A couple of months ago I bought my first smartphone. I went for the one I really wanted (despite the extortionate price): the lovely, shiny iPhone 4. I went the whole hog - 16GB or32GB? I have no idea how much data I'll be storing but what the hey, let's go 32GB. Download limit (must I be limited, really?!) let's go for 1GB. Multitasking? Check. Facetime? Check. Multi-touch, 326 ppi, 960x640px, high-resolution retina display? Check.
What a cool toy! I ordered it by express delivery; if you realise that the phone I was upgrading from was a Nokia so rubbish it couldn't even receive picture messages, you'll understand how excited I was; I couldn't wait for my clever new phone to arrive.
Only ... wait a minute. Now I'm a little more familiar with this gadget, I realise that in my enthusiasm for the new and exciting, I forgot to ask a basic question - is it actually any good as a phone? This didn't even cross my mind. Surely something as sophisticated as an Apple smartphone has the basics covered ... right? I mean this thing has 3-axis gyro, for goodness sake - it knows what angle it's at and adjusts the display accordingly (clever, huh?!). It's a pocket computer, an MP3 player, a video camera and player, a 5mpx camera and a games machine, and that's before we even delve into the world of apps. Surely the phone bit is a walk in the park, no?!
Well, apparently not. With the iPhone, Apple have built a great pocket computer, with lots of fancy features, but they simply haven't got the phone functionality right at all.
My first experience with it should have been a clue. When my beautiful new toy arrived, I took it inside, and went to take my SIM card out of my old Nokia and put it in the iPhone. Only that would be far too straightforward, apparently.
Apple have decided not to stick to
consistency and standards: an absolute rule of thumb in design, and one of
Jacob Nielsen's top
ten usability heuristics.
Instead Apple decide to reinvent the wheel - or in this case the SIM card; giving you a new "microSIM" with your iPhone. So, instead of simply switching SIMs, you need to first activate your microSIM by going through a process which starts with getting your computer out and installing the latest version of iTunes. (Hang on I thought this was a phone, why the computer?!).
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| the microSIM | |
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So, after some fiddling about I activated my microSIM, great. Now let's put it in the phone. But hold, on, how do you do that?! It's not at all obvious. So much so that I had to give up trying to work it out myself and look at the instructions. (I'm feeling really stupid now).This task completely fails on
visibility - one of
Don Norman's most important principles of good interaction design, as the SIM card drawer is totally lacking in
affordance clues.
Once you've found the drawer, you then need to open it using this thing:
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| Apple reinvent the paperclip |
No, it's not a paperclip, it's a"SIM eject tool" apparently.
What a palaver! And this was only the beginning. Apple's phone design crimes are many. Here are the ones that annoy me most:
The iPhone often falls foul of the principle of
feedback / visibility of system status. The most irritating example is this:
My iPhone doesn't work outside my university, within a large area covering at least the car park, the station and the roads around the local shops. I can't make a call at all there, but (according to the phone) the signal is fine. The thing that annoys me most is that I have no idea why it doesn't work! It gives me no useful feedback at all.
Then, to add insult to injury, when it doesn't work, the phone gets stuck on "calling"; if I try to cancel out of "calling" I get stuck in a loop (see the video of me trying to use my phone, below). The only way out I've found is to turn the phone off, but then it takes ages to come back on again. This completely fails two more of Neilsen's heuristics:
help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors and user control and freedom, which is about giving users a clearly marked "emergency exit" when things go wrong.
Another backwards step as far as phone functionality is concerned is, surprisingly, the touch-screen. Now, as far as the iPhone as a pocket computer goes, I think the touch-screen capability is great: it's a pleasure to use, and incredibly intuitive - even my 2.5 year old son can move things around on the screen with ease. However when it comes phone functionality
, I have to ask myself do I really want touch-screen?
I think the answer is, actually, no. I'm a high volume phone user, and I know my old friends' numbers off by heart. On my old phone I would often phone them using the keypad, but without looking at it - especially when multitasking (e.g. watching my child / walking in the street). I can even write texts without looking at the keypad. I can't do either of these things on an iPhone however, so it's failing on cross-platform
consistency: by going totally touch screen, it's doing away with any
physical affordances whatsoever.
It's pretty ironic actually that the new "touch-screen" capability actually does away with the ability to use the phone by touch alone. It should really be called "look-and-touch-screen" but I guess it's a little less catchy.
Wanting to text without looking is probably a fairly niche requirement, but there might be many situations where you wanted touch to help you make a call. Most obviously if sight is a problem for you at all, then it's not going to work (have they invented an app for this I wonder?). Also what about using your phone in an emergency situation to call for help? Try dialing 999 on an iPhone with one hand while stuck up a mountain! Not very easy, I imagine.
Multi-tasking is another great new feature of the iPhone 4. It means that you can use different apps and functions simultaneously. So, for example, if you're listening to a radio station on an app, it will continue to play when you come out of the app to check your texts for example. Similarly apps will save the position you were last at when you were using them, so when you go back to them you start from where you were, rather than the same place every time. Again while this is great for a pocket computer, it's a backwards step for the phone functionality.
One of
Bruce Tognazzini's fundamental principles of interaction design is
efficiency of the user, which states that it's more efficient for a user to be able to press the same button a few times to make a selection, rather than having to waste time, and brain power on making the decisions necessary to press a few buttons. On my ancient Nokia, I could phone the last person called by pressing the same button a few times. On the iPhone, the sequence of buttons depends on where I last left the application, which is annoying and at times disorientating.
Finally, one of the most annoying features is that if you're on an important call and the battery runs out, when you plug the phone in you have to wait until it's charged (something like 10%?) before it will let you use it again. Even the very old phones let you use them when you plugged them in! This falls foul of
consistency again, and also doesn't do much for my
user control and freedom.
All things considered, my old £15 Nokia is a much better phone
that the £500 iPhone.
So, will I be returning to my ancient Nokia any time soon? Not on your nelly! I love having a pocket computer. I remember the days when 32k machines were high-tech, and I'm still excited by being able to have the internet in my pocket; also the apps are great. However I'm glad I'm "only" tied in for 18 months. I'm already sick of the patronising arrogance of Apple, who, in my opinion, have chosen style over substance or user needs too many times with this design. I'll be trying a different one next time.
The iPhone? Too smart for its own good, I reckon.
Image credits:
iPhone photo courtesy of
snapping kurtle via flickr
microSIM photo courtesy of
Christian Paul via flickr
Apple paperclip image courtesy of
Brandon Shigeta via flickr
