OK, this is not earth shaking, but it does bug me, and it's my blog so I can waste my time any way I want.
The mute switch is one of the single greatest ideas in phone design. Before the mute switch you had to navigate through menus to change your phone from "Silent" to "Normal" mode, which was annoying and also impossible to do in a hurry. The Treo was this first phone I owned with a mute switch and once I had a mute switch I knew I didn't ever want a phone that didn't have one.
iPhones have a mute switch, and I am very HAPPY that they have mute switches. They also have volume controls on the side, and that has more to do with them being media players than from any real necessity.
iPads have three buttons on the side, just like an iPhone. Apparently, if you believe the internet, the third button was originally meant to be a mute switch, making the iPad like a giant phone. However before the iPad shipped, they changed their mind. In the original iPad software, holding the "down volume" button muted the iPad, so it was just as easy to mute the device. The switch-formerly-known-as-the-mute-switch was re-purposed to be a "Rotation Lock", which would stop the iPad from auto rotating the UI, which gets annoying and needs to be turned off depending on how you are using your iPad.
This was brilliant. This was why Apple wins. It made the device better.
However the iPad with its cool rotation lock button was a problem for iPhone users. As iPhone apps began to implement rotateable apps, they needed a way to do rotation locking. So iPhoneOS 4.0 added the ability for iPhone users to lock the rotation. The gesture in iPhone OS 4.0 was to double click the big button on the face of the phone, flick left, and then click the lock. This is nasty and awkward, but you don't need to rotation lock a phone very often, so it was a fine place for that function to be on a phone. You certainly DO NOT want to have to retrain millions of phone owners that the former mute switch on their iPhone is now a rotation lock. So Apple wins again, good UI design.
Enter iOS 4.2, which runs on BOTH iPads and iPhones. What should happen now? When faced with this problem, Apple made two decisions. First they decided not to make all iPhones work like iPads ( by making the switch on the side of both devices be a rotation lock switch). Good choice, as I said before, you don't need rotation lock that often on an iPhone, it doesn't make sense to take away the mute switch which you use all the time.
What they decided to was to make the iPad work exactly like a phone. To make the switch on the side into a mute switch and move the rotation lock to the same weird place it is on the iPhone. This was the wrong decision. The correct decision would have been to leave the switch on the side of the iPad as a rotation lock, with the "hold down volume key to mute" gesture, and then, for iPhone users who insist on doing the gesture, you could provide, in the hidden place where the software rotation lock screen exists, helpful pointers to finding the rotation lock.
Why am I sure this is wrong? Well for one thing, it is wrong because it bothers me. But it is also easy to demonstrate that it is wrong. Lets us imagine three different users. Each of these users owns an iPhone, knows how to use it, and now has an iPad.
Expert -- I'll be the expert.
Normal -- Someone who knows how to use an iPhone, but has the ability to learn a new thing if given a chance.
Idiot -- Someone who somehow learned how to use an iPhone, but can never ever learn a new thing.
Now let us see how these three users feel about their devices, both on "Day 1", the first day they start using an iPad, and on "Day N", after they have been using their iPad for a while and have learned how to take best advantage of it. Let us compare the happiness of these people with Apple's Decision vs. the happiness of these people if Apple had done the right thing, and left the rotation lock switch alone on the iPad. Each person will will be found in one of these three states:
HAPPY -- the UI is working really well for them
CONTENT -- the UI is working for them, but not in the best way
ANGRY -- they can get stuff done, but it pisses them off
User
Apple's Decision
The Right Thing
Day 1
Day N
Day 1
Day N
Expert User
ANGRY
ANGRY
HAPPY
HAPPY
Normal User
CONTENT
CONTENT
CONTENT
HAPPY
Idiot User
CONTENT
CONTENT
ANGRY
ANGRY
This table clearly shows that the only people happier with Apple's decision are idiots. I totally support designing user interfaces for Normal people. However designing user interfaces for Idiots is a really bad idea, and in this case, in a classic example of "foolish consistency", that is exactly what Apple has done. ( "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines --Emerson )
In June, having been given an iPad as a gift, ( which gets me off the hook for what I said here ), I decided to try an experiment. Put the laptop away, and see how well the iPad stands up as a replacement. I bought a keyboard, and a small pile of software packages. I tried, for as long as I could stand it, to give up my laptop and replace it with an iPad.
As you have probably already guessed, I did not like the experience. I am typing this report on a laptop, and the iPad is sitting right next to me, closed and turned off. A couple of friends who read my last post on this topic have been bugging me to post the followup, so here goes.
I like the iPad. I use mine all the time. There are a lot of great reasons to have one. It is the perfect travel companion: e-Reader, map, internet, videos, games. Amazing, don't leave home wihtout one. However, "replacing Michael Toy's laptop" is not one of the good reasons to own an iPad.
The experiment did not last very long, I quickly decided it wasn't going to work. For the record however, here are a few days of notes after trying to use the iPad, mostly as a tool to browse the internet and to write, here is the list of things which caused me run back to the comfort of my MacBook.
You can't really type on the pretend keyboard.
If you get the external keyboard, you are in a world of hurt. First of all, it isn't attached, which means you often have the iPad which you grabbed to look at a map and put down, but not the keyboard, which you didn't bother to pick up. Then you try and use the iPad without the keyboard and you discover that you can't type because even though you can't find the keyboard, the iPad knows it is out there and won't give the pretend keyboard. Apple does not make this experience easy, seamless or pleasant.
Even with practice, it is clunky and hard to select a precise fragment of text with the touch screen.
Often when reading web pages, you can't get the copy UI to appear at all, making it impossible, for example, to quote something wihtout re-typing it yourself.
