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Too many secret features
- Thread starter Exile714
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Was the "keyboard is a trackpad" ever announced as a feature of the 6 plus? It was demo'd as a new feature of iPad under the new iOS.
that feature was accidently included in the betas and has been removed from the iPhone.
1. I'm not saying that the concepts of moving forward, evolving the OS, and introducing new features are bad.
2. The core user interface of iOS has not remained the same.
3. Bloated = bogged down with features, services and apps that negatively affect user experience.
4. A lot of the core functionality has not remained the same.
Give an iPhone 6S running iOS 9 to anyone who's ever used an iPhone 3G with iOS 1 and I guarantee you they can use it without confusion. This is what I mean by core functionality. Sure, icons have changed slightly in shape or color but not enough to not look familiar.
Advanced Features like the Control Center, Notification Center and Spotlight search are not core features.
Give me an example of a core function that has changed and is no longer familiar.
I could easily say "Give an iPhone 6S running iOS9 to anyone who's never used an iPhone before and I guarantee that they'll be confused."
We learnt how to use iOS on the earlier, more intuitive versions 1-6, which gives us an advantage over new users.
Some examples from a new users perspective.
Safari - 3 of the 5 buttons on the bottom toolbar don't make any sense until you click on them to see what they do. Even once you work out what they do, you'll forget the difference between the "square with an arrow" and the "open book". That's assuming you can work out to get the bottom toolbar to show at all.
Messages - why is there a microphone symbol in my keyboard and also where the send button should logically be? What do these mean? I just want to send a message!
Control Centre - A new user will not even know this exists. How on earth do I lock the rotation on this device? Adjust the brightness?
Closing apps - how do I do this?
Photos - how the hell do I use this thing? I just want to be able to easily organise my photos!
TouchID - why do I randomly get asked for my passcode instead of TouchID?
Music - what the hell is this? How can I just listen to my music?
Notes - meaningless symbols located in random places. "Oh 4 squares, this must let me see all my notes in a grid... Wait now it's asking for attachements or something?"
There's just a few examples!
A few examples of someone needing to play around a bit to figure something out? Been that way with pretty much any software, especially something as an OS. Even with iPhone OS 1 there was nothing to tell people that pinching or using more than one finger would do something, but people figured it out. Things evolve and new things get added, doesn't mean everything has to cater to the lowest common denominator that it should be plain obvious and a given otherwise it's too hard and thus not worth it. Plenty of things in life evolved, even bicycles got gears after some time to make them more useful, but that would probably be too complex and thus unnecessary bloat compared to just plain fixed version of the bicycle, right?
Yeah, you're probably right.
We could probably agree that present day iOS is still fairly intuitive, but certainly not as easy to use and as intuitive as it used to be.
We could probably agree that present day iOS is still fairly intuitive, but certainly not as easy to use and as intuitive as it used to be.
Which is normal as more functionality is added. It doesn't mean that some things couldn't perhaps be better in some ways, but it does mean that things will go beyond simplistic as more is added (and some could argue whether or not that "more" is worth it or not, but certainly for the most part more of the features are useful to more people rather than not).
This is one of the reasons I like Apple - they make their devices easy enough for the average user to use out of the box. Basically they are using the 80-20 principle, 80% of users will just use 20% of the OS potential/apps, but there is a whole lot more that tinkerers/professionals (the 20% of users who use 80% of the OS) can, and do, use as well. [The numbers are based on Pareto's Principle, and can be applied to many situations].
For the average user, Mail, surfing the web, messaging etc is more than enough, but as we know the Mac can do a lot more than just these, and I agree it is fun finding things out - almost like lots of Easter eggs throughout the OS.
For the average user, Mail, surfing the web, messaging etc is more than enough, but as we know the Mac can do a lot more than just these, and I agree it is fun finding things out - almost like lots of Easter eggs throughout the OS.
Your examples seem to dictate that the user has no experience with computers, internet or electronic software.
Safari: Anyone who has ever used a browser knows what the back/forward icons are. The book icon for bookmarks is an accepted Universal icon to represent just that.
Messages: With so many messaging apps out there that feature voice recordings I don't see how this is out of place.
Control Center: Collectively as people we have learned that any type of app or software tends to have a settings/preferences menu. This ranges from a thermostat, smart TV and cars. Instinctively a user would go into Settings to look for brightness adjustment. Control Center is just a shortcut.
Closing Apps: How do you close an app? You press the home button. Please don't tell me you are one of those people who swipes up the task switcher card every time you are done using an app.
Photos: I'll agree with you here. Organizing photos is not very intuitive in many places including Android OS as well.
TouchID: This feature is a bit complicated compared to others so I'll agree with you.
Music: Not sure where the confusion is here as the bottom tabs clearly show you where your music is.
Notes: If I remember correctly right before you start using notes there are arrows drawn to each icon showing what the icon does before you begin.
Correct.
One of the guiding procipals of the original iOS design was that a child who's never used a computer before should be able to pick the device up and instantly use it with ease.
