Lost in phone, or another opportunity for iOS 7

Let me confess, I have been using Apple iPhone since 2008.
Back in 2010, my phone was stolen. A month later, we were moving to Australia and I did not buy a new one.

I have been using a Nokia phone for a year, it was a Symbian one.
Interestingly, I did not miss the iPhone. I was on the lookout for something new, something better.
It happened to be an hp pre3 powered by [ex Palm's] webOS operating system. But that's another story.

I tried to understand why I did not miss the iPhone, after all, I was a Mac user since 2001.
And I think I can explain why, at least to myself.

There are things in iPhone experience that simply make you bored.
The same old grid of same old icons, mostly static. Onerous App Switching functionality.

But now I also see things that actually enrage me, even if they used to do it subconsciously.

Let us talk about one.

Phones are many things to us now, but for me, they still must serve well as PHONES.

It seems that iPhone fell short on this, even compared to my first smartphone that I bought in 2004, the absolute flagman of the years and everything before the iPhone - Sony Ericsson P910i.

Consider unlocking your iPhone, you will see Phone and Contacts icons.
Inside the Phone icon, you will see Contacts tab.
Along the Phone app tabs, you will see "Favorites", "Recents", "Contacts".
As well as "Contacts" outside of the phone app, on the dock.
"Recents" tab is split in "All" and "Missed" categories.
Can you still follow me? :)

Guess what? THERE IS NO PEOPLE PHOTOS, NO USERPICS not in any of these multiple tabs. Huh?
All four tabs I have listed, have no people faces on them. Not even in Favorites!
To see a picture, you need to drill down to a particular contact! This is in 2013.

Many times we are trying to catch up with people on the go, while walking, some [unwise folks] even when driving.
No pictures does not help at all!
What is even worse, is getting stuck in "Recents"-"Missed" and trying to dial a number who you just talked to and said "I'll call you in a minute".

This is because Phone app remembers where you were last time, making navigation to where you want to be this time a process that takes more brain cells to coordinate their work, distracting from other things you're trying to do (unless you're sitting on a sofa playing the phone).

I took out my old SonyEricsson and checked the Phone application.

Always takes you to Favorites that have faces on them. Two-touch calls to Favorites are possible from wherever I am.


On the iPhone, if your favorite people are calling you then your Recents will look much like Favorites, but sometimes sans the guy you want to talk to now. Same-looking text in both tabs, no pictures. Frustration. No wonder they need Siri to help.

Finding yourself switching to less-often used tabs like Dialpad is OK.
Having to switch out of that rarely used functionality is not.

Another source of confusion is the double Contacts functionality.
Since there are two of the Contacts tab, and each remembers its own position, you will have to re-find (find again) the user that you have focused on, should you go to the "wrong" Contacts tab.

It took me some time to realize that in order to send an email, I have to touch the actual email address instead of reading all the button labels below in vain search for "Email" button, then trying to figure out whether "Send Message" button meant "email message".

There's simply not enough visual cues. Have a look at how it was done in the SonyEricsson.

One more thing about my ancient but greatly usable phone.
It seems to be the only 3rd party phone that Apple has written software for.


No kidding, Apple programmed for Symbian UIQ 2.1. Steve must have cared enough.

Here's a proof.

The iSync agent worked hand-in-hand with iSync Apple app for MacOS, making sure that bluetooth synchronization of Calendar, Contacts and such was impeccable. And it was, unlike my Nokia PC Suite experience.





Overall, with a couple of tweaks I hope that Apple will resolve these issues in upcoming iOS 7 - they just need more of that "attention to detail".
But maybe not - it does not seem to be about phone calls anymore...at least, this is not Apple's business.
Or is it?

Opera strikes a false note

I was an active Opera browser user for about 10 years.
But the time has come for me to stop that practice, and here's why.

