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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

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...))

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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.

Yep, that's how Android does it too. Text size is a very important option for older folks, and having people pick it during the initial setup alongside other accessibility options, helps a lot.

I just set up a pixel 3 and it didn't ask anything about text size?

Onboarding was like 3 steps, including "plug in your old phone".

Onboard if tends to be quite different if you already had a device though. With an iPhone you can just put it close to your old one and it will suck in everything. But if you set it up anew it will ask questions about privacy setup, text size and so on.

It has been since the 6/ 2015

If its important enough to put in on boarding, its important to have it handily available through easy to access means during regular use.

Why? The initial setup is for the things you set once and never need to change. I tell my phone I want it in English during on boarding - and then I never need that setting again.

Eyesight changes over time. People learn new languages, and want to switch. Making these decisions for the user and then forcing them forever is decidedly un-user-friendly.

Or, you know, the person can search for 1-2 minutes how to change the font, when they need to, if and when their "eyesight changes" enough during their years of using iPhones to warranty it.

Better than cramming every such feature as a first priority, and making a UI that's confusing for everyday use.

You didn't read the article? Even though its buried there, in the system prefs, people who need to change such settings still cannot find them. That's the point: the UI is already confusing for everyday use, and we honestly expect better of Apple.

>You didn't read the article? Even though its buried there, in the system prefs, people who need to change such settings still cannot find them.

They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them. Better than having all such settings front and center over more commonly used settings.

> They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them.

But they don't. You're a reader of HN. It is fairly obvious that you're the sort of person who, at a point when you need to accomplish something you don't know how to accomplish, will assume that it's possible and start with research. But there are a lot of people out there who will start with the assumption that not being able to see their phone screen so well anymore is just something to put up with. The entire point of this post and discussion is that Apple may not be providing the best experience for those users for whom it would never even cross their mind that changing the text size on their phone is possible.

Would you say that everyones grandparents (which mostly could use that setting) are capable of googling tutorials?

Even most young people I know are not able to google things (even if it's some important information they urgently need). Or maybe they just don't get the idea of even asking the internet.

What operating systems have settings like these in a more intuitive location?

Apple's design of Settings has clearly evolved via accretion rather than any thoughtful and considered design. The fact that something is possible in a UI/UX has no bearing on the fact that it's fundamental design can still suck huevos.

Or 1-2 seconds. The 3 steps are explained at the top of the Google search:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=change+font+size+iphone

How often do you think this happens? I am through and through an Android + Windows user and hate Apple for certain things but I do have to admit their design decisions are pretty solid most of the time.

It's not like you're learning a new language everyday. Nor losing your eyesight. Keep in mind that the life of a cellphone is anywhere between one and six years, for most tends to be around three (speculation). Isn't reason enough to make it a top priority for people to be able to access language / text size changes in their settings everyday.

Forcing them forever is not the case, IDK where you're getting that from. Language settings and text size / other accessibility settings are in the settings and nowadays ios even has a search function in there.

If an elderly person can't find these settings buried in some menu system, they're as good as set forever.

I don't think so. What's important for setup is not important everyday. Some things you just need to be able to set once and forget. No reason to put those things front and center.

Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS. There are three languages spoken in my household, by various family members. Changing the language dynamically for them would be a benefit, not a hindrance.

Text size? Same - I often have to show something to my elderly family members, but digging deep into the menu's to find the Text Size setting is very distracting.

I think what's happening in this thread is that people are simply attempting to justify bad design decisions without thinking things through. Language should be something you can change, with ease. Same with text size. Ditto, Wifi access, etc.

>Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS.

That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next on the menu" is contrived at best.

The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.

If that's the best argument, Apple is doing pretty well.

It's not an outlier for me. Most people I know switch between English for work and international friends and the local language for mostly everything else.

I'm switching languages I type in every whatsapp conversation.

On an older Android version that doesn't track per chat language, I have to switch the keyboard every single time. Three languages. And I happen to know more.

