How people really use the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

How people really use the iPhone

slideshare.net

155 pointswird60 comments

This was awesome, but I recommend viewing the high-res PDF instead: http://www.createwithcontext.com/landing-iphone.html

Incidentally, Scribd and Slideshare have given me a newfound appreciation for Adobe Acrobat. A couple of years ago nobody would have said "I just want a good old PDF."

I love PDFs. I hate Acrobat.

I love xpdf.

Evince is fine for me. What does xpdf do that Evince doesn't?

It has a smaller footprint, if that matters to you.

xpdf has better anti-aliasing in my computers, usually. Pdfs from jstor for example look awful under evince and ok on xpdf.

I haven't heard of xpdf or evince before and have been using foxit, how does this compare?

While I haven't used them in direct comparison, it is worth noting that Evince is shipped with GNOME in nearly all GNOME-based Linux distributions, and xpdf has the added bonus of not relying on a specific toolkit. Mind, you can certainly use Evince outside of GNOME, but people have their own reasons for avoiding such things.

The bottom line is that both work acceptably well, and do so much better than Adobe's own offerings in my experience.

Evince will use the anti-aliasing option that Gnome does, including a couple of different flavors of subpixel rendering.

Yes, and it works marvellously for most fonts, but I think it doesn't do anti aliasing for bitmapped fonts, and xpdf does. I could send you a screenshot of how badly jstor pdfs get in my laptop, if you're interested.

No need, consider me educated.

Evince chokes up on large PDFs but xpdf does not. I started using xpdf to read PDFs in OLPC, due to necessity. I liked it so much that I'm using it in my dev laptop as well. It is faster too.

Odd, I've been using Evince all today to read a 772 page PDF of 'Solaris 10: The Complete Reference' (yes, I read textbooks, yes I'm also aware of how piss poor Solaris is).

It handles the document fine, including generating thumbnails for all the pages on the fly as I scroll down.

I think the difference is significant when you are RAM poor. It made a huge difference for me on OLPC. May be you have lots of RAM?

Evince has 19.5MB resident when loading the document, which seems reasonable for an average desktop, but I don't know how much RAM OLPC has.

No bad at all! OLPC RAM = 256 MB.

I used to feel that way until Acrobat 8 because Acrobat was always so slow. However, versions 8 and 9 open PDF files much faster and are more reliable than previous versions, so I don't see the point of the alternative PDF viewers any more.

Does anyone know of alternative PDF viewers which deal well with large images? Because I know Acrobat, Foxit, and Evince all aren't great and slightly choke up.

Thanks a ton for the link!

For me, my opinion shifted once I had a Mac, and Preview.app. Before then, I loved Scribd (though Slideshare is just horrible). Now, it seems inefficient by comparison.

Yeah, Preview is awesome. Bu Firefox on Mac OS X by default saves all docs, this sucks.

This should solve your problem (works for me): http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

Thank you! Installed it and it's great.

Slideshare presentation is also high-res, just hit "full screen" button in the lower right corner.

Some people read that presentation in NOT full screen?

Maybe someone should write a "How People Really Use Slideshare" post...

Thanks for providing an iPhone friendly version.

My biggest gripe with the iPhone is that the optimal zoom for viewing a web page is slightly larger than the width of the phone. To read a page, I have to constantly swipe left and right a bit. I wish they had a text-only zoom mode that would fit pages to the width of the phone at a comfortable text size.

Surprisingly, article matches it's title. They actually did put camera and recorded how different users used iphone given specific tasks. This looks like good data to me, i'll go finish the slide deck.

Wow--it really surprised me how much I take for granted in interacting with a UI. The big piece of information for me was the placement of the buttons in Safari. Extremely interesting.

The carrier in the images is T-Mobile; jailbroken iPhone?

Or T-Mobile Germany

The things that interested me were the comments that people made: the more specific pieces of information. Not having enough dexterity to manipulate the phone, for instance. I never would have thought about that.

I also found the comment about not knowing album art slightly sad, even though I've had the same feeling before. It feels very slightly like the end to yet another music era.

You can two finger tap to zoom out in Maps?! Frick. Did not know that. I suck at iPhone.

I think that was their point: it's an incredibly small feature that doesn't advertise itself well.

That was my first reaction too, though. I must admit.

Wow, slide two was TERRIBLE! I couldn't read the text with that very distracting background, who does that?

Yeah. For a slide show investigating design, readability, and ease of use, the second slide seems a bit out of place. Luckily, the rest of it is easy to understand, and very useful and interesting.

It looks fine in the PDF. It seems like a translucent layer is missing in the slideshare version.

Oh that makes a lot more sense. Good catch.

How many people participated?

I'd love to see more details of this or follow on research. They did an excellent job. None of the suggestions here would be surprising to a UX expert but having them in context is really helpful.

One thing that seems to get people is 2 finger to scroll divs/iframes in safari. Pretty intuitive when you think about it, but some don't. Especially when the scrollbars aren't obvious.

Intuitive? I'm not sure you understand that word.

OK, what other method could you have to scroll a div/iframe? It was the first one that I thought might work, so I tried it. Unless I'm mistaken that made it intuitive for me.

I do get your point though - for some people it's not obvious...

Why not use the same mechanism you use to scroll the main document window?

because then if the iframe covers the whole screen, it'd be impossible to scroll the document?

I would expect the standard scrolling gesture to scroll the iframe -- unless the iframe is already scrolled all the way in that direction, in which case it applies the scroll to the iframe's container.

This behavior is intuitive, if slightly inconvenient in some cases, which is exactly the trade-off I'd have expected Apple to make. Requiring an unfamiliar multitouch gesture for a common operation strikes me as the kind of "let's do something cool because we can" geekery that got us middle-click-to-paste in X Windows.

I'm curious: what does the iPhone use to scroll an iframe in an iframe? Three fingers?

Sorry for the off topic comment but I have to say... I love middle-click-to-paste in X Windows! Hooray geekery.

"Intuitive" means I did similar things a hundred times in the past.

I think the whole gestures thing is NOT intuitive. There is nothing that invites the user to do that stuff. I think scrolling is OK because we have all seen it in the iPhone advertisements. But do stuff with 2,3 or even 4 fingers? Why would I ever even try it? It's like pressing CTRL+@+ALT+AppleKey+xyz.

If it's not something you'd try, what would you try?

On non-Apple-systems, typically you can try the right mouse button or browsing the menus.

My phone didn't come with a mouse.

I understand, however, maybe then there have to be some buttons. Anything but a random thing to do.

This is great!

The thing is, though, for a lot of the "problems" they found with Apple's UI, fixing it would cause other problems. Such is the nature of design.

I think the idea is not to avoid all problems, but rather avoid unnecessary problems.

Yeah. For instance, a lot of the button-consistency issues could be fixed without harming the interface.

This just goes to show you that nothing beats good old fashioned usability tests with actual users. They'll unearth the most obvious problems with interfaces that you're blind to.

great stuff in that presentation! what also interested me was the bit on application pricing because that's what I'm struggling with at the moment.

do we go the .99 cheapy-route or price at a premium to maintain a status-quo. hmmmmmm

One guy I heard from recently recommended pricing cheap until you get on a top-100 list, then jacking up the price. Of course, he was trying to market a game, which probably has different market dynamics than an application.

when you use msn on iphone does it charge to your usage? if so, how much usage does msn take

Thank you for sharing that!

Pure gold!!!!

Great find.

I thought I was the only one who found "the most intuitive phone in the world" a bit confusing. I also hate touching the screen because I sometimes accidentally click something I didn't mean to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com