To start with, I really like Opera. Or, liked - I should say.
It has pioneered way too many useful features to ignore -

built-in e-mail client with tagging and quick reply (M2)
built-in bookmark sync (Opera Link)
built-in BitTorrent client (although quite limited and slow)
Opera DialPad - replacement for your TV channels
page mini-thumb previews
tabs (yes, way way back before Firefox)
side panes for everything
notes
widgets
Magic Wand - you unobtrusive password helper, even for those site which do not allow to save it
and, lastly, Opera Unite and Opera Turbo (which I don't use)

Opera is a real all-in-one convenience, especially for multiple installations and platforms. It seriously helps achieve unified user experience across separate devices.
I had used it on two PCs, one Mac and two cell phones (S40 and UIQ2.1)
Bookmark sync was a bliss!

But, recent 10.x branch of desktop browser has been less than encouraging.
First off, there's been UI rehash in 10.0 to which one would have to accustom for quite a while. Then, there were some issues with my proxy detection PAC script - while easily processed by IE, it was not always taken well by Opera.
These issues were finally resolved, only to reappear in the latest 10.51.

But Oh, this 10.51 release is something.

The hideous thing is that it installed itself on top of my two 10.10 PC installations! No questions asked, no indication of a process given.
Sneakily and silently it installed itself, so when I reopened a closed Opera browser, the Windows Installer proceeded to set up my user environment and - voila - I had a new shiny un-asked-for release installed.
And guess what - I don't like it.

On one of my PCs, with User Switching enabled, it takes so much time to load. It also makes a simple wake-up operation take up almost 10 minutes with blank screen.
It clearly behaves in a CPU hog manner.
On another PC, it loses connectivity way too often, and I suspect "new and improved" PAC script logic. For instance, taking notebook off the docking station, I am losing Ethernet connection, then I dock it back - and have to restart Opera, because it obviously loses proxy connection, and goes direct.

I hate the new Microsoft-like "O" menu button in the top left.
This is the new Start button for you the netbook generation! :)
Takes one or two clicks more to do same stuff.

Mac version takes too long to start. Although I like the way it scrolls pages.
Smoooth!

So I have taken a look at three more browsers for PC - Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox. And here's what I say.

Apple's Safari was my next turn, obviously, for having it on my Mac.
Once again, I was looking for a unified user experience, a browser I can rely on for both Mac and PC. (I am not using those cell phones anymore)

Safari pros:
- works great on a Mac
- works fast on a PC, too
Safari contras:
- has ugly unnatural looks on PC, trying to achieve mac's look with pc's means
- takes too much space in vertical dimension (three lines for my setup, IE8 takes two)
- bookmark sync is a paid option (mobileme.com costs $100/y)
FAIL (as compared to Opera I'm replacing, and the winner)

Google Chrome is very fashionable now, I see it more and more often, especially at web expos, where most of devs are Google-junkies/wannabes. So I took a spin on it and was not impressed...yet? "Yet" is too, the word which comes to mind when I think of Android. But I digress.

Chrome pros:
- fast
- Google-integrated, HTML5 support
Chrome contras:
- system colors are not respected nor used! I am on XP (Silver theme), do not show me bloody blue Vista-like buttons! WTF? Respect my environment, look and color prefs - do not supplant them!
- WTF with fullscreen (F11) mode? I raise the mouse to top bar - and see no menu, no address line only some useless nag?
FAIL ("yet"?)
By the way, "Chrome" is "lame" in Russian.
Not that I hate it, it's just "not there yet".

And the winner is: Mozilla Firefox

Why?

Firefox pros:
- nice look, respects colors and style
- fast
- has free bookmark sync plug-ins
- does not cause "hanging" when waking up
- does not hog CPU on user-switched setups
- most sites are tested on it (although Opera was also OK in that regard for me)
Firefox contras:
- not the same look on mac - but I guess I don't want it to look like Safari on a PC
- there were problems updating it on a mac, "locked" dynlib files in Trash, even after restart
- popular - could be exploited successfully - will need often updates
Well, I guess it still much better on PC than the rest.

It's not the fist time Opera screwes up. But it's time to change.
Thanks for 9.x-10.10 though, it's been a great ride.

