iOS 7.1 Real-time Design Reactions | Hacker News Reader

iOS 7.1 Real-time Design Reactions

polarb.com

73 pointsnoinput39 comments

I would think you'd get a ton of bias by having the options labeled (particularly using words like 'old' and 'new') and always having the options in the same order, 7.1 on the right.

That said, de-biasing it by making it randomly switch sides would likely cause confusion. "Old" vs. "New" could probably be reworded pretty easily though to be more neutral yet still descriptive.

Confusion about what? If your goal is to know which design people prefer (independently of generation), there is a necessary amount of confusion required with regard to which is new and which is old.

Even if you were to remove the labels, users familiar with the platform will still be biased. There is something called the mere-exposure effect, which dictates that the mere exposure to a thing will cause preference toward said thing. Because of this aspect of human preference, the deck is naturally stacked against "new" things.

I really don't think first impressions from a screenshot viewed on the web is going to be very accurate anyway

One thing that concerns me from a 'normal user' point of view is that the new Buy Album button appears right next to the price for the individual song.

For some users it may appear like you are choosing 'buy album' for $1.29

http://cdn.iphonehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/itunes...

The only iOS 7.1 option that seems to be losing is the call screen. Of course the old one looks better with the full-screen photo, but how many people have good enough photos of their contacts to make that consistently look good in everyday use?

It's not just the photo. It's the vastly increased hit area for answering.

I have photos for all the people I'm close to.

I can't imagine their motivation for reducing the size of buttons like that. Other than the smaller buttons, 7.1 actually looks pretty good.

Accidentally answering a call is embarrassing.

Androids 'drag from A to B' is a godsend in this regard.

Having to use two hands to answer a call is annoying.

Where's this two-hands requirement coming from?

I know for sure (because I was testing something where a contact had a weird photo) that on 7.0.6 it did the 'small circle contact photo on incoming call' thing. Was full screen photo only activated for high res photos?

I'd much rather my contacts be able to set their own photos for when they call (with the option to override it). It's just not worth the trouble setting photos for each person.

That's exactly how it works on Android. It uses Google+ profile pictures, which you can override, you can also enable option to show details about numbers that are not in your contacts (including the picture).

I would rather avoid a social network getting their hands on my contacts, though. You could sync facebook and twitter with your contacts in iOS, but I just don't feel comfortable doing it.

The thing is I have absolutely no interest in join a bloody social network just to use my phone book, as a matter of fact I block every app on my phone from accessing the contacts info.

I suspect that I'm not alone in this regard.

I'm an Android user, so I don't know if this is easily doable on iOS, but I sync the Google+ and Facebook profile pictures of my contacts to their entry in my contact list, which covers around 80-90% of anyone who'd call me.

It's easy in iOS as well. My contacts sync with Google. If the contact has a G+ profile associated with it, then their data gets pulled in.

I also have a script I wrote that gives all of my contacts in Google their Gravatar, if they have one. Works well.

Hi,

I'm an engineer building Polar Polls. This is an example of one of our realtime poll results dashboards.

We've built some cool tools for building beautiful, photo polls and the ability to embed them anywhere on the web.

http://polarb.com/

I understand that you want me to know that people are voting right now, but the yellow flashes are incredibly distracting and made trying to view all the poll results very difficult.

I agree. I was looking at the site trying to figure out what was going on and the yellow flashes just kept grabbing my attention.

By using cursor key for voting you dramatically decreased usability, for example I no longer can use Platform Key (Win/Command) key + left arrow to go back to previous page.

Normally I'd agree with you (e.g. I hate Blogspot because they hijack Alt-Left for back also), but in this case I actually liked the arrow keys for voting because they were quick and simple. I voted on probably ~5 screens in just a few seconds and felt really smooth.

Why not do both: support cursor keys for voting, but leave meta+ key events alone?

It's nice to see people are actively voting, but I'm way more interested in the data than the too rapidly flashing yellow. Just changing the numbers and flashing the font bold (or some other effect on only the number) when new votes come in should be sufficient to make it clear the number are updated realtime. But I'm no designer so what do I know ;)

This was not a pleasant experience. Half my screen (horizontally) was taken up by a blank UI element, while the actual screenshots were scrunched together on the right. It took me a while to realize that they were two screenshots next to each other.

Others have mentioned the flashing UI elements - if you wanted to show that things were updating in real time, you could've added the highlight to the votes themselves, instead of flashing a big rectangular area.

Also, you are biasing voters by telling them that one is 'old' while the other is 'new'. Show two screenshots (hopefully, larger than the tiny ones you have right now), in some random orders, and let people vote without bias.

"Dramatically increase participation and time spent on your sites or apps with Polar."

With pinchzoom disabled, I just want to leave this site. -1

Why are there questions asking if people prefer having [feature] or not having [feature]? And more importantly, why are people voting for the latter one?

Which proves that history repeats itself. Apple goes overboard with its initial design and pulls back in places with subsequent point releases. Everyone in 5 years forgets that their phone was allegedly unusable!!! for a matter of months.

Sorry, it's hardly been unusable.

I've had almost zero issues with iOS 7.0 - most of my gripes are my dislike of the new icons and bad discoverability (e.g.: casting a song to airplay /bluetooth speaker), but none of that made the phone unusable. The control center by itself makes iOS7 better than iOS6.

Same here, running on a 4S since release and haven't had any crashes or stability issues. The only thing I had to change was the "bold text" option since I found some of the text too light for my liking and that got fixed in 7.1.

I just wish the forest that is Settings was searchable. One example being to find all the similar "Use Mobile Data" toggles.

It's odd that it isn't searchable since OS X's analogous System Preferences has had its cool search with the fading light graphic for many years.

I hear ya - this is one area where Spotlight on Mac OSX Tiger (10.4 - almost a decade ago) really innovated - I could tell my folks to "use the magnifying glass on the top right corner and type 'mouse'". The same on XP could be a nightmare depending on how it was setup. Apple definitely should have kept the settings in the search in iOS.

Right now it's sad I have to search google on how to find some of the settings on the iPhone.

The menu-searching (Cmd-?) with the auto-reveal and floaty arrow was similarly brilliant. I still use it to this day.

The flashing is distracting. Quite irritating actually

I like it. It makes the page seem 'alive', though I guess they should add a toggle button to turn it off for those who have trouble with it.

The tiny avatar is terrible. I want to quickly see who is calling. Facial recognition is the absolute best way for that to happen.

On top of that it looked beautiful.

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