Designing "Mute" | Hacker News Reader

Designing "Mute"

marco.org

46 pointsiamclovin63 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dumbphone still does this.

> It'd be disastrous if I accidentally muted my phone, failed to wake up, and missed a morning.

It'd also be disastrous if you accidentally turned your phone off and failed to wake up. It'd also be disastrous if you accidentally unplugged your alarm clock and failed to wake up. Or if you accidentally pushed the gas instead of the brake in your car.

There's only so far that a device can go to protect you from yourself. If the harm done by this "helpfulness" can be great (like interrupting a symphony performance for hundreds of people) it's better to err on the side of adhering to what the user actually did. In the case of a "silence" switch, that means being silent. Otherwise why is there a silence switch at all?

FWIW, a lot of people (like me) can wake up to a vibrating phone, especially if it's laying on a hard surface like wood. So an alarm isn't necessarily useless just because the phone's speaker isn't making sound.

> Really, you want a "don't annoy me or people around me" button, but that's context sensitive.

No, what I want (really really) is a switch that turns off the phone's speaker absolutely.

Siri is a potential solution: "Siri, do not disturb me for the next 2 hours."

The problem I have with the iPhone behaviour is twofold:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> A very large number of people work in shared offices and operate their phones in silent mode all-day, every-day.

If that's the case, can't you just turn the ringer to off in your phone's settings? Why do you need the silence switch for this? The silence switch is useful when you want to switch back and forth a lot.

That's definitely not the use case I would imagine for the Mute switch.

The shared office situation should be handled by setting the phone into a "Vibrate only" mode. On "Mute" mode, my phone doesn't even vibrate, and that's exactly what I expect to happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it really a "costly" situation? Really?

Perhaps there should be "Mute" and "Mute Everything." Not sure how the UX would work for that - a slider for all three values could be tricky - but it would make it clear exactly what kind of muting you want.

There is "mute everything": turn off your phone completely and it will get rid of all sounds - including alarms which won't go off unless the phone is turned on.

My phone rings the alarm even if the phone is turned off. That makes sense to me, I turn my phone off at night.

The article was talking about the iPhone, hence my suggestion being for the iPhone which does not ring the alarm when it's off. At least it didn't until 3.0 where I tried it last time.

The other option (on the iPhone) is to turn the volume down to zero. Even alarms won't sound then.

On the other hand, the most common use for alarm is when you want to be woken up no matter what, which is more common than weddings.

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

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

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

I don't think that is a common smartphone behavior.

I suspect there's a significant number of iPhone users who have never once shut down their phones, and don't even know how to do so.

That's only a solution if you know about the behavior in advance. Unless somebody told you, there's no reason to expect that the mute switch won't silence the alarm.

Precisely. When I am leading groups of people in committing felonies, I tell them: "Turn your phone off. Not on silent. Not on pleasure vibrate mode. Off."

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

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

I disagree with the conclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> Just be mindful of this feature and check the alarms before the concert starts

As I mentioned in another comment, this is no help when you pocket-play some music (the music equivalent of a pocket call), which has actually happened to me at one of the worst possible times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have my iPhone on vibrate all the time and use it for an alarm.

I get in to trouble when I turn the volume down. I would expect to hear about someone who missed something important because the phone wasn't audible if it were the other way.

On the other hand, it would only affect those in the future, not those in the present.

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

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

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

> That’s good design.

Choosing one of two conflicting commands without warning the user is terrible design.

How would you warn the user?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awful conclusion.

If the user gives conflicting commands, tell them so.

That's responsible design.

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

That's good design.

It's stupid that my crappy old LG phone had an "Alarms Only" mode, but modern smartphones don't. I never replaced my old alarm clock when it stopped working, because I just used the alarm mode on my phone.

Now, my new smartphone doesn't have that feature and there's no way to use it to wake me up in the morning without it also making sounds when my uncle in another timezone forwards me a hilarious text message at 3 am.

The only workaround is to individually set every sound event to silent and then turn off vibrate, which is kind of ridiculous, especially when I want the phone to make sounds again the next day.

3 way switches are terrible design.

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

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

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

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

Next problem.

Simplicity trade-off.

very likely their thinking, agreed.

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