It's not surprising at all to me that people who don't take the time to learn how to use the supercomputers in our pockets are unable to use them.
It's like typing. Learning to touchtype was one of the best things I've ever done on a return for investment basis. All I did was stick a little printout of the keyboard layout under the monitor, and committed to not look at the physical keyboard ever again. It was slow for a couple of weeks, but from then on I could touchtype. It was not such a massive burden. But most people I see are still painfully hunting and pecking, even people who use a computer all day long in a professional capacity!
I know there is much more that Apple and other manufacturers could do to make things better, and definitely they should be doing those things, but the main problem IMO is that people are just lazy. They want their phone to do complicated things, but they don't want to spend the time to learn how to do those things.
It would be good if there was easy training for these things though, maybe some kind of beginner courses? I know some community centres/libraries have courses for beginners and older people... But most people just expect to automatically be able to use a smartphone with no training, knowledge or effort.
I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger. When I was younger a shiny thing would make me excited, take my eye and sort of fool me that this new thing is cool. I'd be excited to learn what the new thing was all about. I'd spend a few hours and figure it out. Back then apple was winning big with consistent and intuitive interfaces, operations.
As I got older i started to prioritize what I want to learn in a different way. Now all I want from the phone is to be a tool, not the other way around. A good tool but not something I have to learn over and over. And especially when I know these changes were made for.. the sake of change, to sort of give the impression of innovation I'm even less incentivized to take a course to teach me how to use a phone. And most of the time these changes make my life harder... e.g. remove the tactile button trend. I'm willing to bet that the 1 button will return at some point as an "innovation". Someone here mentioned the mental maps that people build when learning a system. If you mess with that mental map for a few generations you end up with frustrated users. We know what game these companies are playing: force people to upgrade through planned obsolesce. If it's real upgrades such as better performing cameras, faster ram, etc, I will eventually upgrade. But if they're forcing these changes through updates that we cannot turn off, we have a problem.
I am older, ~40, and my relationship with technology changed over time. I'm no longer eager to learn a new interface as I was when I was younger.
I don't mind learning a new interface or even coming up to speed with an entirely new UI paradigm, if there's something in it for me. But my objection is that as soon as I learn it, someone who is paid to look busy will change it for no reason other than to justify their role in the company hierarchy.
Obvious examples include almost anything from Microsoft ("Metro^H^H^H^H^HWindows 10 is awesome! You just don't like change!") or Google ("We have altered GMail. Pray all you want, we're going to alter it further"), but Apple is far from guiltless.
When that happens, it's hard to escape the feeling that your time is being wasted... and as you suggest, the older you get the bigger a deal that is.
Actually the MS 'Metro' design used in the ZuneHD and Windows Phone UI (best Home screen design by far) were both more logical and discoverable than the iOS UI (well until they released the Win Phone 10 UI with the hamburger menus...), but everyone just learned how to navigate iOS because 'everyone's doing it.'
I still believe the iOS UI is terrible. Navigation is all over the place, the wall of icons gives no preference to priority (other than creating folders), the icons and colours change (as mentioned in the article) and interaction is inconsistent (press/long-press).
But everyone learnt the interface so now it's 'good.'
100% agree. I'm on Android and it seems to be going further and further away from simple, consistent home/back/menu buttons that are always available.
The hardware Menu button was the best way to make advanced options easy to access, and it has been removed completely in favor of an inconsistent three-line icon that might or might not appear in any location on the screen, so you have to look around for it. Stupid.
I'm sort of waiting for them to bring those back before I upgrade my phone.
It's not like typing at all. Typing is fairly obvious: hit the button with the letter you want, and it will always be in the same place, so maybe you don't have to look too often; anyway lots of people will teach you to type. Cute cats (paws), Mario, Mavis Beacon.
How can you learn to press and hold , or press harder, or shake the phone, or whatever else when there's no manual, you don't even know there's some other way of interacting, there's no getting started video, etc. I firmly believe that if companies actually wrote a manual for their software, they would ocassionaly make things more obvious, so it would be easier to write the manual.
Yes, a lot of people wouldn't read the manual, or wouldn't understand it, but not providing a manual means those few that would read it can't.
It's the same in that it is a set of skills that you need to spend time to learn. That's the point I was trying to make. I learned touchtyping in a couple of weeks. I guarantee someone with motivation could learn the basics of a smartphone in that time.
I agree there should be a manual. My phone (Samsung) has an almost useless pdf manual available.
But I also think that most people do not spend anywhere near the time necessary to learn how their phone works or how to use it. They wouldn't read the manual even if it was available. They don't watch the intro videos that play when you first start your phone out of the box. They expect to just get it out of the box and it to magically be completely usable for them.
There's lots of ways they could learn those things you mentioned. Libraries and community centres often have courses for beginners. There's youtube videos. There's books. There's endless websites. Nothing makes most techies special except the motivation to google the things they don't know. Most people don't even try, and just muddle along with what little they already (don't) know.