I'm not talking about the Settings menu, I'm talking about Control Centre, which can only be accessed if you know it exists. There's nothing in the UI to indicate that it's there.
How would you close an app unless you looked up instructions or saw it online? And we're not talking about me, we're talking about a hypothetical user. (For the record, I don't force close apps unless a bug has a occurred and I need to restart it)
And you must be the only person in the world who likes the Music app design and thinks it's easy to use. It's pretty much universally thought of as awful.
With the Notes instructions, that just proves my point entirely. The UI is so unintuitive, that they needed to build a tutorial to show people how to use it (and hope you remember what the buttons mean, and not ask why they are placed in random locations).
Agree on the first point, which is why I didn't mention the back/forward buttons, and specifically called out the other three. The book icon is the universal symbol for Bookmarks, yet the user has to click some square with an arrow to be able to actually add a bookmark...and also, all your bookmarks appear when you enter the address/search field..so why have a bookmarks button at all? It's unintuitive design.
I haven't had any trouble adapting to the changes in the music app at all. I use it on a daily basis. I do scratch my head about why Apple put the EQ settings in settings > music. Other music apps like Vox put EQ settings inside the player itself which makes more sense.
Existing iOS users will adapt to whatever Apple does with iOS but I don't know what will happen with first time users. I would imagine people like us will just teach our friends and family how to use their phone slowly. I've been doing that for 3 years now as everyone in my family has an iPhone.
Agree. All I'm saying is that pre-iOS 7, there was no need to teach/show anyone anything! Newbies could just pick it up and use it.
Notification Center was added before iOS 7, even before iOS 6. Multitasking was there even before that--who would expect that double pressing the home button would bring it up? I mean who would expect that tapping and holding an icon for a while would make it wiggle and allow for deletion? Or that dragging one icon over another and holding it there would create a folder? All things that are supposedly not that obvious and many that were around for a long long time way before iOS 7 or anything like that.
Notifications appear at the top of the screen, it makes sense for the user to pull that notification down to see historic notifications that occurred prior to it. In other words, it's intuitive.
The app dragging thing, well again that's intuitive design because to drag icon, it makes obvious sense that you would need to keep your finger on it to do so.
I'll certainly give you the folders and the double press though! I remember accidentally discovering that fairly early on!
But even before dragging just to be able to do that or to delete an icon you'd have to know that you first have to tap and hold for some time before you can do any of that. Not the most obvious thing about it. People figure things out though, like the folder and multitasking that you figure out. Same goes for quite a few newer features. And in this day of more and more people having a smartphone and all kinds of tech information readily presenting itself online or even on TV, let alone word of mouth or just family or friends showing something, it's not that hard. Yes, not everything is completely intuitive for everyone, but not everything really was before either and we still figure things out one way or another.
Lets be realistic. How many minutes per day do you spend using your smartphone vs your microwave, or your garage door opener? How many things can your microwave or garage door opener do compared to a smartphone?
In 2016, most people spend hours per day using a smartphone in some way. They do a lot, so they need a lot of functionality. It takes a little effort to familiarize yourself with *all* of it.
Lastly, does it really matter that you don't know everything your phone does right out of the box? You bought the phone based on what you knew at the time, so clearly the limited amount of features you were aware of made it worth the purchase. Wouldn't finding "extra" stuff later on just be icing on the cake?
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I think his tips videos are good. His other stuff...eh.
The guy I was responding to was asking about the average joe, who probably isn't going to want to be bothered looking at the stuff you mentioned. Watching a YouTube video is about as low-effort as I can think of.
This is just plain false; I eventually figured out iOS 4 but it was torture doing so. However I agree once I got it it "just works" up through iOS 9.
Again, I find TechSmartt quite annoying. My comments were based on my personal taste and then I explained how I learned how to do an unknown task.
I think the "average Joe" is going to ask someone. Doubtful that anyone who is overwhelmed by iOS would go to Youtube (or tech blogs) to find out how to do something. They will ask someone that they know.
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And then there's the issue of dealing with how the interface/interaction changes over time. As an example, I give you "closing an app". First, one need to know that you can close an app.
In iOS 5, you double tapped the home button, press and hold on an icon in the app switcher to initiate "wiggle mode" and then tapped on the red minus overlay on the icon to close the app down.
In iOS 7, that completely changed. Double tapping the home button gave you a totally different look for the app switcher, one without "wiggle mode" and the minus overlay. Now you close apps by swiping them away.
This particular change confused a lot of seasoned iOS users. Clearly, this was not an intuitive thing until you learned how to do it.
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But it was a fairly quick thing to learn once it was shown. Like I mentioned, not everything is just plain obvious, and not everything ever was, and over time things can evolve to one degree or another, and all of that is fairly normal.
Um OK. Im not sure why you felt the need to reiterate your personal preference when I already acknowledged it, but OK. I hear you.
You think he's a tool and his videos are annoying. I don't know him personally to judge him but I've discovered a couple of useful things from his tips videos. I think we can agree to disagree here.
Then I have no clue why you responded to my post with all those other sources. What you said originally has nothing to do with what you're saying now.