Monday, 30 May 2011

The "Hall of Fame": Shazam on the iPhone

Shazam is an app which allows you to identify tunes (perhaps on the radio, or being played live, or on an old unlabeled CD) by simply holding your phone up to the music source. It's got a massive database behind it, with an amazingly large repertoire. (I've tried to fox it with some obscure stuff, and although it's not impossible to catch it out, I really was impressed).



The beauty of the Shazam app is its simple design; it looks good, it does what it says in the tin and is great fun to use.

The app takes you straight to the most important content – the opening screen contains the name-that-tune functionality. You can make it work at one touch of a big, obvious button in the middle of the screen – so visible its design is the visual equivalent of screaming press me! This means it has  great virtual affordance, and makes good use of Fitt's Law, which at its simplest can be taken to mean that big buttons are easier to use. Obvious, surely; however this principle is surprisingly often ignored.

When you press the button it gives you clear and timely feedback on what stage of the process it’s at, and a timer lets you know how far along the process you are – both features adhering to Jakob Neilson’s heuristic design principle of the visibility of system status
 
The icons for the other features in the service are clearly labelled with text; "using words to describe the desired action" is something which Don Norman reminds us can be good practice. The icons themselves also rate very well on consistency as they're often used on other interfaces.

The fonts are high-contrast, easy to read and often large; so the app has good readability - a fundamental principle according to Bruce Tognazzini

The overall design is aesthetic and minimalist - another of Neilson’s heuristics.

It's a great app; powerful but very simple in design. A pleasure to use!

The "Hall of Shame": the phone functionality of the iPhone

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?!).

the microSIM
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:

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