Loads and loads of people are older than 40. Loads of people just have weaker eyesight. Apple has really good accessibility tools, and it would make a _lot_ of sense for there to be a dedicated part of the onboarding for accessibility.
As much as I'm not a fan of their products, there is very little you can do to help users when they (by proxy in this case) ignore or avoid your attempts to help them.
Making the option easier to find after on-boarding might help, but for the users you describe it would need to be very easy to access and you will fill any list of quick-access options very quickly if you include things they may only want to use one or twice in the life of the phone rendering the "quick access" a big scary list that is neither quick nor easy. Even if you do find a good place for the option: will that class of user even know to look for it never mind find it? They'd just ask the person who on-boarded them instead so the technical level of the target audience has changed back to someone who at least knows how to Google for where to find a more buried option.
So don't ask them. Default to a non privacy invading mode. Ask the questions later of people who wants the features.
I don't buy "this is the pinnacle of ease of use" and we can't get further.
I know many people (yes, most of them older) for whom the idea of trying to look at an unfamiliar process on a computer (including smartphones) and see if it's something they can do themselves is just a completely alien idea. If it's not something they're already familiar with, it's Scary Technology Stuff, and they need a Technology Person to handle it for them.
It seems a bit of a stretch to ask everyone around me to drive go there every time they get a new phone.
Reality: people who feel that they need help, and for most features it's a one-time trip with settings passed from phone to phone as you upgrade.
And of course there are still countries where there is no Apple store, but you see quite a few iPhones.
Onboarding was like 3 steps, including "plug in your old phone".
I‘m really not sure what else Apple could do other than:
- Asking during onboarding
- Putting it in Display as well as Accessibility settings
- Having a control center button
Text size? Same - I often have to show something to my elderly family members, but digging deep into the menu's to find the Text Size setting is very distracting.
I think what's happening in this thread is that people are simply attempting to justify bad design decisions without thinking things through. Language should be something you can change, with ease. Same with text size. Ditto, Wifi access, etc.
That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next on the menu" is contrived at best.
The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.
If that's the best argument, Apple is doing pretty well.
> That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one
I've lived in similar households. In KDE one can change the language on the fly for any arbitrary application or the desktop manager.
The Russian-speaking girlfriend, the Hebrew-speaking children, and the Spanish-speaking regular can all use KDE comfortably. I was actually surprised when I had to use an English-language Windows machine and could not change the language on the fly.
I'm switching languages I type in every whatsapp conversation.
On an older Android version that doesn't track per chat language, I have to switch the keyboard every single time. Three languages. And I happen to know more.
You don’t need to change the whole OS’s language to type in multiple languages!
The vast majority of users in some countries may never change language, but there are other countries where multiple languages are officially spoken and where even members of the same household have different first languages.
For the phone form factor I would think that maybe language switching isn't as important since most people are not sharing their phones often, but for the iPad it might be more useful to be able to switch languages quickly.
I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)
FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:
- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.
- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.
3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control.
Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...
Then everyone does it a bit differently and there is this pre-parsing phase trying to understand which idiom people have written the text.
This is what frustrates me about consumer electronics, that if you have a use case that the vendor doesn't want to support then you'll be constantly frustrated over what could be a simple software change.
Bingo! Apple have acquired immense expertise in applying this anti-pattern.
Better than cramming every such feature as a first priority, and making a UI that's confusing for everyday use.
They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them. Better than having all such settings front and center over more commonly used settings.
Even most young people I know are not able to google things (even if it's some important information they urgently need). Or maybe they just don't get the idea of even asking the internet.
But they don't. You're a reader of HN. It is fairly obvious that you're the sort of person who, at a point when you need to accomplish something you don't know how to accomplish, will assume that it's possible and start with research. But there are a lot of people out there who will start with the assumption that not being able to see their phone screen so well anymore is just something to put up with. The entire point of this post and discussion is that Apple may not be providing the best experience for those users for whom it would never even cross their mind that changing the text size on their phone is possible.
It's not like you're learning a new language everyday. Nor losing your eyesight. Keep in mind that the life of a cellphone is anywhere between one and six years, for most tends to be around three (speculation). Isn't reason enough to make it a top priority for people to be able to access language / text size changes in their settings everyday.
Even so, all of those people have to change their text size just once or twice. They can look it up when they need to. It's not like it's a feature they need to use everyday.
