Most people know it's controversial to say "iPhones are hard to use" because most people feel that the iPhone, perhaps more than any other technological innovation in the past 20 years, made technology easy to access, use, and integrate with their lives.
To say 'iPhones are hard to use' and then point out all the small edge cases of use as significant flaws is hyperbole in bad faith. The author is caught up in his own intellectual habit and not in touch with reality.
A better title for this article could be 'Simplifying complexity inevitably sidelines some of some user's needs'.
Or maybe "making the setup process easy hides some really important (and even safety critical) functionality". Or "popups are still bad and apparently we still need to say it" (referring to the wifi one). Or maybe "some current edge cases should be center cases".
I don't think that his point is an overly broad indictment of the iphone so much as an analysis of where many of its more common flaws actually lie. I've seen so many criticisms of trivialities around colors in the calendar, but little analysis of what real people with basic knowledge don't know.
The fact that it is so iPhone centric leads me to believe that the author is a fan. I don't consider this bad faith at all.
Do you really believe "iPhones are hard to use" faithfully represents his overall critique? Objectively iPhones are not hard to use. Do you really feel that an iPhone's ease-of-use is reasonably compared to a "handheld engine-diagnostics module for Daewoo cars"?
The fact that an iPhone can literally be used out of the box with no user-manual (unlike an engine-diagnostic unit) is testament to its simplicity. I don't even know why I am arguing this point.
Does iOS get everything right? Nope. Is an ongoing conversation about UX important? Of course. My point is not that the author may or may not bring up some valid points, it's that he hung his whole piece off of an self serving, insincere title and sensational premise.
More and more we are declaring that there is so much noise on the web that it's ok to bait users with nonsense titles. Just a couple comments down someone advocates this. If you let principles like sincerity and honesty slip just to get attention you've let a piece of your integrity go which in turn mars what you are actually saying.
If what you are saying isn't interesting enough to warrant an interesting title, maybe you aren't as smart as you think you are, or what you have to say is less important than you think it is. Either way, don't hijack the attention of others to validate your own ego, work harder and earn the attention honestly.
“Hard” is obviously a definition that’s relative and varies from person to person. Maybe you could define it as some sort of objective metric where you poll people about ease of use, but then your definition of hard becomes subjective.
For a lot of people any tech is hard relative to the rest of their life, including the iPhone. My mom is very much not computer savvy and she runs into so many problems with her iPhone that would otherwise be obvious to tech users. When you really think about her problems often there is some unintuitive design choice causing it.
My point is that “iPhones are hard to use” is a very true statement for many people. I don’t think the author was insincere.
Some people are bound to struggle with any form of technology, no interface can ever accommodate all levels of expectation and comprehension. One size will never fit all, it's just not a reasonable expectation. If that is your standard for 'easy' then yeah, iPhones are hard to use.
Within the spectrum of all personal computing, ever, I think today's mobile devices are some of the easiest to use. Blinker yourself from the realm the devices occupy and set idealistic goals and maybe you can say 'iPhones are hard to use', but you are likely being purposefully obtuse, dishonest, or willfully naive.
After reading your response a few times I think this might come down to whether you jump to using the word "hard" relatively or absolutely.
You seem to describe something as "hard" or "easy" relative to other things.
If your job is lifting rocks and all of them are really heavy, but one weighs slightly less, you might describe the less heavy one as "easy" to lift. Someone else might describe them all as "hard" to lift.
A lot of people in the tech industry, yourself included, seem to be in the first mindset. That mindset can be dangerous as it invites complacency.
This language matters a lot, because who wants to improve something that's already "easy"? Refusing to call something "hard" because it doesn't apply to what you view as the average or ideal user is picking a small semantic point in a way that avoids improvement.
Perhaps this is not you, but I've seen many people use language like yours("idealistic", "naive", "one size will never fit all") to dismiss turning a critical eye towards tech design. The argument seems to be that modern design is actually really good and that efforts to improve it are just a futile quest fueled by people who are unnecessarily critical.
Maybe that argument is right, but I don't think so. Whenever I get a chance to peek outside my bubble in the tech world and I talk with a less tech savvy user it becomes clear their relationship with technology is basically adversarial.