I switch between languages all the time too. Mostly, I just type whichever language I want, and the keyboard figures out it’s one of the two I use frequently and doesn’t bother me. Failing that, there’s a button next to the dictation button to change languages if autocomplete is acting up (this whole post was written with the keyboard set to Portuguese with only one miscorrection thus far).

You don’t need to change the whole OS’s language to type in multiple languages!

You’re talking about switching the keyboard language, which is easy to do all the time. The parent is talking about changing the language of the entire phones UI, which seems like something you’d do significantly less frequently than changing the keyboard.

Actually, I'd do it frequently if I could, since I live in a multi-lingual household.

Having a customisable control centre might be good. I often turn mobile data on and off (when I'm abroad), and it's a minor pain going into settings. On the other hand I hardly ever touch Bluetooth, and never use airdrop or airplay mirroring.

It is customisable, you know.

You can do this from Control Center.

3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control.

Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...

Personal Hotspot is not the same thing as mobile data...I suppose it's possible it's what the parent meant, but unless you meant to say that there was a switch to turn cellular data access for the phone itself on and off there, I don't think that's going to solve the stated problem.

There is an immediately visible cellular data switch (right next to airplane mode) in the control center, as well as a hotspot switch which is hidden behind the 3D Touch.

Mea culpa, you’re totally right about the distinction, I wasn’t reading clearly.

I had no idea widgets in the Control Center responded to 3D Touch/long press.

Interesting. Couldn't under ios10, but I've bitten the bullet and downgraded to ios12 and yes, it's right there, cool.

I'd like to use different languages for different applications. I'm using Russian and English languages interchangeably on my phone. Luckily many applications nowadays have separate language setting, but not all. That's not an outlier request. I hate that English-dominating CS monoculture that thinks that everyone is like them. It caused great headache of 8-bit encodings which the rest of the world had to deal with for decades, while US didn't even understand what the problem was about, strlen is just fine!

Yup. "ASCII is mostly OK if you're USian and only use English, therefore no problem exists."

It was good enough for UNIX... Heck, it was a big deal when early uucp and Internet links were finally 8-bit clean! (Only 7 bits are needed for plain old English ASCII, and when you were paying many thousands of dollars a month for a T1 (1.5Mbps) connection, using 7-bit was an instant 12% bandwidth boost...)

Sure, but that's a historical quirk - epoch time has advanced from 0 a bit ;)

Which is why then you have to come up with tricks like typing c, instead of ç, eh instead of é and so forth.

Then everyone does it a bit differently and there is this pre-parsing phase trying to understand which idiom people have written the text.

>>Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently.

> That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one

I've lived in similar households. In KDE one can change the language on the fly for any arbitrary application or the desktop manager.

The Russian-speaking girlfriend, the Hebrew-speaking children, and the Spanish-speaking regular can all use KDE comfortably. I was actually surprised when I had to use an English-language Windows machine and could not change the language on the fly.

> The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.

The vast majority of users in some countries may never change language, but there are other countries where multiple languages are officially spoken and where even members of the same household have different first languages.

For the phone form factor I would think that maybe language switching isn't as important since most people are not sharing their phones often, but for the iPad it might be more useful to be able to switch languages quickly.

One thing I'd think could be useful would be switching the language based on Touch ID, so family members or partners who speak different languages could pick the device up and feel at home.

The fact that the vast majority don't use a feature does not make it less important for the people who do. That's the same logic as saying, I don't know, that face recognition only has a false positive rate of 1/1000. If you scan a million people each day you still end up with 1000 people falsely identified.

I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)

FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:

- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.

- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.

Language can be changed in the keyboard quickly and easily.

I would argue that Apple actively doesn't want to support your two use cases because they'd much rather sell a device to each member of your household and make it incredibly easy to share the page you are looking at between each member of the house.

This is what frustrates me about consumer electronics, that if you have a use case that the vendor doesn't want to support then you'll be constantly frustrated over what could be a simple software change.

>I would argue that Apple actively doesn't want to support your two use cases because they'd much rather sell a device to each member of your household and make it incredibly easy to share the page you are looking at between each member of the house.

Bingo! Apple have acquired immense expertise in applying this anti-pattern.

