Four blatant iPhone usability blunders (and one constant annoyance)

Brian Dillard, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

I've been an iPhone 3G owner for about six weeks now - six weeks of love, loathing, cool apps and connectivity problems. Rather than complain about poor network coverage, though, I'd like to delve into some of the vexing usability problems that hamper the phone's user experience.

No ability to disable autocorrect completely

Like pretty much every autocorrect feature ever built, the iPhone's does more harm than good. It always thinks it knows best. If you don't watch it like a hawk, it will render everything you type completely nonsensical. Proper nouns, abbreviations, profanity - all get turned into gibberish by this well-meaning but deeply flawed function. And god forbid you try to use the classic email e.e. cummings mode in which uppercase letters don't exist. The iPhone literally will not let you output the word "iPhone" without throwing in that capital "P." It's maddening.

If the purpose of autocorrect is to allow you to type quickly without having to monitor your output, it fails miserably. On the iPhone, if you want what you type to show up verbatim on the screen, you have to pause at the end of each word to ensure that the OS is not about to substitute its own wisdom for your actual intent. I would honestly rather type on a 1999-era StarTAC numeric keypad.

None of this would be as galling if there were a setting to turn this feature off. But there isn't. Elaborate, unwieldy workarounds have been suggested - all because Apple users know that the folks in Cupertino often paternalistically ignore their users. Microsoft's OS and apps may suck, but you can usually customize the hell out of them. Not so Apple's.

No saved password feature

Everybody and their brother has complained about the iPhone's virtual keyboard. Aside from the autocorrect feature, I think it's actually pretty good for composing email or SMS messages. But for passwords, it blows.

If you've got a strong password, chances are it's a combination of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. That means you've got to switch back and forth between screen modes constantly. (And don't get me started on the way the iPhone automatically switches from numeric to alpha mode when you hit certain special characters.) Sure, it's nice that the phone shows you the most recently typed character in any password field so you can verify it's correct. But it's still such a painful, error-prone experience that once I've typed a password into my iPhone once, I want the phone to remember it forever.

No dice.

Mobile Safari has no built-in password manager. Sure, you could install an app like 1Password to get this functionality, but that means paying $29.95 for a feature that should be baked into any web browser - especially one that makes typing strong passwords such a maddening experience. Lots of iPhone users are downgrading to simple alphabetical passwords just so they can make this process less painful. That's a real blow to web security - especially the security of Apple accounts, whose passwords you've got to type over and over and over again on the iPhone just to perform such simple tasks as updating free applications.

No love for existing mobile stylesheets

I get it: Mobile Safari isn't like the other mobile browsers. It's got all the features of a real browser and can display web pages as they were originally designed.

But should it?

Pan-and-scan browsing makes for an incredibly frustrating user experience. Visual hierarchies that work wonderfully in an 800x600 or 1024x768 desktop viewport completely fail when they're reduced to the size of a deck of playing cards. Zooming in on little sections of the screen doesn't alleviate the problem. Mobile Safari's scaling abilities are impressive, but they're no substitute for a properly optimized interface.

Sure, you can serve up custom styles for Mobile Safari's viewport, you've got to use an extremely specific media queries. Normal mobile stylesheets are ignored:

<link href="mobile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" />

Instead, you've got to go the extra mile:

<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="iPhone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

Why ignore the hard work of sites that have bothered to develop a mobile stylesheet? Why not at least offer a setting that will enable these stylesheets on a site-by-site basis? Failing that, could we at least have the ability to disable CSS altogether for certain sites? For the minority of sites with a lovely iPhone interface, Mobile Safari offers a great user experience. For almost everything else, it blows.

No default keypad in phonecall mode

Almost every phone number in the world is hooked up to some sort of touch-tone interface. From giant corporate phone trees to individual voicemail accounts, we live in a world where the lingua franca consists of 0-9, # and *.

So why doesn't the iPhone expose a numeric keypad by default during phone calls? To type an extension or navigate a phone tree or hit "0" to skip a voicemail greeting, one must stare at a row of icons for such rarely used functions as three-way calling, press the icon for the numeric keypad, and only then see the desired digits to tap. Sure, it's only one extra click. But considering this is the mainstream use case for most phone calls, shouldn't it be easier? Couldn't Apple at least offer a preference to show the keyboard, rather than the special features, by default?

No memory of wi-fi network preferences

If I don't have a WEP password to my neighbor's wi-fi network, I'm never going to be able to connect to it. But the iPhone has no capacity to remember that choice. If I have "Ask to Join Networks" turned on in my settings, it will ask me to join every network it finds. If I say "no" to a specific network, it'll keep asking me every time I launch an Internet-aware application within range of that network. My only choice is to turn off "Ask to Join Networks" altogether ... which means I won't be notified when my phone finds a network with unrestricted access. All it would take is a simple "ignore the existence of this network forever" button to banish a constant annoyance.

Does this irritant rise to the level of usability blunder? No. But it sure gets my teeth grinding.

Related Services: iPhone Application Development, User Experience Design, Custom Software Development

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3. Will Q4 iPhone Sales Surpass Expectations?
4. Top 5 Iphone styled websites
5. the iPhone and Touch screen technology

Comments (9)

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Comments: 9 so far

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1. 

