iPhone and the First Generation Woes

Commentary

For everybody who was hiding under a Godzilla-sized rock, Apple released the iPhone last weekend. It represents a big step forward in pure humane-ness of mobile devices. Despite the slow network, the poor customer service provided by AT&T, and the lack of an open development environment, I am still on the verge of getting one. Using its interface is a like drinking refreshingly cool water after a crawl over a barren desert made of discarded cell phones.

Instead of singing the praises of the iPhone (which it deserves), I want to describe some of the unpolished corners that escaped Apple’s quality assurance.

The Volume Buttons and Tilt

Apple, like many other cellphone makers, realized that changing the volume of the phone is so important that it warrants its own hardware buttons, not screen buttons — at any time, no matter what you are doing, you’ll need to be able to change the volume of the phone. That Apple made this concession is particularly impressive given how much they seemed to desire a sexy and button-less exterior.

I love the fact that the iPhone switches between portrait mode* and landscape mode automatically when the phone is rotated — when we were working on a cellphone project a couple years ago, this was a feature we really wanted but couldn’t push through. I did find, when playing, that the implementation on the iPhone was somewhat finicky: It took some fiddling to make it register the rotation.

That aside, there is a serious mismapping that Apple forgot to correct. When the phone is in the portrait mode it uses the correct natural mapping: Pressing the higher key increases the volume and pressing the lower key decreases the volume. However, when the phone is rotated, the once correct mapping is broken: pressing the left key increases the volume and pressing the right key decreases the volume. It should be the other way around.

This isn’t a huge deal, but it messed me up a number of times. It’s just sloppy craftsmanship and I expect better from Apple. It’s an easily fixable problem: when the phone is in the landscape mode where the buttons are on the bottom (you can rotate either direction to get to landscape mode), just swap the buttons roles. This can be fixed purely in software. Hopefully Apple will.

*This should rather be called the portrait/landscape quasimode. The problems that go along with full modes don’t apply here because you are always aware of the iPhone’s orientation kinesthetically.

The Camera Button

There isn’t one. That’s a problem. The iPhone actually takes a step backward in this regard over its competition. On my Nokia, there is simply a button I can push to take a picture. I press it, a picture is taken. With the iPhone, I have to (1) Press the home button, (2) Press the camera icon, (3) Press the take-a-picture button. That’s just too much pressing.

Taking a picture is another one of those things I want to be able to do anytime, anywhere. Why do I think that this is a first generation problem? Because I think Apple will eventually realize that adding the camera to the VIP list of physical buttons would not only be useful, but also sexy*. Here’s hoping for a dedicated button in a later generation.

*How could this be sexy? How can you do do an interface that doesn’t dislodge you from your current location while taking a picture? For now, I leave this as an exercise for the reader. Perhaps it will become a puzzler latter on, or the solution a blog post.

On-Screen Keyboard

The on-screen keyboard was much better than I expected it to be. I was ready to condemn the iPhone to the good-idea-with-fatal-flaw pile because of the keyboard, so it is with great surprise that I say that it “isn’t too bad”. With index-finger typing, text entry felt pretty zippy. When I tried to type with two thumbs, I could go faster, but I made an unacceptable number of mistakes. The Apple-store folks claimed that it will learn my particular typing habits and adjust the keyboard accordingly, but I can’t comment on whether that is true or not. Typing punctuation marks was quite annoying, because you have to go into a separate keyboard mode to access them.

A company called Immersion is working on a technology that gives tactile feedback to a touchscreen. This could not only solve my still-lingering skepticism about the on-screen keyboard, but possibly morph the iPhone into the Best Thing Ever(tm). All of a sudden, it would become fully possible to type and navigate without looking. One of the nice things about the iPhone is how the interface feels “real”. Interacting with it feels like interacting with a physical object. When you flick your finger on a list, the list scrolls with momentum. It’s a nice touch. With the addition of programmable tactile feedback, there is a wealth of interaction and “realness” of the interface that becomes possible. This is clearly not a feature for the second or even third generation. But I truly hope it is an nth generation feature.

There are some genuine first-generation woes with the onscreen keyboard. In the web browser, you can rotate the iPhone to browse in landscape mode. An added side-effect is that this enlarges the size of the keyboard, effectively making your typing faster and more reliable. As I was attempting to enter an email in the Mail application, I tried the same trick. No luck. There are only certain times and places when the iPhone will successfully go into landscape mode. There is no indication of when it will and when it won’t. I spent a frustrating minute thinking that the orientation detection wasn’t working. One particularly inhumane mode is that while typing, you are not allowed to switch from portrait to landscape: You have to stop editing, rotate the phone, and resume editing. Senseless.

The solution to this UI problem is to always allow landscape mode. If you are going to implement a feature, don’t do it half-way. I actually began to feel somewhat insecure about the device, not knowing when the accelerometer was being sticky and when I wasn’t allowed to change orientations.