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

- Putting it in Display as well as Accessibility settings

- Having a control center button

This has no basis in reality. Putting a feature like this upfront will cause more accidents than it will allow people with vision issues to use it frequently. People with vision issues need almost all text to be larger. These same people will be the ones accidently hitting this bar instead of brightness and not knowing how to fix it.

I have very bad vision and I use the feature regularly but I imagine I‘m like 1 of 500 people. Accidents are not an issue though since I oversold it being as easy as brightness. You need to force press the icon before you can slide up/down.

I really like this idea. Actually, I have it in control center on my iDevices, but I’m not sure if I had to turn that on.

I bet the end users are not setting up the phones themselves and the younger people doing the setup skip all of the prompts except WiFi.

Not if you do it in an Apple Store, at least in my experience.

I'm guessing most people get their phones from their phone provider or online.

And of course there are still countries where there is no Apple store, but you see quite a few iPhones.

Only a small fraction of iPhone users have ever been to an Apple Store, never mind bought their phone from one.

Siri says that the nearest Apple Store to me is 265 miles (a 4h 38m drive) from me.

It seems a bit of a stretch to ask everyone around me to drive go there every time they get a new phone.

> everyone around me [...] every time they get a new phone

Reality: people who feel that they need help, and for most features it's a one-time trip with settings passed from phone to phone as you upgrade.

That isn't Apple's fault though.

As much as I'm not a fan of their products, there is very little you can do to help users when they (by proxy in this case) ignore or avoid your attempts to help them.

Making the option easier to find after on-boarding might help, but for the users you describe it would need to be very easy to access and you will fill any list of quick-access options very quickly if you include things they may only want to use one or twice in the life of the phone rendering the "quick access" a big scary list that is neither quick nor easy. Even if you do find a good place for the option: will that class of user even know to look for it never mind find it? They'd just ask the person who on-boarded them instead so the technical level of the target audience has changed back to someone who at least knows how to Google for where to find a more buried option.

You can make the onboarding so simple they don't need help?

Not if the problem has nothing to do with how simple the onboarding actually is, and everything to do with the users being scared to try things.

Why?

Why? It's literally the whole reason for that article. It's "hidden" because these older people are too scare to even click on a setting button.

Maybe I suck at the Socratic method. Maybe the onboarding should be much easier. I think that if people must ask a friend to set up the phone, something has failed. It should just work and setup should be optional. If you wanted to migrate all your data and settings from a previous phone, you should be able to do that later, without wiping your phone. There's a lot yet to do in UX, not much explored. Apple really owns the "slick" game but they could spend some effort on the next billion customers.

It doesn't matter how easy a particular procedure is on an iPhone or anything else if the person trying to use it is so scared of technology that they don't even try.

I know many people (yes, most of them older) for whom the idea of trying to look at an unfamiliar process on a computer (including smartphones) and see if it's something they can do themselves is just a completely alien idea. If it's not something they're already familiar with, it's Scary Technology Stuff, and they need a Technology Person to handle it for them.

Honestly I don’t think it could be any simpler. The problem is some of the questions it asks about privacy and the cloud are beyond the scope of many people. But these questions need to be asked.

It can't be simpler but the questions are not simple?

So don't ask them. Default to a non privacy invading mode. Ask the questions later of people who wants the features.

I don't buy "this is the pinnacle of ease of use" and we can't get further.

I lost count of the people who complained about their iDevices features not working properly because they intentionally (so they thought) turned them off. Having eg location services turned off by default and not ask about it will just lead to tons of people complaining that directions don’t work properly. And asking them the moment they open the builtin maps application will make them close the app because ‘it does not work’ and ‘there’s an error’ and ‘iPhones are so complicated’.

I think you will find much of this is because of the current balance struck between privacy invasion and usability. If brilliant minds were put to it, I am sure location services could be mostly client side and not server side. And so on. Just writing it feels heretic and crack-pot, except it wouldn't have to be.

Location services are client side. You turn it off if you don't trust client side apps to have access to your location.

