a design anti-pattern, so the complaint has to be taken lightly. (Also the "Apple doesn't care about usability" is just cheap words)

No shit, Sherlock. Welcome to the 21st century.

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