The standard layout of a keyboard has remained completely unchanged for literal decades. It doesn't update every year with invisible gestures, nor does it remove keys that used to be there in favor of those gestures.
I was trying to make the point that you need to actually find the motivation to spend the time to learn something in order to be able to use it, and not just expect to be able to use it with no time spent learning at all.
Most of those extra gestures you can get away without knowing, can't you? I'm not on iPhone but on Android you could get away with just using the home button and tapping on icons on the screen to do almost anything. Tapping on a touchscreen to activate an icon hasn't changed since the first touch devices in the 90's.
I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that not everything has to be obvious, and in my opinion it is ok to have some learning curve for advanced operation, in the same way that many of us have spent extra time learning to touchtype in order to save time over the long run.
If you dumb the device down completely for the lowest capability user, then it will limit how a person willing to put in that learning time will be able to operate it.
No, it is not like touch-typing. That is a skill that won't be obsoleted when a vendor decides to change the user interface on a whim with the next OS release.
I contend that doing a course or learning how a computer works at a fundamental level is a skill just like touchtyping that will remain even into the next generation of phones.
For example we bought my gf's mother a smartphone and she has a very limited understanding of what the difference between her plan data and storage on the phone is, which causes a lot of confusion.
She uses it mostly to take photos which eventually filled up the storage on her phone, so she became unable to send or receive photos from her children.
She was confused by the error messages coming up that the phone storage was full and thought they meant that she had used up her phone plan data. Because of her limited understanding of how it works, she was unable to deduce that those two things might be connected, so she was expecting the phone to become properly functional again at the end of the month when her plan data resets.
That's just the first example that comes to mind, but there have been many others.
A good analogy she may grok easily could be comparing her plan data to her water usage and comparing her phone storage to the kitchen sink.
The sink can only hold so much water at once, but she can use more/less water each month than the sink can hold. If the sink is full, she has to drain some water to be able to add more. Also, if she uses too much water, she may be charged more than she was expecting.
I've explained storage vs data this way to a few people and it seems to have been useful.
> I contend that doing a course or learning how a computer works at a fundamental level is a skill just like touchtyping that will remain even into the next generation of phones.
While I agree with exactly what you're saying here, I don't think Apple's UX choices pertain at all to how a computer works at a fundamental level. Even changes between OS and software revisions have upended what I thought I'd learned about it, which is entirely dissimilar from using a keyboard where you can literally just look down at your hands if you forget where your hands are or if you are using a new layout.
As far as hand held computers go, using a Palm V was much easier and more comparable to a keyboard in the sense that I had to internalize the Graffiti alphabet. Once that was done, every setting and system application on the thing was clearly laid out in consistent forms and modal dialogs, with the input working consistently across all applications. You didn't have to coerce it into marking text instead of magnifying, and its analogue to iTunes wasn't a backpack-sized Swiss army knife.
I know how a computer works at a fundamental level, but whenever I have to use iTunes to manage the data on my phone I'm in for a googlefest. You don't need some cargo cult residing on an Apple user forum to give you various more or less outdated opinions on where the tilde key is located on the keyboard if you happen to forget. I could probably tell you on a pretty detailed level how MP3 works, but to this day I haven't figured out how to get songs off my iPhone to the PC.
Meanwhile, I've had phones and MP3 players that I could just connect with USB and they'd show up as mass storage devices with a regular file system. Perfectly intuitive no-nonsense approach compared to launching iTunes once a year only to learn that they've completely reworked the thing so that you can now only enable uploading plain MP3 recordings by checking some obscure checkbox hidden away in a dialog accessible from a menu.
To be fair, the trivial features I typically use on a daily basis all seem very intuitive and accessible, but any slight step off the path Apple has laid out for you is always a pain in the ass, which in my experience holds true for OS X to an even greater extent. Often it's not hard, but unergonomic and esoteric. Often, as is the case with managing music on the thing, there is an obvious alternative that would be much more user friendly.
It's like typing. Learning to touchtype was one of the best things I've ever done on a return for investment basis. All I did was stick a little printout of the keyboard layout under the monitor, and committed to not look at the physical keyboard ever again. It was slow for a couple of weeks, but from then on I could touchtype. It was not such a massive burden. But most people I see are still painfully hunting and pecking, even people who use a computer all day long in a professional capacity!
I know there is much more that Apple and other manufacturers could do to make things better, and definitely they should be doing those things, but the main problem IMO is that people are just lazy. They want their phone to do complicated things, but they don't want to spend the time to learn how to do those things.
It would be good if there was easy training for these things though, maybe some kind of beginner courses? I know some community centres/libraries have courses for beginners and older people... But most people just expect to automatically be able to use a smartphone with no training, knowledge or effort.