iPhone Usability: More Taps, Less In My Head

Noel Rappin, Wednesday, September 17, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

The background image was probably
taken from Scott McCloud's web site

Consider this my somewhat belated follow up to Brian's post about iPhone usability.

First, one pure follow-up. If you are so inclined, you can join an online petition calling for Apple to allow iPhone users or developers to disable keyboard auto correct if they so desire.

Here are my usability notes. I should say, I'm not a complete mobile warrior or anything, so there are probably other users a lot more dependent on, say, mobile email than I am. Also, the iPhone is my first smartphone, so I don't have any residual BlackBerry or Window Mobile experiences to compare it to.

Phone Usability

For all that everybody focuses on the fancy stuff, an iPhone still needs to allow you to make and receive phone calls. I have to say, the basic phone interface is perhaps my favorite of the built in Apple applications. The basic set of in-call options (speaker, mute, etc...) are clearly and cleanly presented with large buttons, reducing the need to remember how to trigger different features. The visual voice mail interface is outstanding -- almost making it pleasant to deal with voice mail.

One More Thing...

The iPhone 2.x OS features an unusual password entry field, in that the most recent character typed is displayed plain while all the other characters are masked. The idea, presumably is to make it easier to catch password typos, and it's (I guess?) not all that likely that somebody would look over your shoulder to catch a password.

Still, the behavior feels weird. I thought it was a bug the first time I saw it. I opened this up on my twitter feed and got exactly two responses. One in favor, one against. Obviously the masses have spoken. What do you think?

There's an interesting User Experience issue here -- certain basic phone actions take more steps on the iPhone then they would have on my non-smart LG flip phone. The clearest example of this is dialing a known favorite contact. On the LG, up to 8 contacts are associated with numbers, and they can be dialed just by holding down the appropriate number -- one step. On the iPhone I have to open the phone app, open the favorites tab, and select my contact -- three steps (although you can set the phone to go directly to favorites from a double-tap on the home button).

The tradeoff here is user cognitive load versus steps. The downsides of the LG method are that a) it's limited to a small number of contacts, and b) it requires me to keep in my head who each number refers to. On the iPhone, I can have as many favorites as I want, and I can actually see who they are. Overall, that makes the iPhone feel more user-friendly even if making the call takes an extra second.

The iPhone interface is also more flexible, finding an arbitrary contact is much faster on the iPhone (because scrolling is faster), even though there are clear limitations to searching for contacts (recommended: using the Google Mobile App, which searches your local contacts..)

The point here is not that the iPhone is better designed than a regular non-smart phone, that would hardly be surprising. The point is that the iPhone uses it's best hardware asset -- the screen, to advantage in making using basic features easier to manage. (To a lesser extent, the same thing happens for, say, accessing the keypad during a call -- an extra step, but clearer options and more flexibility)

Oh, and while I'm here, I have to point out a little feature that I like. I have several contacts where two people have the same home number. If the two people have different last names, then a call from the number shows up as "Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble". That's nice, but even better is if the two people have the same last names, and the caller ID shows "Fred or Wilma Flintstone". Minor point, but it shows that some thought went into the display.

iPod Usability Nit

I use the phone for iPod functionality pretty frequently, and I have a couple of annoying nits.

On a traditional iPod, the music display shows the time remaining in the song, and it's a button click to show the volume. This makes sense, because the time remaining is what is changing at, at least for me, is checked more frequently. The volume display shows up if you spin the click wheel.

On an iPhone, that's reversed. The volume control appears all the time, and it's a special action to display the time remaining. This is especially weird because the side volume controller triggers a completely separate volume display if you change the volume that way. (I also find the slider bar kind of hard to control, both for time and for volume, but that's another story).

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Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   RE:

   The tradeoff here is user cognitive load versus steps. The downsides of the LG method are that a) it’s limited to a small number of contacts, and b) it requires me to keep in my head who each number refers to. On the iPhone, I can have as many favorites as I want, and I can actually see who they are. Overall, that makes the iPhone feel more user-friendly even if making the call takes an extra second.

   =====================

   That’s only true if you haven’t mapped your contacts into muscle memory.

   Given that the number of contacts can be small and the buttons don’t change their relative position, you can very quickly train your fingers to retrieve the digit from the person without needing any conscious thought; a cognitive load of precisely 0.

   The search-for-a-contact approach and the keypad shortcuts are not directly comparable. The keypad shortcuts are there to make dialing a commonly used number fast. As a bonus, you don’t have to memorize the whole number. The search-for-a-contact approach is good for not memorizing numbers… It will always require more clicks for numbers you use often.

   Comment by Andrew, Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 11:59 am

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