With the introduction of the iPhone, Apple did something legendary. Out of nowhere, they created a highly advanced, easy to use product that jumped years ahead of competition that had a fifteen year head start. In the process they invented several major advancements in HCI. And they created something that felt not like a 1.0 product, but something that actually worked. It worked well as a phone, it had decent battery life, and it wasn’t too buggy. These were things that defied traditional wisdom:
“I would just caution people that think they’re going to walk in here [to the cellphone market],” said Ed Colligan. “We’ve struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he added. “PC guys are not going to just knock this out.”
Apple, the novice, didn’t merely walk into the business. It climbed a 10-meter platform and executed a back two and a half somersaults with two and a half twists in the pike position.
The iPhone remains best-in-breed three years later. It is raking in huge swaths of the total market and is a testament to the power of product vision.
I love my iPhone and use it enthusiastically, daily, for all sorts of things I could not previously imagine.
There. Now that the props are out of the way, it’s onto the gripefest. I pick on Apple a lot for three reasons. First, because their products are the only ones worthy of criticism. Secondly, because I use them and know them intimately. Thirdly, I want to fight the perception that Apple can do no wrong; that Apple design is equivalent to good design; that everyone should strive to design their products just like Apple.
The reality is that Apple has a number of bad design habits which others should avoid to create products that are even better than Apple:
- Apple sacrifices actual simplicity for the appearance of simplicity (parodied scathingly by the Onion).
- Apple puts form ahead of function, to the actual detriment of users.
- Apple is can be obstinately not-invented-here, depriving users of good ideas that are well-known and work
- Apple has a tendency to bolt new features on, accumulating complexity over time, rather than blending them in.
- Apple often fails to identify and streamline the most common, frequent tasks (you know, such as pausing playback on a music player or typing an email message into a mobile device or placing a phone call).
My post from a year ago critiquing the iPhone calendar continues to garner a steady stream of traffic and amen-brothers. In that post I was focused only the calendar. But there are several other aspects of the iPhone that stick in my craw daily.
- The phone app itself is terribly inefficient and demanding of the user’s brain and eyes for the most common tasks. On my 12-year-old flip phone I could press and hold one number to dial a frequently used number. I could do it in two seconds, without even having to look at the device. On the iPhone I have to wend my way through the modes to get to the page of favorites, then I have to look at the screen and target the right entry, possibly scrolling. [Voice dialing may or may not be a panacea for this; my iPhone 3G doesn't have that feature.]
Dialing an arbitrary contact: I have over 3,000 contacts, which makes the primary navigational UI, flick-to-scroll, useless. Searching by typing should be the primary way of finding a contact from the entire set. (In contrast, the Palm Treo’s had a clever feature where you could type the first letters of someone’s first and last name to jump straight to them. To dial me you might type “pha” for philip haine.)
The iPhone doesn’t learn your habits and tune its behavior to your patterns. If I search for Mark, it always presents me with the same set of 28 Marks in the same order, beginning with Mark A, even though I have only ever called up Mark D in the last year. (My favorite precedent of a UI which tunes itself automatically based on your real-world habits is LaunchBar).
- I have loathed the home screen / app launcher since the beginning. It scales poorly. When searching for an app I feel like a flicking idiot, paging madly through screen after screen of icons to find an app. And if you move one icon it shuffles the rest of them on the page. So much for positional stability and muscle memory. Trust me, there are better paradigms for navigating and organize scores of applications.
- The new Spotlight feature that lets you search the whole device is welcome. But it suffers from Apple’s habit of bolting on new features. For example, the Spotlight page is now better at looking up someone to call than the dedicated phone app (which ought to tell you something about the phone app.) Yet when you find someone to call, can you just tap the person and choose a number? No, that would be too blended and efficient. Spotlight instead passes you off to the the Phone app to complete the task. Adding insult to injury is the UI friction of the zooming away visual from Spotlight and then zooming into the phone app. I’m busy; just give me a dial button.
- iTunes is tired. It is simply too clumsy to move media back and forth between the computer and the iPhone. Managing playlists is a chore. Backing up the iPhone takes a ridiculous amount of time (up to an hour for me) and often fails. Coverflow is distracting eye candy. I once lost all my apps by syncing. My calendar has never synced properly.As a result of all of these problems syncing, I do none of it. Yes, that’s right: the exact same scenario that Apple+iPod+iTunes exploited in the early days of MP3 players has come around again. The process of syncing is so onerous that non-use is a better solution than dealing with the hassle. Time to reinvent iTunes as Apple did with Mac OS 9 and iMovie.
- Alarms, alerts and notifications are inconsistent and not trustworthy. Each feature has its own policy on how to alert you. I had to really study the UI to isolate the idiosyncrasies of each.For example, an SMS message will beep and buzz every few minutes, indefinitely, to make sure you find out about the change of restaurant plans. But if the same message happens to be left as a voicemail you’d better be paying attention, because voicemail beeps and buzzes just once and thereafter remain silent.
And unlike every cellphone or answering machine built in the past 20 years, the iPhone has no blinking message indicator light to let you know there is something you are missing. The only way to know you have a voicemail message waiting is to check it.