The main challenge there is just reminding people that the option exists so that they will know to ask. That and normalizing the idea of navigating interface elements by voice or querying the search bar rather than by physically scrolling around.
Actually, I prefer a larger text size in the evening / night and a smaller text size during daylight hours. So I'm changing text size once or twice per day.
Worth noting that there's a fair number of apps historically that don't really support text sizing. Until iOS 11, if you were using a non-system font, you had to do the resizing manually. They made it much, much easier to buy in to Dynamic Type in iOS 11, so hopefully this will get better over the next year or two.
I don't think that was the point. The point was that people don't even know it's possible to change text size, never mind about other accessibility features, because they're not easily discoverable. Besides, the people who don't know about text sizing don't know about control center customizability either...
At the very least, the emergency contact info should be stupid simple to find (I'd say top level in Settings). This isn't an "advanced" feature, it's a fairly vital and basic feature of a cell phone. Family relationship specification should be simpler too.
Relationships is one of the features, to me that feels like Apple ended up building functionality on top of years after the feature was released, but since it was useless for so long nobody ever uses it.
Did you know not only could you specify your relationships, but other people's relationship's as well? I'm not sure if Siri lets you contact people this way ("Call John's mom"), but I wouldn't be surprised if a hidden update to Siri enabled this feature as well.
FWIW it's been in the MAC address book since the original OS X (jag-wire?)
It's a hard problem. Has anyone really solved it well that offers the use cases our current smart phones/computers have?
https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-con...
"so-and-so is my wife" => it will update that contact's info (and yours). Then later you can say "text my wife I'm on my way home" and it will.
"call me Mister Smith" => it will update your contact's nickname and use that to address you
"Take me home" (or to work/etc.) => it will bring up directions in apple maps to the "home" address on your contact
All devices need a universal undo so you can change something and easily undo if you get it wrong or you just preferred the old setting.
For security you could prompt after a while to make the new settings permanent and delete the snapshot.
Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus.
There is definitely room for improvement though. There are some regressions that are too obvious. The recent regression that comes to mind is forcing the end user to go through extra taps to switch the camera between front and back during a FaceTime call when previously it was a one-button click
I seriously doubt there was a groundswell of users complaining they could swap cameras with a single tap.
The other annoying change was putting the End Call button in a panel the bottom right. Regular users have muscle memory, and suddenly they have to relearn one of the main features.
Changes like these are superficial tinkering and make work for the sake of appearances rather than considered, focused development.
While 'desktop mode' is super useful the HN crowd, I don't think most users would benefit from it.
A non-technical user is probably only minimally aware that mobile and desktop sites might have different features at all. And even when you do use it, it might not have the desired affect. I might have been browsing around on "mobile.site.com" for a while and repeating my request with a desktop User-Agent is still going to get me the mobile version. (this happens to me on m.facebook.com) To fix this I have to know how to modify the URL to point to the non-mobile-only version...easy for this crowd, but not for the average user.
Certain CSS @media queries also don't seem to be affected by "Desktop Mode". (It only changes the User-Agent I believe?) So in other situations, it won't work no matter what and that's pretty frustrating/confusing/inconsistent if you don't know the details.
Even if I do succeed, a desktop webpage on mobile can be a pain with all the zooming and zooming out needed. Sometimes desktop sites don't even work properly on mobile browsers! Now...we understand the constraints, but all these details come together to make it a pretty confusing feature for the average user.
I think most users wouldn't get value from this so it's obscure by default...but for the technical types that love this, it's not too hard to figure out how to move this feature to a place where it's convenient to access.
Overall I think the current design is a pretty good balance all things considered.
(though I do wish the ability to move the desktop mode button to the 1st slot was more obvious. Definitely took me a while to figure this out)
It took me a second to realize that "Request Desktop Site" is available in the Share Sheet. I use it by long-pressing the refresh button.
Long pressing there also gives me a "request without ad blockers" button which I've found super useful as well. A bit weird this option isn't in the Share Sheet like desktop mode is...
also isn't it weird that this is called the "Share Sheet" but has lots of buttons for non-sharing related things?
The whole "Share Sheet" is rather confusing. It has three categories of actions in one screen. Potentially useful options are hidden wayyy down the list (like this Request Desktop Option). Even more options are hidden inside "More" menu all the way at the end. Which is also where the re-ordering controls are – although I just realized the icons can be reordered with drag-and-drop.