Wii are the champions

Checking up Nintendo Wii for a week (bought it as a gift, in advance).
First impression - it's very tightly built, very good quality of materials, all connectors connect very easily and they have easily understandable, not confusing outlines and forms, and all use different colors. Gives you a nice feel to setup such nicely-built system.

Starting up gives you tons of warnings - you must be over 18 to legally set it up. Otherwise, you kiddies are breaking the Nintendo agreement and when you get injured boxing, or break that antique vase that cost your daddy 150K - Nintendo just wash they hands and smile happily. (Ask your parent to read EULAs and press A button!)

User interface is so immersive! Wii Remote gives slight rumbles when you point at buttons on screen. It also emits sounds in-game. Really cool and important for multiplayer (indicates who's turn in Bowling, for ex.)

The "Channels" concept nicely replaces "PC programs" concept; instead of "PC desktop" you have "Wii Menu".
That's it - no wondering around. Just 4 screens of 12 channels each (max 48 channels).
I had 6 channels installed, but, after visiting Wii Shopping Store, increased to 9, for free.

It's really nice and easy, and good for your body. The best video-gaming for your body. Fitness is better - but, you know, there's Wii Fit set on sale...

What bothered me most in user experience is annoying Yes/No confirmation menu when you try for Wii Menu from within a game or an activity. If you press "Home" button on Wii Remote, you first get Home menu where you can select an action.
Usually those include "Wii Menu" , "Reset" , "Wii Remote Settings" , and "Operation Manual".
You move the pointer, you get the rumble as you focus. You do confirm by pressing "A" button.

But, in case of "Wii Menu", you get that extra Yes/No confirmation dialog.

Why do they consider everyone so stupid - to make so many actions already and STILL get ANOTHER nag dialog - does not seem reasonable to me. Is this some cultural difference?
Even if there's danger of mistakenly going to Wii Menu - why not every mistake is covered by confirming dialog?
This is Windows 95 style and ought to be avoided.
Those who do mistake, do learn and stop mistaking.

Why pester everybody on such common action?

Another note - and quite understandable - is that there are too many warnings in Sports Pack.
Those are usually to make sure you're strapped, have a jacket on Wii Remote, have enough space, have thumbs to hold the remote tightly etc.
Let's count them - I will recount for you all user interactions on my way to start Bowling, single user game.

1. Open "Disc Channel" from Wii Menu. You will see channel preview.
2. From the channel preview, pick "Start". This brings up a remote jacket warning.
3. From the jacket warning page, you either timeout or press A after some reading delay and you get new window.
4. Now you're asked to press A+B buttons simultaneously. Is this to check that you have a working thumb and index fingers?
5. Finally you get Wii Sports menu - here you select which game of 5 you want. Press Bowling.
6. Number of players, or training mode. Press 1.
7. Here you're asked to select Mii (artizans) per each player.
8. Another jacket warning! Press A to continue.
9. Al last, you see the game intro. First player is asked to press A+B to confirm.
10. Real bowl begins. Make a throw. If you do incorrect throw, Wii will warn you and make you press B to confirm.
11. Now you've (hopefully) scored a throw. Alt angle replay, plus cheering voice comment. Nice. Press A and repeat steps 10 until game end.
12. Game Finished. You see your final score, as well as all scores. Press A.
13. Final screen. You see your current Skill Level in chosen game, and it's dynamics. Nice. Press "Again" to go to 9 or "Quit" to go to 5.

Is not it a bit too much of confirming? You have to be pretty determined to get into play.
Makes sense to warn once, or maybe 3 times - but every time? I know we're talking about children here.
I can understand. I just wonder if there's another way, like fast voice warnings while the games load?
(By the way, not every child CAN read those warnings! I am not even talking about who WILL read)

Last up, my thought on improving the channel content - we need more free channels.
Why not turn it into something like Nokia WidSets, where anyone can write a useful bit of functionality (stock quotes, web clips, car alarm integration, world-wide web cams) and put it in for Nintendo's approval, and be sold in Wii Shopping Channel with some revenue split like Apple does in iTunes App Store?
Right now it seems rather limited - and I can understand that Nintendo wants us to spend more on GAMES.