In contrast, the countdown timer in the Clock app is like a drill sergeant. It will insistently remind you to feed the parking meter now, repeating the alarm continuously and indefinitely until you stop it. If left upstairs it will vibrate the iPhone clear off your nightstand and onto the floor.
Different still is the Clock app, which is kind enough to completely ignore the silent mode switch, so you can hear it over those pesky stage performers.
Appointment alerts take a kinder and gentler approach. They will prod you gently every five minutes to tell you about the upcoming meeting. If your volume is turned down it will do so quietly.
The clock app lets you snooze alarms, but you can’t snooze the countdown timer, nor calendar alerts. For example, you cannot tell the calendary app, “Thanks, I know the phone meeting is in 15 minutes; remind me once more in 10.”
The alarm clock and the countdown timer lets you specify the duration down to the minute. But the calendar appointments limit your choices to 5, 15, 30, 60 and 120 minutes, which is just not enough specificity.
There are even more quirks that make it hard to understand the rules and predict the behaviors: different alert options whether the device is on standby or on, message indicators that make you do the busy work to visit the Phone and Messages apps just to clear their status, repeat options that differ between the alarm clock, the calendar app, and iCal.
The entire paradigm of iPhone notifications deserves a nice, healthy, systemic rethink.
- The slide to unlock feature lacks common sense. It is a dexterity test to perform with one hand. And if the phone times out while you’re reading a screen, it should let you turn the device back on within a few seconds, bypassing the swipe.
- The lack of real background processing is a huge limitation. “Oh but we want to save your battery” says Apple. But what about when the device is charging? How about doling out limited slivers of time? How about giving the user the prerogative to decide who may work in the background, as is done with notifications? This one smells of disingenuous self-interest – SMS, voice mail, money makers, would be threatened if third parties could play on a level playing field with Apple.
Background processing is an enabling technology and when other platforms exploit it it will be clear what iPhone users have been missing.
- Mac and the iPhone are not very friendly towards one other. They are on the same wireless LAN most of the time. Why don’t they just say Bonjour, and just trickle sync in the background throughout the day to keep my Apple world in sync? (Surely not because Apple wants me to subscribe to Mobile Me?)
- If I’m re-downloading an app I’ve already purchased, why do I have to click BUY NOW and then have it tell me that it’s free because I already bought it? The device should just say hey, you own this, help yourself.
- The app store approval process is a bottleneck that is truly hurting users. Bugfixes cannot be dispatched instantly to users and are delayed for upwards of a week.
- Apple’s patriarchal control over what apps show up is an idea that is playing itself out. Protecting the users from badness is one thing. Artificially protecting Apple’s interests at the expense of the customer’s is another.
Every app that Apple prohibits is a set of needs that will never be fulfilled by the iPhone. The controversy over the Google Voice app rejection is only the most vivid recent example. When the Pre eventually gets its act together we will, hopefully, see how different the world can be. Apple could use the competition to keep it honest.
Given the triumph that was the iPhone, these issues were tolerable for the first year or so. But we are now at the third version of the iPhone OS. It’s time for Apple to get back and fix the basics.
Until they do, there is an opening for competitors to exploit.
Here is an idea to steal for whichever competitor is first to trump the iPhone interaction design: launch an advertising campaign with billboards that trumpet the ease of use and efficiency advantages: “Call your spouse. iPhone: 6 steps. Pre: 2 steps. The Palm Pre. For busy people.” “Move an appointment. iPhone: 13 steps. Palm Pre: 5 steps. The Palm Pre. For busy people.” You get the idea.
Readers: what serious long-standing iPhone issues did I miss?
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
Amen brother… I switched to iPhone 4 (for Verizon) a week ago from my BB Curve. I’m taking it back… the apps are cool, there are fun features, blah blah blah, but a business person (like myself) has no patience for the lack of basic functionality. The lack of message indicator in an of itself is a deal-killer for me. So its back to the BB (clunky, yet functional). Yes… I should have given the phone a test drive before shelling out $200, but I never would have dreamed that after four versions this phone would lack so many basic features.
“the iPhone has no blinking message indicator light” I wish I’d read your post weeks ago, would have saved my hours trying to find out how to activate something that doesn’t exist
Agree with a lot of what you’ve written above .. some is just too techie for me though 
Uggh! Wow this was posted a while back and yet Apple still hasn’t fixed a lot of your views, which are shared by many. I am particular about the iTunes store…what a pain in the bahookie. Every time I get on a new system (Ipad/Iphone/whichever computer) it asks for my iTunes password and 90% of the time I enter it correctly and 90% of the time it sais I am wrong…ugh. Great post….thanks.
My biggest gripe is #8.
Mac and the iPhone are not very friendly towards one other.
Aren’t they made by the same company?
““the iPhone has no blinking message indicator light” I wish I’d read your post weeks ago, would have saved my hours trying to find out how to activate something that doesn’t exist”
Wow, you did too, Richard? I also tried soooo hard to find this certain feature. Then I went desperate and I let it just the way it is. After reading this article, I think I’m really silly for being desperate finding something that never exist.
There should be an app for that…or someone needs to make it. I find it very convenient when I can distinguish visually when a message comes in on my ipad 2.