In the next generations, I expect to be able to use the landscape-mode enlarged keyboard anywhere that I want to type, and I’ll be able to switch orientations at all times.

Autocorrections

The reason that typing feels so zippy is that the iPhone is clever and corrects your mistakes as you type. Unfortunately, the iPhone is not so clever when you are not typing English. In this case, the iPhone replaces the word you want with a different word entirely — and there is no way to undo its mistakes. It evokes the feeling of running through a field where every 25 paces there may be a landmine.

To accept an autocorrect suggestion you tap the spacebar. To cancel an autocorrection you tap on the suggestion. That’s just weird. Plus, it’s hard to habituate to because the suggestion appears beneath the word you have typed. That means the place you need to tap could be anywhere.

Bluetooth Keyboard

I had convinced myself that I would take the plunge and buy an iPhone if it had just one feature: The ability to hook up with an external Bluetooth keyboard. That way, I could eschew the on-screen keyboard for some real text-entry power. The iPhone could take the place of my computer for text editing purposes: I could email and write with impunity, and I wouldn’t need pay for an Internet connection at home.

Most of the work I do on the computer is writing. With a fold-able Bluetooth keyboard and Google Docs, I would have the ultimate portable writing system.

I spent a long time with the folks at the Apple store talking about this issue. Alas, there does not appear to be a driver for this yet. Apple just hasn’t thought of it. That’s okay — they had a finite amount of time to get the first generation phone out. Yet… the driver would be fairly easy to write and tiny to include. In fact, if there were a true SDK, I would write one. But the platform is closed, so I’ll probably have to wait at least half a generation for this feature.

Copy and Paste

There isn’t any. This really hurts, especially when typing is somewhat laborious. I’m not advocating standard copy and paste — the standard invisible buffer that can only hold one thing is pretty inhumane. I am advocating some method of moving text around the system without the need to retype it. Also, the ability to select text is key as well. This will get fixed, I am sure. It had better get fixed. For now, though it’s just another rough and troublesome first-generation edge.

Dragging Lists

I mentioned above that dragging a list up/down feels smooth. It’s fast and it’s efficient. (Because of Fitts’ law, standard scroll bars are very inefficient, and I’m happy to see them gone.) But Apple missed a great opportunity: Scrolling left/right between lists.

Let me give an example. I’m on this screen in settings:

To change a particular set of settings, I click on one of the options. The screen slides over to reveal the new list of settings. I might even do this twice. To get back, I have to click on a small button near the top of the screen. It’s annoying and unsexy. And it’s Fitts’-law bad. How could Apple do it better? Simplify.To move up/down in any of the settings I just drag my finger in the direction I want to go. I should be able to do the same thing left and right to move between the different settings screens. The slide-over metaphor is already visually there. In fact, I was expecting the drag method to just work and was confused when it didn’t. The same thing is true for changing “tabs” in the web browser. Apple has already implemented zoom; why does the iPhone need a separate mechanism for changing tabs? Simply zooming out and panning would accomplish the same thing, faster and more naturally.

I hope that Apple will eventually settle on using the drag method consistently throughout the interface. They even use it for moving between photos. But, I’m not holding my breath. Apple may already be committed to this kind of back-button. It would be a shame for the back-button to become Apple’s standard design pattern, when they’ve already implemented a superior method.

Attaching an Image to an Email

There was a discussion on this blog a couple weeks ago about icons after I wrote a eulogy to the floppy-disk-as-save icon. The problem with icons exhibited itself fully in the iPhone photo-viewing interface.

How do I send an image? After looking over the screen for something to help me, the only thing that looks remotely right is that image of a rectangle with an arrow. I touched it and the iPhone went into slideshow mode. The icon does look a little like something meaning “slideshow”. Because that button wasn’t it, I tried everything I could think of. I starting drafting an email but the Mail application didn’t have a way of attaching an image. I even asked a Apple store guy if it was possible to send an image as an email. “Nope”, he replied, “they should be adding that soon. You can see incoming emails but you can’t send them.”It turns out that you can send an email as an attachment, although not from inside Mail (talk about frustrating). How? By clicking that little icon I tried before. It just so happened that because of the touchscreen’s lack of kinesthetic feedback, I tapped the photo instead of the icon. Thus, the iPhone began the cycling the images and I thought the icon meant “slideshow”. I went around for a day telling people that the iPhone didn’t support sending images.

Icons look pretty, but they cannot replace text.

Conclusion

The iPhone represents a new era of more humane phones. For the most part it’s excellent. I’m not sure that I can recommend the phone to my friends yet*, but once these first generation woes get worked out, it will be an awesomely humane machine. I’m excited that there will be a slew of “me-too” phones. Not because they will be better than the iPhone, but because it will raise the bar on cell phone humane-ness.

*Although I might still get one. I’m in the interface design business, so it’s a necessary buy for research. Right?