All in all, not very discoverable for a feature with such high utility.
The problem with Solaris, Windows, and other desktop workstations at the time was that the second (and even third) mouse buttons were required for many workflows, especially in applications---i.e. a lot of functionality was only available from the right-click menu or via the middle mouse button. This introduced a lot of unnecessary complexity to computer use, especially for new users, because of low visibility and discoverability.
Even today, Mac hardware never has a visible 2nd mouse/trackpad button. Sure, you can click a trackpad with 2 fingers or tap on the right side of a mouse to get a context menu, but keeping the buttons invisible forced these shortcuts to remain just that, and not an essential requirement to get the job done. Windows apps today follow this rule as well -- never make right-clicking the only way to execute a particular function.
Damn the little tip about tapping the clock to jump is so handy, I have actually searched for how to do this and never came across a description of this feature.
That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible.
The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non-obvious to me.
Force touch just seems like a different form of right mouse clicking.
E.g. to delete you didn't need to "right click, send to trash". You dragged the item to the trashcan.
You're probably thinking of either discoverability or affordance.
Actually, I wish any modern smartphone OS had half the thought put into it that Palm had 20 years ago. After all this time, nothing even comes close for contact and calendar management, as well as actual phone use!
Whenever a key feature in iOS seems missing I just google for where it went. iOS search is so essential that I couldn’t see it ever removed...
Easter eggs?
This reminds me that several versions ago, Windows stopped underlining the shortcut keys to the menu items by default --- taking away the only affordance to discovering that the keyboard can be used to more quickly activate the menus. I learned by accident long ago ("what's the Alt key for?"), and have used it since. In contrast, I remember trying to operate a Mac the same way but gave up experimenting with the Alt key and such to try to get the menus to show (I know about the shortcuts, but they are not easily discoverable/explorable in the same way that menus are) --- and only later found out that trying to operate the menus on a Mac from the keyboard is... not very intuitive and disabled by default (why!?!?):
https://superuser.com/questions/117549/use-the-keyboard-to-a...
https://superuser.com/questions/504111/how-to-select-file-me...
(I'm not sure if the above even apply to pre-OS X --- when I discovered the function of Alt and the underlined keys in Windows, it was the Windows 3.1 era.)
Well, that's not a dictum to design UIs by. This way everything becomes "critical".
At some point you just use statistics, and if something is critical to fewer people, you can give it lower priority anyway than what most want to use everyday.
This is not so nice when you only want to reload the page while clearing the cached files.
Could have been something like a long press or double tap on the refresh button.
Not a single time in the past 5 years or so. What's your point?
I thought cool, I'll try it with the nyt - It'll be like the original iPhone demo again but no - it goes to a pay screen. Mercury Browser kind of worked though which is an app that "can spoof the UserAgent string to trick websites into thinking the browser is a desktop browser."
Added to this is the obvious point that with a touch interface on a small screen, you cannot make everything obvious. It's impossible.
I like Apple's design, but that's...definitely not true. You could charitably say that Apple's goal is a seamless marriage of form and function, and they do that better than most. But they have always cared more about aesthetics than any other important developer, of hardware or software.
Meanwhile a function-motivated Finder in MacOS would not look anything like the clunky dinosaur we seem to be stuck with.
Perhaps they should be located in the middle of the screen? ;)
Yes, why not? Tons of PC laptops had it that way as well, even industrial-style all-function PCs.
I'd rather present all of the options and let the user learn what options are there even if they never use them.
Personally, I prefer the Android ecosystem, and honestly I'd very much prefer even more control than that. In fact, I'm really excited about the Librem 5 project, which is pretty much the exact opposite of Apple. However, many of my friends prefer the Apple experience.
A product doesn't have to cater to everyone. If it tries to, it ends up alienating everyone.
I've always found the Apple-way, wrt UI, to be different; more confusing for me because I'm used to a different paradigm. But, there's some lock-in effect there, if you start with Apple, you become accustomed to their way and then other "ways" seem more complicated. In practice it seems largely to be just familiarity.
Our tech keeps getting more powerful, to the extent that the interfaces and sheer number of options outstrip the average person's capabilities to manage.