   I mostly disagree with you.

   - Autocorrect makes the keyboard useful. It’s almost always correct – sometimes spookily so. If you’re typing l88t speak then no, it’s not going to get it right but if you’re typing actual words, then it’s usually excellent. Without autocorrect my typing speed would decrease dramatically. If you’re having that much trouble with it then you’re probably fighting the feature instead of leaning on it.
   - Saved passwords are a problem on a mobile device. If you save the password to your banking site and someone steals the phone they’ve got access to your account. That’s why 1Password throws up a pin screen when you go to use the saved password.
   - Mobile stylesheets? God no. It’s not a fake browser, it can display the web the way it’s supposed to be. Who wants the ugly, useless WAP-style pages?
   - No default keypad? Most people are more likely to turn the speaker phone on/off, mute the call, or put it on hold then need to dial through a voicemail menu.
   - Remember wifi? I agree with you here – in addition I’d like to be able to remember to attach/not attach by mac address. There are some ‘linksys’ networks I’d like to attach to and most that I wouldn’t.

   Comment by Charles Wise, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 2:16 pm

2. 

   This is why, and for other reasons too, I don’t want an iphone :-p

   I think it’s mainly aimed for web surfing on the go… but why do people need the net so badly when on the move?? I’ll stick to making calls and text messages

   oh well!

   Comment by Lara, Friday, September 5, 2008 @ 3:06 am

3. 

   @Charles Wise:
   Believe it or not, not everyone uses the phone precisely the way that you do. I agree with every point the author makes here, and even if you disagree that a function is needed, wouldn’t simple logic/common sense/respect for other users make you agree that that function be made available or possible?

   Autocorrect is terrible. I can’t even type my name without it screwing it up. An off button there would have been enough to keep my from replacing my iPhone with a blackberry after week 1.

   Mobile stylesheets are absolutely necessary for serious people. Most websites are 75% crap, 25% content. Why not let the iPhone display just the content, if the webmaster has been kind enough to allow it?

   Saved passwords are not a big deal on a mobile device — that’s why other devices allow them. Only an idiot would save their bank password on their phone (unless the phone had a decent locking mechanism, which the iPhone lacks), but there are about 30 other passwords I use that really aren’t important enough to hide from the world. The OPTION should be there.

   Comment by michael, Friday, September 5, 2008 @ 1:24 pm

4. 

   Interesting perspective on the usability of iPhones. I see many more problems (from the hardware, no keyboard, to others, including control and customizability). I am recommending your usability assessment to my readers for their Weekend Reading…

   http://tpgblog.com/2008/09/05/the-product-guys-weekend-reading-september-5-2008/

   Jeremy Horn
   The Product Guy
   http://tpgblog.com

   Comment by Jeremy Horn, Friday, September 5, 2008 @ 4:43 pm

5. 

   Why did you buy this crippled piece of shite at the first place?

   Comment by Curious, Friday, September 5, 2008 @ 6:00 pm

6. 

   @Charlie Wise:

   On the subject of autocomplete, I agree that the feature increases my accuracy on 80% of the words I use. My problem is with the other 20% of the words – the ones not in the iPhone’s dictionary.

   To compensate for the poor usability of the virtual keyboard, Apple has to offer an aggressive autocomplete feature. Yet that feature mangles proper nouns, abbreviations, technical terms and profanity. By solving one problem, they’ve created another.

   The result is a keyboard in which you must constantly monitor your output to make sure what you mean to say ends up on the screen. If that means that I’m fighting the feature, well yes, I am and will continue to do so.

   It’s a typical Apple fanboy perspective to say that I should simply type the way the iPhone’s autocomplete wants me to. Steve Jobs apparently doesn’t want me to swear. He apparently doesn’t want me to use text-message speak in, well, text messages. And apparently he thinks that when I type “Z” as an abbreviation for my boyfriend’s name, I actually mean to type “A.” It’s heartening to know that the folks in Cupertino know more about my personal life than I do.

   If the iPhone autocomplete were more capable of learning from my interactions with it, then I’d have no problem. But having to fight it every step of the way renders the iPhone the most frustrating user-input device I interact with in a typical day.

   I would respond to your other points, but (a) other people already have, and (b) it’s obvious that you’re the ideal consumer for which the iPhone was designed: One who is happy to change his own habits and adjust his own expectations to suit the device, rather than the other way around.

   Comment by Brian Dillard, Monday, September 8, 2008 @ 11:21 am

7. [...] this my somewhat belated follow up to Brian’s post about iPhone [...]

   Pingback by Pathfinder Development » iPhone Usability: More Taps, Less In My Head, Wednesday, September 17, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

8. 

   lol i love it cause i HATE the iphone and i dont even have ipods as my favorite mp3 player but apple computers i LOVE because of their security and ease of use so much less frustrating then windows.

   Comment by Apple undecided, Friday, June 12, 2009 @ 9:15 am

9. 

   ps there are 5 there not 4

   Comment by Apple undecided, Friday, June 12, 2009 @ 9:16 am

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