Do you know what iOS onboarding even looks like? It literally can't be more basic without removing the exact thing you are trying to make a point to have.

I suppose a nice compromise here would be to make an intelligent decision whether to bring up a prompt asking if you want to change the font size. For instance, if the FaceID detects that your face is farther or closer from the screen than normal, or that you're squinting.

Maybe, but I can say without reservation that the times I find my personal technologies the most frustrating are when they're "trying to help me". 99% of the time, this is the WRONG thing to do - for instance if my phone "helpfully" resizes my text, then there's a very good chance that I can no longer see everything I was trying to see on the tiny screen in the first place, as it will have reflowed off-screen! FAIL! It MAY be OK to ASK if I want help, but just jumping in and doing something is most likely to result in, "Shut up and do what I tell you!" (in the words of Beka Valentine...)

>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.

My mom asked me if I can make the text bigger. Or I told her, I forget. How is this so upsetting? I also had to set up almost all her devices, and she’s not technically illiterate at all. She just doesn’t have the time or energy to learn every minute detail like I do.

> Even so, all of those people have to change > their text size just once or twice.

Actually, I prefer a larger text size in the evening / night and a smaller text size during daylight hours. So I'm changing text size once or twice per day.

The point was not accessibility in day-to-day use. The point was discoverability of the feature in the first place! You cannot look up how to change text size if you haven't even realized that the possibility exists.

Simple commands like this can also just be invoked with Siri. So difficulty with navigability to find the option is becoming less and less of a problem.

The main challenge there is just reminding people that the option exists so that they will know to ask. That and normalizing the idea of navigating interface elements by voice or querying the search bar rather than by physically scrolling around.

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

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.

> Text sizing is addable to the control center, as are other accessibility shortcuts.

I don't think that was the point. The point was that people don't even know it's possible to change text size, never mind about other accessibility features, because they're not easily discoverable. Besides, the people who don't know about text sizing don't know about control center customizability either...

True, you do still have to find it once.

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?

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.

> It's a niche feature that has been there since at least iOS 4

FWIW it's been in the MAC address book since the original OS X (jag-wire?)

Yes, the feature has been there since iOS 1.0. Siri on iOS 4.0 started making use of it to enable voice commands (e.g. “call Mom”)

You can also tell Siri relationships, “x is my brother”

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?

No, and I don't think it can happen until users are empowered to be driving design decisions. Designers may need to serve as facilitators of the design process.

https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-con...

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.

Right there you highlighted the biggest issue most people have. They're scared to touch or change anything in case they mess something up.

All devices need a universal undo so you can change something and easily undo if you get it wrong or you just preferred the old setting.

For security you could prompt after a while to make the new settings permanent and delete the snapshot.

Talk about a feature my 89 year old grandma will be terrified of.

And if you think people are terrified of messing up the iPhone itself, they cower in mortal fear at trying to do anything in iTunes, which is still, a decade on, inexplicably the only way to do many things with an iPhone (like, for instance, back it up if you don't trust your personal info to iCloud...)

This is correct.

"so-and-so is my wife" => it will update that contact's info (and yours). Then later you can say "text my wife I'm on my way home" and it will.

"call me Mister Smith" => it will update your contact's nickname and use that to address you

"Take me home" (or to work/etc.) => it will bring up directions in apple maps to the "home" address on your contact

If you ask Siri "call my wife" before that, Siri will tell you he doesn't know who your wife is and ask for a contact name, then ask for confirmation, and finally persist the information and proceed with the call.

Jane will find it funny if you say “call my wife” and it calls someone else instead I’m sure.

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

That change is infuriating. Showing something/someone else on a FT call may be a minority pastime, but it's not exactly a super-obscure use-case.

I seriously doubt there was a groundswell of users complaining they could swap cameras with a single tap.

The other annoying change was putting the End Call button in a panel the bottom right. Regular users have muscle memory, and suddenly they have to relearn one of the main features.

Changes like these are superficial tinkering and make work for the sake of appearances rather than considered, focused development.

