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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 innovat

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'.

MattSayar 8y ago
But then nobody would read it
- jsight 8y ago
  Yeah, the OP made a good point, but it is really true of most persuasive writing, IMO.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  Well sure, the profit-motive explains clickbait (or in this case, wanting readership; I see no ads). We should still keep it off HN. I expect the headlines to work for me, not for the author.
jsight 8y ago
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.
- monkeynotes 8y ago
  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.
  - kettlecorn 8y ago
    I took no offense to the title myself. “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.
    - monkeynotes 8y ago
      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.
chaostheory 8y ago
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.
- sizzle 8y ago
  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.
  - dublin 8y ago
    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.)
    - chaostheory 8y ago
      If you don't use a cloud service, then how do you transfer all of your phone numbers and emails when you get a new iPhone?
- dkonofalski 8y ago
  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.
blue4 8y ago
Sounds a lot like you're saying blindly, that Apple is without any design flaws because look what they've introduced to the world.
tripzilch 8y ago
What is the hyperbole? Should he rather have said "iPhones are not easy to use", as they clearly demonstrated?
- dkonofalski 8y ago
  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.

MattSayar 8y ago

But then nobody would read it

jsight 8y ago
Yeah, the OP made a good point, but it is really true of most persuasive writing, IMO.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
Well sure, the profit-motive explains clickbait (or in this case, wanting readership; I see no ads). We should still keep it off HN. I expect the headlines to work for me, not for the author.

jsight 8y ago

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.

monkeynotes 8y ago
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.
- kettlecorn 8y ago
  I took no offense to the title myself. “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.
  - monkeynotes 8y ago
    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.

chaostheory 8y ago

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.

sizzle 8y ago
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.
- dublin 8y ago
  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.)
  - chaostheory 8y ago
    If you don't use a cloud service, then how do you transfer all of your phone numbers and emails when you get a new iPhone?
dkonofalski 8y ago
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.

blue4 8y ago

Sounds a lot like you're saying blindly, that Apple is without any design flaws because look what they've introduced to the world.

tripzilch 8y ago

What is the hyperbole? Should he rather have said "iPhones are not easy to use", as they clearly demonstrated?

dkonofalski 8y ago
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.