The iPhone can be "great", "easy", "hard", and "terrible" all at the same time. Refusing to accept calling it "hard" and describing someone who would do so as "obtuse, dishonest, or willfully naive" is a constrained and inaccurate mindset.
I agree with you, especially considering that the same complaints aren't really any easier on any other smartphone. You can't lump "Androids" together because most of them have some sort of custom skin over top of the base Android install and, even if they didn't, most end-users still wouldn't know how to change the text or manually select a WiFi network without some kind of instruction.
The author's issue lies with the complexity of today's modern devices vs. the number of people that require certain features. It's definitely in bad faith and, frankly, is nonsense.
I say this as an Apple fanboi with both a PC and an Android Nexus phone.
A handheld engine-diagnostics module is not hard to use. Take it out of the box and drive in a nail with it.
Saying that there is something you can do with a device without an explanation doesn't automatically imply that it's easy to use. Ease of use is a metric for how much of the full potential of something you can utilize with as little instructions as possible. The article has a point that this ease of use is quite reduced when you are disabled or don't have prior knowledge of devices.
I'm not saying that the title couldn't be less sensational but simply saying that iPhones aren't difficult to use is wrong aswell.
I can definitely see where you are coming from there. The more that I think about it, I would be just as annoyed if this were coming from a major news publication.
But I see his blog as one dude's opinion, who just happens to also be a good writer. Its hard for me to blame such a person for clickbait when I can't really see how they would even derive significant personal benefit from such clickbait.
As to your comment about the Daewoo engine diagnostics module, I've never used that one specifically, but you might be surprised at how easy some engine diagnostic tools are to get started with. And also how powerful they are if used really well, and how frustrating (and incorrect) they are if used for marginally more advanced things without a basic level of knowledge. The analogy worked pretty well for me.
There is one way to solve this problem. Apple knows which users are new and which are not because of iCloud. Just allow new users to schedule a class at a nearby Apple Store at the Welcome screen when users login to their iPhone for the very first time.
I like your idea of identifying if you are new via iCloud registration. I think this event should trigger an extended first-run setup flow that hits all the major accessibility features under the assumption that most new users would benefit from becoming familiar with these features from the get go and how to access them in the future. I know many senior citizens (including parents) who would have greatly benefit from an accessibility settings heavy onboarding experience, related up many of the issues the author mentioned regarding eye sight and vision related age decline.
Sorry, but I've been a iPhone user for many years, and will turn on iCloud about the 12th of Never. You totally give up all privacy for contacts, photos, appointments, etc. the moment you turn it on, and you can never undo that. Apple is NOT trustworthy enough to have that kind of insight into my life. (And Google is even worse, which is why I'm stuck with Apple as truly the lesser of two very definite evils.)
This is not necessarily true. My parents had a Mac with an iCloud account and managed to purchase an iPhone from Verizon without ever logging into their iCloud account. It's one of the reasons I moved away from Verizon. They prioritized the sale of the device over making sure that people understood what they were buying and how to use it. Luckily, the iPhone is user-friendly enough that they were able to use it fine but they were never even asked if they wanted to enable iCloud and eagerly said yes when I mentioned what that meant.
I think the main issue is that he's singling out the iPhone as if it, outside of any other smartphone, is somehow more difficult to use than any other ultra-complex piece of technology and then proceeds to demonstrate that, poorly IMO, by pointing out several edge cases that the majority of users will never experience. His first example, case in point, is that users are never asked about text size when that's demonstrably not true. New iPhone users are presented with that during on-boarding and existing users have already made that choice. Changing it is in the settings. It's not Apple's or Samsung's or Nokia's fault if someone has another person set up their device for them and choose their preferences. The WiFi example is another one. The entire premise of those features is that users prove that they're capable of navigating to the manual selection of that feature because they need to do that at least once in order to turn the auto-discovery off. That's very intentional.
To say 'iPhones are hard to use' and then point out all the small edge cases of use as significant flaws is hyperbole in bad faith. The author is caught up in his own intellectual habit and not in touch with reality.
A better title for this article could be 'Simplifying complexity inevitably sidelines some of some user's needs'.