Why “Smart” Phones Suck, Part II - The iPhone
“The Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing” - Alan Kay
I’m going to rip on the glorious, flawless, made-in-heaven-by-angel-elves iPhone. I’m going to rip on it because I simultaneously want to tie it to an AT&T contract and make sweet love to it, but also want to bludgeon its design team with a book on affordances and gestalt-principles.
The Phone Part of the iPhone was an Afterthought …
… and no surprises there. It was apparent to many, and was later confirmed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself, that Apple set out to design the iPad first, but later decided to shrink it into a phone. Remarkable as that feat was, there was an unsuspecting victim - the phone. I’m not just talking about the hardware issues - poor reception, unusual antenna design etc. I’m talking about the sheer blown opportunity in elevating the phone.
First, it gets relegated to being “just an app.” It’s just another icon in the icon grid. Neither size, nor saturation, or even placement, calls it out as the most-bloody-important app on the phone. And it is the most important app. It’s used by more users, more days of the month, more times of the day, than any other single app.
People are NOT First-Class Entities on an iPhone
When desktop GUIs were in their infancy, they assumed that most of what users wanted to do was manage files and folders. That is why the Finder and Windows Explorer find such prominent placement in their respective operating system, and the Start Menu and Dock were after-thoughts. Heck, the entire GUI layer is run by the file manager. If you don’t believe me, try killing the Finder or Windows Explorer - or actually, don’t, ‘cause I don’t want to lose you just yet.
If we go through the same thought process with a phone, we have to arrive at the conclusion that people are the most important entities on a phone. We call, text, poke, tweet and email people all the time. I’m not saying everything needs to be people-centric - that only works for apps like Facebook - but why can’t my phone favorites have their pictures added to my homescreen, for example? Why isn’t there a view where I can see my frequently called friends, so I dont have to manually create a favorites list? Why do apps get so much UI love and your friends & family don’t? Because Apple doesn’t get 30% when you make a friend.
The iPhone is Full of Half-Baked Innovation & Plain Bad UI
The phone experience should be 10x better for friends who are both on iPhones. It’s a “smart” phone, the most anticipated and celebrated gizmo of the last decade, and nothing less will do. It’s a phone, dammit, and that’s inherently social!
Yet, I dont know if my friend is even using an iPhone, let alone see if it is FaceTime capable. What a smart idea, to make a next-gen, hi-tech feature without understanding the basics of social presence! Skype gets it right, and guess which one I actually use for video calls?
And then there’s the poorly thought-through UI. Here are a couple of examples that I’ve actually observed stumping users:
And for my grand finale, the slide-to-unlock screen. This is not so much wrong, as just horribly lazy. Allow me to illustrate:
Remember how much fun we made of that in design and usability blogs? Well now Apple creates the finger-equivalent of the same thing and we’re all ooh-ing and aah-ing. Shame on us, design community.
In Conclusion
I wrote this critique in the spirit of the Alan Kay quote I began this piece with. The iPhone is truly the best-designed mobile device in the world for now, but let’s not get lazy like we did with PCs and Macs. No more sticking grids of icons on a home screen and cooing over the beautiful “design.” There’s a LOT of room for design and technology innovation in the mobile space. I believe that we will actually see a lot of amazingly social design and innovation on these devices soon, in spite of the fact that Apple wants nothing to do with it and Google doesn’t know good design from an overstuffed meta-tag.