Said quoting is almost impossible, because you can't have a word processor open to type the quote into, while at the same time looking at a web page, since you can only see one app at a time.
I like to be on AIM and Jabber, so people can interrupt me while I am doing other things, and I never found a good multi protocol chat client that made that experience work nearly as well as running iChat or Adium does on a Mac.
I like to use client-side blog editing software for creating posts ( mars edit, for example ), and I never found one which was worth even a free download.
If I try to use the DOM-magnifcent editors built into the web sites of blogging software, when I try to insert an image, I hit "Browse ..." and the web site can't find my photo album, because it is hidden from the web browser.
There are bugs in Safari and there are times ( like trying to send a private message in Facebook ), when there is no way to cause the magic software keyboard to appear. This causes many web applications to be useless.
The captcha on many web sites display as broken images, making impossible for me to verify that I am not a robot.
When writing an e-mail, there is no easy way to refer to a second e-mail is to save the message as a draft, then go read the second e-mail, then come back and edit the first one again.
Data is a problem. On your laptop you can organize your data any way you like, and you can easily take a piece of data from one program to the next. On your iPad, each program can only see its own data, so it is impossible without the help of some third agent, to share data between apps. Sometimes you get lucky. Images for example, can often be shared between apps if you can figure out how to get them into the Photo Album. Also you can sometimes use third party solutions, like Dropbox, if both the apps you are using allow it. All in all though, it is complicated, messy, broken and annoying.
I stopped pretty soon into the experiment. I knew I wasn't going to be a convert. If I had kept going, the list would have kept growing. The iPad is a weird device, doesn't replace a phone, doesn't replace a laptop. It is wonderful, but weird and un-neccessary.
I am seeing a trend of people figuring out crazy cool things to do where you have an iPad WITH a computer as a companion. If there is a future where people start "needing" iPads, my guess is, it will be in that direction.
To acknowledge all the hard work and extra hours put in to reach the June 17th OnLive launch, the company has given every single employee an iPad. I had previously snuck a couple days on a borrowed iPad to see what I thought of them, and what I thought was: "Gorgeous, Fun, Toy"
Now that I have my very own iPad and can buy apps and give it a real trial, I've decided to try and take a serious run at this. I am putting away my laptop and trying to use my iPad for all my mobile computing. With the sweet little bluetooth keyboard that Apple sells and the right iPad case ( pictured here ), it does LOOK like it might be a reasonable computer, but is it? Stay tuned for the results.
Here is what the OnLive(TM) system looks like on the iPad. The design was done by Emily Adams at OnLive. It is gorgeous. I did a lot of the work to bring this beast to life, including the decision to stick the controls on the top of the screen.
Absolutely, 100% of the time, everyone who sees either a picture of this, or sees the actual application running on the iPad, the first question is "Why are the controls on the top of the screen, that is a horrible idea."
And, 100% of the time, once they hold the iPad in their hands, they instantly get it, and agree that the controls work better on the top of the screen. With the controls on the bottom, the weight of the iPad makes it hard to hold on to, and the fear that having the controls on the top would cause you to block the screen with your fingers turns out not to be much of a problem. It turns out, on a touch based device, you are waving your hands over the screen all the time.
I am not a reknowned expert on UI design, but I have been doing this for a few years and so I have some wisdom gained from battle scars. And I have learned two important lessons. The first lesson is this. Users have no clue what they want. People will tell you all kinds of weird stuff that they want, but they don't really want it, all they really know is that they are unhappy with what they have. If you give them what they ask for, they will roast you for giving them crappy UI ... you job is to listen through the requests for the real problems hiding inside the user response. The second thing I have learned is, "Don't be an arrogant asshole, just give the users what they ask for".
So the trick, when the users are telling you something that you think is wrong, is to figure out which story are you living in? Are you living in the story where you serve the user best by thinking you are smarter than they are, or do you serve the user best by assuming that they are smarter than you? I have no magic way to tell the difference between those two moments, but I do know this.
I chose wrong for the iPad client.
If this were a shipping product (it isn't, this is just a technology demonstration), the right thing to do would be to let the user drag the UI to the top or the bottom. It isn't shipping and while I loved the idea of dragging the UI bar, I didn't have time to make it draggable, I had to make a call.
Based on my experience with everyone who had ever held the thing in their hands, I decided that I was smarter than the users, and I should put the bar on the top of the screen. That was a bad decision.
Because this isn't a product, it is just a demo. There have been a number of videos posted on the internet because we are using the iPad in our announcements and people are interested in seeing high end games running on a thin platform. I see, in the comment streams for these videos, "What idiot put the controls on the top?"
Here's all kinds of arrogance. The commenter shows typical internet arrogance. If you see something you don't agree with, it is stupid. The idea that maybe you might learn something unexpected by listening never even occurs to the typical commenter.
And then there is me, because the commenter is right. Maybe a few hundred people in the world will ever hold this demonstration client in their hands and be able to understand why the buttons belong on top. On meanwhile, 83,000 (so far), of people on the internet are looking at it and wondering what idiot put the buttons on top.
Everyone I ever tested the iPad client with told me the same thing, and I was unable to hear them, because I had forgotten that this was a demo. I was all focused on making it as usable as possible in the very short time I had to work on it.
So this is my apology and my confession, I should have listened and put the buttons on the bottom.
Here's the YouTube video if you are interested.
where's the "ocd" mentioned in the title? well, i thought it would be obvious. i am sitting here obsessing about "buttons on bottom vs. buttons on top" the thing is in the can and done, it is still bugging me that i didn't get it exactly right.
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