Like, as tech nerds we have no problem navigating lists of lists of settings, we can usually guess where a setting will be if it exists. But for a lot of people, just asking "Hey Siri, can you make the letters bigger?" would be more accessible.
-we have feature X but only 1% of users find it where 10 of users use it after someone else shows them how to use it. Maybe a feature that is only for 5-10% of users is advanced or niche but we need to design it better so this niche/advanced features are irrecoverable.
I do not know how to solve this on mobile, I know that some software on desktop has a tooltip dialog when you open it(with a checkbox to disable this feature) that presents some cool advanced feature, you can click Next and Next to see more and more advanced features. I seen this in Intellij, they also have a list of the actions you performed sorted by usage, so you can look at it later , notice you used action X the most and that you can speed it up if you learn or configure a shortcut
Mind you I do believe Apple should release a proper manual. Barring that, there's a series of iphone books, websites and magazines that will go over these features over and over again.
If people don't invest the time themselves, why should Apple bother?
Also why is Apple and the iphone singled out? It's the same rhetoric for Windows, where the start button is a mystery to the computer illiterate.
TL;DR educate yourself or don't get an iphone.
I do believe text size should be an option for the first configuration though (and if you give your old phones to other people, do a factory reset and let them run through that initial setup themselves).
It gets complicated with apps though, designers often don't keep the variable size text in mind. That feature - at least when I looked into it a few years ago - gives you fixed text sizes to work, which is fine for default looking apps but a bit problematic when you're implementing a certain style.
These type of complaints are the most common I hear from technical people that switch from android to iphone - the lack of customization, the product is on purpose 'dumbed down'.
This is after me owning 3 generations of iPhone (3S-4S) and an iPad AND the family owning one of every main iPhone since 3S.
Is turning off the device an advanced feature?
I guess most people really never need to turn it off. Maybe when switching sim cards to not hotplug them?
They just changed the battery page in settings. Where's the tutorial? An obvious place would be apple.com/batteries but I don't see it.
https://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone
And no: Apple does not "believe their product is so easy to understand that people will just get it". You just made that up. It's...surprising what people will claim sometimes about what Apple "believes" based on zero evidence. The fact is, Apple knows very very well what is easy and obvious, and what isn't. They have done rigorous study of all of this.
I'm not saying that Apple always makes the right choices, design-wise. But to say that they are blithely ignorant of the basic usability facts surrounding the most successful consumer product in world history is...a bit of a stretch.
Edit: and according to the article, the manual doesn't cover a lot of the hidden features described in the article.
I learned at least five new things: select multiple pictures, announce calls, swipe right for forward, and a couple others I don't recall. I would rate myself as an advanced iphone user. I've made very complicated Siri shortcuts. But a lot of stuff has been rather hard to discover.
More likely to be found is that in the Tips app that a newly set-up iPhone tries to point you to, once you've gone through a few tips one'll suggest that you download the manual through Apple Books.
That reminds me of the 1990s scenario of having to know and understand FTP in order to install a web browser.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to have it preloaded on the phone? I presume the OS is already regionalised, so they could include the appropriate manual.
It’s purely anecdotal but as far as I’m concerned I would rate discoverability as good enough.
I have a feeling they also rely on less tech savy users buying in-person at the Apple Store where their sales staff can do whatever custom 1:1 training is required.
Stop being hostile, dude.
Poll a hundred iOS users and ask how many know there's a manual.
You're being weirdly hostile about this.
I like Apple's design for the most part, and I enjoy a good comprehensive manual as much as the next guy, but the expectation these days is that software should be self-teaching. Presenting the user with an incomprehensible pile of options is bad, but so is only giving them a tiny subset of practical functionality. Good design presents the common/important options front and center, then lets power users drill down into advanced settings if they want. And all that should be at least nominally discoverable with recourse to the manual.
Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way.
I’d be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how to improve the situation without compromising on ease of use.
(Regarding the WiFi thing...I agree this is a very annoying default setting, but I think a worse outcome is when a user shows up in their friend’s house and has no idea how to connect to the WiFi. Making the user go to Settings -> WiFi to disable this prompt means they’ve demonstrated they’ll be able to go back to that page to manually connect to a network in the future. If you turn this setting off on a friend's phone, be sure they still know how to connect manually.
(Though I do think iOS could be smarter and not prompt you to connect to intermittent networks while you’re driving around a city...))