What if I am not a gamer type but I like the console and I hate PC and I don't have a Mac?
Those types are mostly senior/disabled citizens, or there are some people who have adverse opinion on PC at home (I had one programmer friend who never had a PC at home, intentionally) - but anyway - they can be made a paying audience while their kids are at school.

P1i user interface - is it any better?

I've finally had some time to spend it with SonyEricsson P1i, the avant-garde of "serious" SE smartphones. As I have previously confessed, their previous generation flagship product had been my device of choice for almost 3 years.
Must I say I had been quite excited and I had some expectations of increased usability, robustness and stability of the new runner-up P1i.
But it turned out, that the P1i device (again! after the lackluster P990i) is not up to pretty high usability/ergonomics standards that I had enjoyed on my trustworthy P910i.
And here's why.

1. First off, they left off the 5-way JogDial wheel.

This wheel alone is an "interface" on its own.
The whole menu structure in UIQ2.1 has been fully accessible with just your left thumb on jog dial!
You could open menus, close them, navigate within, select items, run them with only a thumb, single-handedly, even with the flip closed!



Now all that goodness is gone, since the P990...






2. They also left off the phone buttons.

P1i contains only qwerty keyboard, no "Answer"/"End Call" or other phone-related buttons.
What this means is that you have to use a mixed interface - you dial numbers on keyboard, then press on-screen "Call Button" (or press the jog dial inside). Switching from virtual keys for control, to physical buttons for numbers.

Sometimes the on-screen buttons are small and you need stylus... Needless to say - one hand/on-the-go operation becomes cumbersome. In P910i it was solved by a flip-closed mode, which beautifully shifted the complexity away, switching display sensors off while on-the-go. But here in P1i - another step back and dispersion of your attention.




3. The ubiquitous "More" button.

This is the most annoying and cumbersome feature of all UIQ3 user interface.
Whenever some application designers feel some "need of space" for all the menu features that don't fit into the 3 soft-buttons in the lower bar, they hide all the goodness into a single and impenetrable "More" button, behind which hell only knows how many useful (or completely not) features are hidden.
User often is compelled to press that button just to see what else that application can provide.

This is so inferior to the UIQ2 and MacOS paradigm of top-bar pull-down menus that I have nothing else to say. Just check the screenshots. This would have been OK for your dumb phones with buttons only, but on a touch-based smartphone! Duh.
How could hiding part of UI help user productivity and UI transparency I just can't imagine! I think we've been there already with Microsoft's "Personalized Menus".






4. The 3 ways of input.

User may interact with P1i using either:

-- keyboard,
-- side buttons and jog dial,
-- touchscreen+stylus,
-- touchscreen+fingers.

Having many options for control could sound as advantage, but those inputs methods are complementary throughout the UI, not replaceable!
For some features you HAVE to use on-screen soft-buttons, which are easiest and most conveniently pressed with just a finger; for others, such as very basic CLOSE button in the upper right, you better be holding a stylus since the button itself is quite small; for still others (CAMERA) there's no way but to press a side button.
This makes user experience tattered into pieces of using different input methods.
Especially funny when you see several "Close" buttons on the screen - one for the stylus (top right corner) and one for non-existing in P1i "three buttons row" (lower right)!

5. "Do you want 5, 15 or all of your apps?"

The paradigm of "More", "Even more" and "All" continues in the application strip at the bottom of the Home screen.








With touch screen, there could have been a better solution - a scrollable "infinite" ribbon of icons, with "inertia", like a wheel that would roll for some time after you clicked and dragged it. Such ribbon would effectively allow to do away with the application menu and the 12-icon mode. Customization would be accomodated by re-arranging icons order on the launch ribbon.
Instead, user sees 5 icons, by clicking on a divider a user can see 15 icons (with peculiar diamonds replacing empty spaces!) or, finally, the whole application menu.
Now what if I want space just for 7 or 19 icons? :)

6. The Ulimate Goal.

So what it is, the ultimate goal of such conformist UIQ3 UI design?