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)

> I also moved it so it's the very first option listed for quick access

It took me a second to realize that "Request Desktop Site" is available in the Share Sheet. I use it by long-pressing the refresh button.

hah I only discovered that long-press option just a couple months ago!

Long pressing there also gives me a "request without ad blockers" button which I've found super useful as well. A bit weird this option isn't in the Share Sheet like desktop mode is...

also isn't it weird that this is called the "Share Sheet" but has lots of buttons for non-sharing related things?

Yeah, "request without ad blockers" is great. Very inconsistent that it isn't available in the Share Sheet.

The whole "Share Sheet" is rather confusing. It has three categories of actions in one screen. Potentially useful options are hidden wayyy down the list (like this Request Desktop Option). Even more options are hidden inside "More" menu all the way at the end. Which is also where the re-ordering controls are – although I just realized the icons can be reordered with drag-and-drop.

All in all, not very discoverable for a feature with such high utility.

"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.

is that what putting usb ports on the back of an iMac is? function, period, paragraph, and publication?

>is that what putting usb ports on the back of an iMac is?

Yes, why not? Tons of PC laptops had it that way as well, even industrial-style all-function PCs.

well, older laptops had top mounted hinges that allowed for a lot of I/O real estate on the back. that allowed them to work well on a tight desk, with power, usb hub, whatever coming out the back. for a portable machine, i think most accessible things should be on the sides, and the newer hinges on most laptops that are mounted to the back of the chassis mean that back mounted ports aren't an option. the obvious function first choice is side mounted ports, with a bottom dock with power redundancy and everything else. best of both worlds. i don't know if older laptops are the relevant comparison point to a new imac all in one desktop though. I understand why they are on the back, but its clearly not a function first decision (putting them on the front would be way more functional.

Where would you suggest the ports be located on a desktop computer whose sides are not thick enough to accommodate any ports?

Perhaps they should be located in the middle of the screen? ;)

well, for the imac, the thickness is more than thick enough to handle usb ports, they just taper it off at the edge so certain three quarters shots make it look thinner than it is. there's also a bezel on the front that could be accommodating. i think the bottom of the screen is an obvious choice, or even integrated into the stand. I understand why they don't do any of these things, and I wouldn't put usb ports in the front of an imac either (its very pretty and sleek). but, a theoretical function first machine would certainly have usb ports right in the front. my monitor has usb hub functionality, but they're all in the back, or behind a plastic shroud on the bottom. I don't get it- its an ugly dell monitor anyways, that i bought for the resolution, why not make it uglier and more useful? so yes, its not just apple, and at least they don't seem to have those useless plastic shrouds over cables. but the imac is not a function first machine, not from a cooling perspective, and certainly not from an I/O perspective.

200 options one person will never use is 190 options that other people won't use. And they're not mutually exclusive.

I'd rather present all of the options and let the user learn what options are there even if they never use them.

And that's fine, you have other options available to you. Apple's target demographic prefers simplicity first, convenience second, with niche features way down the line... and Apple delivers.

Personally, I prefer the Android ecosystem, and honestly I'd very much prefer even more control than that. In fact, I'm really excited about the Librem 5 project, which is pretty much the exact opposite of Apple. However, many of my friends prefer the Apple experience.

A product doesn't have to cater to everyone. If it tries to, it ends up alienating everyone.

I always thought Apple sold lifestyle/fashion primarily; their target demographic are those that buy in to fashion readily. They're highly concerned with looks and want to pay more to flaunt their wealth.

I've always found the Apple-way, wrt UI, to be different; more confusing for me because I'm used to a different paradigm. But, there's some lock-in effect there, if you start with Apple, you become accustomed to their way and then other "ways" seem more complicated. In practice it seems largely to be just familiarity.

> "Form over function" is not "Apple's way". Apple's way is function, period, paragraph.

I like Apple's design, but that's...definitely not true. You could charitably say that Apple's goal is a seamless marriage of form and function, and they do that better than most. But they have always cared more about aesthetics than any other important developer, of hardware or software.

