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Comment by hoi | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, you are beginning to 'blame the user' because they 'don't get it'. Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get? It should 'just work' with minimal thinking, with no frustration. It doesn;t matter that Kanji is enabled... maybe it was enabled by accident? But it doesn;t resolve his problem? Maybe he doesn;t know how to easily enable/disable languages because he finds it hard to configure? If anything, this is useful data for Apple (and any UX designers) to look at to resolve potential usability problems.

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Guy activated kanji in preferences, but doesn't like it. I don't know who else should be blamed! The iPhone comes with only your local keyboard layouts.

Do you expect apple to display a pop up every time you change the language saying "did you know you can disable unwanted keyboard layouts?"

He actually needs to switch to Kanji several times a day as he says clearly "I must turn my texts and emails into Kanji ten times a day." The gripe is with the layout of the Kanji keyboard which, looking at that screenshot, is indeed pretty ridiculous.

I think he meant "I must" in the incredulous sense, like it must happen to him that frequently as it is driving him nuts.

First, he had to very explicitly enable that keyboard (not easily done by accident, considering it's about 7 taps deep in Settings). After enabling, it is rather simple to activate that keyboard – hitting the globe icon on the keyboard will cycle through all enabled keyboards.

Second, the keyboard isn't ridiculous. It's actually quite powerful. He took a screenshot of the Chinese – Simplified (Handwriting) keyboard, which allows users to draw characters in the blank area. I hear it's an incredibly popular input method in China. Of course, the iPhone offers 6 other Chinese input methods, ranging from traditional keyboards to the drawing methods.

I thought apple was all about picking the best method for you rather than having you make decisions.

And you think that principle applies well to... keyboard layouts?

Within a single language, yes. Obviously you want a different method for Chinese than for English, but I don't want to choose between six different ways of inputting Chinese.

Check out the input method list on whatever OSs you use, and I expect you'll see multiple Chinese input methods. OS X 10.8 has 10, Windows 7 has dozens, a quick Google search shows that Ubuntu 12 around 13.

It turns out that, with over a billion people and dozens of dialects, many different writing styles, and a long history of different electronic input methods, Chinese speakers really do need multiple different ways of inputing Chinese.

Not all of the "Chinese" speaking population live in the same country or speak the same language. Further, they also have different writing systems, with simplified being official in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, and traditional being used in Hong Kong & Taiwan.

There are also different phonetic systems, like Zhuyin/bopomofo. Some of these are taught in the educational systems and used as computer input method.

Apple choosing to support only one of these would be far more drastic than forcing all Latin alphabet languages to use the same layout. There could also likely be political ramifications, as traditional and simplified are the subjects of significant debate. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simpl... ]

Hence why Japanese use kotoeri, which usually works perfectly well.

When you first get a device or a new program, you play with it. You turn things on and off and poke around in the preferences, right? Because you don't know exactly how it's "supposed" to look by default, it might not be obvious to you that you've changed something fundamental about the interface or your preferences. I'm not sure that this happened to him, but it might well have; it's happened to me more than once (not just with Apple products).

For example, because I had a checkbox ticked that said something like "move imported MP3s into my iTunes library"[1], iTunes destroyed my music library organization when I moved from Gentoo to OS X. Since my music still played on random without issues, I didn't even notice until I no longer had a backup of the old names. This made me hate iTunes so much that I still refuse to use it, but ultimately it came down to the same problem I think this fellow has with his keyboard: he messed around to see what options did what and later didn't remember that it wasn't like that by default, so he doesn't even know he can turn it off.

[1] this was 2003; I don't remember the exact wording

> When you first get a device or a new program, you play with it. You turn things on and off and poke around in the preferences, right?

I do, you do, but the vast majority of people do not. Apple products ship with sane defaults and I agree with the parent that it's not Apple's fault if someone fiddles a special keyboard on that was off when the box was opened.

Regular folks just run with the defaults, which work fine for them. And the few people who work hard to become real experts on the platform do fine because they know at a deep level why problems occur.

But in between there is a range of people who know enough about Mac technology to dig in and play around and do some technical troubleshootin, but are unable or unwilling to really really dig in and spend time on hard technical details. In my experience nobody has a harder time with Apple products than these "mid-range" folks.

"Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get?"

I know what you're trying to say, but you're entering a very dangerous area here. There is no useful system, anywhere, that doesn't require some amount of understanding. Even intuition doesn't come out of nowhere. Our intuition is only based on what we've learned so far. That is why we click on things that look like buttons and that is why, when facing a steak, we intuitively "know" it's edible. In both cases the outcome may not be as expected, but that's a different story.

My point is, that a system which requires no prior knowledge whatsoever and no understanding is essentially useless, because it literally couldn't do anything, for it would just be a void. I'm getting philosophical here, I know. Even the simplest of systems require a user to grok its basics to become useful.

The real-world analogues of the devices he's interacting with do just work with minimal thinking, and this is what the letter index mimics. In an indexed book, you find the letter and quickly flip open the book to the proper page. In an indexed scrolling list, you touch it and scroll directly to that letter (or magnifying glass). I really don't intend to 'blame the user,' but I'd respect the 'user' at least a little bit more if the user would explore the software. The options are very clearly laid out, in the user's language (especially wherein a user can use said language to write such an in-depth rant!), and they are discoverable with even the most casual searching.

Touching the screen isn't going to get your fingers sawed off or anything. It's there to be touched, and destructive actions are insulated from touch. A little exploration goes more than a long way.

Sure, for this guy, who is supposedly a tech guy. But if we consider the 'mass market' we're at the point where we have millions of 'dumb' smartphone users. The people who are used to feature phones are migrating to smartphones, and it's this 'mass' demographic that usability issues need to address.

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