Compatibility with buttons-only phones.

And while I can agree that it serves them well (take MOTO RIZR Z8 for example), at the same time it denies the usability achievements of the past platform, UIQ2.1.
Such situation derails old-time users from UIQ and drives them in hordes to Windows Mobile in search of 'new cool' stuff and 'powerfull specs' stuff.
I have seen this situation en-masse in a well-known Russian online forum which used to be alive with the joyful sounds of P910i users, but not anymore. Most people left, only occasional newbies ask for a solution and some old-timers file their report on migration to Windows Mobile world. Some also express intent to migrate there since they did not like what they saw in UIQ3 devices from SonyEricsson either.

Would it not have been possible to create a separate, simpler version of UIQ, like Nokia S60's cousin, Series40?

'One size fits all' strategy failed, at least in the usability plane. And that means a lot nowadays.

What's most annoying is that SonyEricsson had 3 years since the P910i launch to improve and polish the highly valued hardware ergonomics and interface before iPhone hit the shelves! This very strategic blunder seems oh so familiar...

They were the closest shot to the "simplest stuff", the bread and butter of Apple Inc.
This may be also testified by the fact that Apple went as far to help SonyEricsson to write UIQ-based "iSync agent" for P910i, which installs on the phone the first time you try to sync it with a Mac. The sync support is full, up to the contacts pictures.

And yet SonyEricsson pursued some other goals [comments are welcome] and basically slipped down on the software, while mucking the hardware with a non-optional keyboard, and a shorter screen.
Yes, 3G, yes, WiFi, but why go away from marvels of past technology? Would you buy a PC with a faster WiFi but smaller screen and less convenient (and non-removable) keyboard and mouse?
I loved P910i and seeing SonyEricsson fall was a pain.

Such is my completely personal and biased old-timer SonyEricsson hardcore smartphone user opinion.

All comments with no offensive meaning will be published.

iPhone user experience comments

iGot iPhone :)
And so I spent some time figuring out if there are some blunders in it's UI.
There were none. Good job Apple!
There are some functionalities missing, such as MMS or on-the-go media management, but I believe they are dropped by intent, to execute along a clear strategy.
Mac now is the digital hub. ("Oh, sorry PC, you too!")



The only obvious point I would improve is in the Mail client:
- if you happen to have many mailbox accounts (as you can see, I have three), you must go to each other Inbox separately, because the e-mail does not aggregate them into one place like Apple Mail on Mac does.
And so it takes 10 taps just to look into headers in all three mailboxes. This would be reduced to 2 taps if Apple chose to accept the Apple Mail's approach. Maybe this will be fixed soon, in the iPhone Firmware update 1.1.1.







<--- iPhone Mail









That's how Apple mail aggregates mailboxes --->


Another thing I noticed is that there's no task switcher aside from the Home Button, that would take you to the main program menu. Although this initially feels as a drawback, this way the user has only one way to start a program, and the icons are always fixed in the same places, which decreases time-to-launch for every program as the user becomes acquainted to their location on screen.


There are some 3rd party utilities that allow you to have alternative task switcher (SummerBoard). You press in the lower right corner and drag to the centre some analog of "Sun wheel" whith all the programs sitting on it's "rays". The further you drag, the bigger the icons. Moving along the circle selects the program icon.
There appears a separate button for lauching the selected application.
Quite innovative, but clunky and requires to use both hands for a faily basic task.



It happened so that Apple products had never had lack of style.
And this one is not an exception. The company has a track of setting trends for few industries already. All-in-one, translucent colors, USB, floppy-less, IEEE1394, OOP, media management and distribution, now cellphones...They are the true creative power, and have the guts to follow their vision, through the years.
To be competitive, just market share is not enough. One has to be as bold and creative as Apple, not just foresee the Future, but create it. And they made it.
Now the multi-touch UI is Present.

So if you are in UI field, or "just browsing", by all means check out this new level of usability.
I also welcome your comments.