Exquisitely thin keyboards that don't work reliably, missing ports that need dongles, a touchbar that doesn't really add much and sometimes gets in the way, super-thinness at the expense of extended battery life, and a missing headphone jack are all examples of form over function.

Meanwhile a function-motivated Finder in MacOS would not look anything like the clunky dinosaur we seem to be stuck with.

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.

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.)

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!

> 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.

That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible.

The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non-obvious to me.

Or under pull down menus... or context menus... or...

Force touch just seems like a different form of right mouse clicking.

I know a few people who - even after trying - can't make "force touch" work properly. I love it and try to show them. But they can't seem to make the effort to learn it.

Are you saying they are...holding it wrong?

I know at quite a few people that have not upgraded their iPhone 6-vintage phones simply because they found 3D/force Touch to be a really significantly negative feature, and just flat don't want it.

Every single action that was available in the contextual menu (hidden "behind the ctrl key") was supposed to be available elsewhere as well, typically as an actual app menu item.

The idea wasn't to hide or show the context menu -- but to have those actions NOT need the context menu.

E.g. to delete you didn't need to "right click, send to trash". You dragged the item to the trashcan.

> sorry there is a word for it

You're probably thinking of either discoverability or affordance.

I think the word you're looking for is discoverability (or perhaps visibility).

The problem with Solaris, Windows, and other desktop workstations at the time was that the second (and even third) mouse buttons were required for many workflows, especially in applications---i.e. a lot of functionality was only available from the right-click menu or via the middle mouse button. This introduced a lot of unnecessary complexity to computer use, especially for new users, because of low visibility and discoverability.

Even today, Mac hardware never has a visible 2nd mouse/trackpad button. Sure, you can click a trackpad with 2 fingers or tap on the right side of a mouse to get a context menu, but keeping the buttons invisible forced these shortcuts to remain just that, and not an essential requirement to get the job done. Windows apps today follow this rule as well -- never make right-clicking the only way to execute a particular function.

There were no other desktop workstations at the time, Solaris and Windows didn’t exist for years.

I’m talking about the early 1990’s.

Discoverability is a very hard problem on the small screen. I’m amazed at how often I actually know a function exists, and I try every conceivable type of interaction I can think of to no success. Then I google it.

Damn the little tip about tapping the clock to jump is so handy, I have actually searched for how to do this and never came across a description of this feature.

This, unfortunately, is slowly going away. The Home app in the new macOS, which has been ported over from iOS, is unusable if you don’t know how to two-finger-tap.

> hidden functionality

Easter eggs?

Apple hides tons of stuff - often so well that they go missing for years. I hate to admit this (I'm an 8-time tech CTO), but I thought that Apple had made the bonehead decision to completely remove the iOS search feature after swiping to the left from the home screen stopped working (iOS 6?). It was literally years (at least iOS 10!) before I accidentally invoked the absolutely opaque "swipe down from the middle of a home screen" gesture to discover search was still possible.

Actually, I wish any modern smartphone OS had half the thought put into it that Palm had 20 years ago. After all this time, nothing even comes close for contact and calendar management, as well as actual phone use!

I had a Palm Pilot, Palm III and Treo, followed by BlackBerry. It wasn’t THAT great, poor graphics, slowness and weird quirks (also graffiti) but I agree it was visionary compared to everything else in the 90s. the blackberry was pretty amazing in 2000 and as a phone was a step up circa 2005. Though the Palm Pre had some great ideas we Are seeing now in iOS and Android. iOS became really good at calendar and contacts by around 2010 if I recall but I lived with it from 2007 onwards.

Whenever a key feature in iOS seems missing I just google for where it went. iOS search is so essential that I couldn’t see it ever removed...

> 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?

>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.

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

Press the share button at the bottom (or next to the address bar in landscape/iPad), then scroll along the list of options at the bottom and you'll see "Request Desktop Site."

Cool, thanks!

I think the trick they are referring to is to go to the site then hold the refresh icon and a menu saying "Request Desktop Site" pops up.

I thought cool, I'll try it with the nyt - It'll be like the original iPhone demo again but no - it goes to a pay screen. Mercury Browser kind of worked though which is an app that "can spoof the UserAgent string to trick websites into thinking the browser is a desktop browser."

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.

That's true, but I think there's a lot of less technologically proficient people for whom this actually works better.

Like, as tech nerds we have no problem navigating lists of lists of settings, we can usually guess where a setting will be if it exists. But for a lot of people, just asking "Hey Siri, can you make the letters bigger?" would be more accessible.

But that's where the behavior analysis here would be key. Someone mentioned it in a previous post but imagine if Siri, by way of the FaceID sensors, detected that someone's face was closer to the screen or that they were squinting and recommended that she could increase the size of the text on whatever they're reading. Better yet, imagine if someone repeatedly hit a point on the screen followed by the back button and Siri suggested making the buttons on screen larger. At that point, people would view Siri as more of the personal assistant she's meant to be and ask her if she can do things rather than what she can do.

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?

You still need to know that something exists and how it was named to be able to search for that setting.

You need to have an idea it exists, but with well designed search/indexing you shouldn't need to know the name of it. E.g. "duplicate screen" "copy what's on my display" "mirror to another device", etc., should all show "MirrorShare" (and possible other options) on Android.

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.

I'm an avid apple user and honestly had no idea that manual existed. They could do a better job advertising it. Is there anything in the box mentioning it?

Edit: and according to the article, the manual doesn't cover a lot of the hidden features described in the article.

I learned at least five new things: select multiple pictures, announce calls, swipe right for forward, and a couple others I don't recall. I would rate myself as an advanced iphone user. I've made very complicated Siri shortcuts. But a lot of stuff has been rather hard to discover.

It's referenced in the only piece of paper in the iPhone box at the end of the getting started instructions. Or at least it was when I got my latest phone a year ago.

It's the first thing mentioned on the small-print card that's in the box. I somehow suspect that most people don't read this card.

More likely to be found is that in the Tips app that a newly set-up iPhone tries to point you to, once you've gone through a few tips one'll suggest that you download the manual through Apple Books.

> one'll suggest that you download the manual through Apple Books.

That reminds me of the 1990s scenario of having to know and understand FTP in order to install a web browser.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to have it preloaded on the phone? I presume the OS is already regionalised, so they could include the appropriate manual.

Absolutely correct. This is actually one of Apple's biggest flaws: failure to take credit for dozens and dozens of things that they do better than anyone else. Failure to advertise it, to market it, to inform.

When he got his first iPhone, my dad found it and proudly told me that he manage to download it all by itself.

It’s purely anecdotal but as far as I’m concerned I would rate discoverability as good enough.

> And no: Apple does not "believe their product is so easy to understand that people will just get it". You just made that up.

You're being weirdly hostile about this.

I like Apple's design for the most part, and I enjoy a good comprehensive manual as much as the next guy, but the expectation these days is that software should be self-teaching. Presenting the user with an incomprehensible pile of options is bad, but so is only giving them a tiny subset of practical functionality. Good design presents the common/important options front and center, then lets power users drill down into advanced settings if they want. And all that should be at least nominally discoverable with recourse to the manual.

I am sorry if I came across as hostile. My apologies.

> And no: Apple does not "believe their product is so easy to understand that people will just get it". You just made that up.

Stop being hostile, dude.

Poll a hundred iOS users and ask how many know there's a manual.

Having actually asked this question of Steve Jobs at a town hall for interns (& having worked at Apple later as a full time employee) and it is 100% in the DNA of Apple to try to make things intuitive without needing to reference a manual. There's a reason they don't include anything more than a getting started guide. That a manual exists and is high quality isn't proof that they intend or even expect the typical user to use it. A lot of it could also be for SEO purposes so that if you're searching for a question the top hit could be directly from the manual rather than a random blog post.

I have a feeling they also rely on less tech savy users buying in-person at the Apple Store where their sales staff can do whatever custom 1:1 training is required.

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).

Unfortunately true even in the case of Watch updates. That’s why the trick to make it faster is to kill Bluetooth via Settings.app after it starts downloading an update. Easily half the time spent waiting!

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