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Buzzkill
Alternate dimensions
An Insurgency of Quality
Discoverability
Hey iPhone users, did you know that you have access to special diacritical characters? Neither did I. The bloggers at iSmashphone had to point it out to me in their entry 12 iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known.
The way you do it is to press and hold the base character, and the line of diacritical characters appears above. Slide your finger to the correct one and lift up, and now you can properly spell the word háček.
Note that there is no visual cue, or affordance, that this can be done. The E button looks exactly the same as the Q button, for which there is no diacritical menu. Users have to learn this trick outside the interface itself, from a friend or a blog. We would say it’s undiscoverable. (Unless you’re the sort who goes around trying every possible interaction with every possible interface element.) Apple have even used the same interaction style in unexpected places, like the selection of a top-level domain in a URL…
While this makes me a little crazy and a little distrustful of the iPhone operating system — what else have they hidden? — it neatly illustrates the concept of aesthetic-usability effect, and Apple relies on this all the time. The aesthetic-usability effect holds that if a system looks friendly and usable, it will be perceived by the user as more usable as the same system with less friendly aesthetics, even if the pretty system is, in fact, slightly less efficient.
On the one hand this strategy earns Apple a frothing-at-the-mouth fan base, who fall in love with the beauty, simplicity, and quick ramp-up on new devices. On the other, it sometimes prevents them from implementing basic functionality—like cut-and-paste for the iPhone—as they err too far on the side of “uncluttered.”
Filed under: Critiques, Interaction design, Mobile, Visual design
Chris Noessel is a senior consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group in Seattle. For marchFIRST he was Director of Information Architecture, conducting research and design for notable web sites such as Apple, SEGA, and Harmon Kardon. He was one of the founding graduates of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He teaches interaction design at the California College of the Arts.
More entries by Chris
Comments
I tend to agree with Chris, although I have to admit we're doing the same more and more in our products.
It is plain and simple, there is no space to do all, so we choose.
Apple in this matter is quite rigorous in making choices for you as a user. The fact that they still offer a wide scope of functionality in these hidden ways has always been their approach. (think the one button mouse)
But those they do support are examples of simplicity (most often).
And yes trying to perform other tasks than their top three is not as intuitive and natural. It drives a lot of their users nuts and get them criticized for not being the easiest to use UI, if you REALY evaluate the full usability on all use cases.
I would even say the iPhone and iTouch/iPod teams design for Anglo Americans only. Any language other than English is awkward.
The thing is as long as their fathful aficionados are taking it and evangalizing the interaction they will get away with it.
Having said that they are breaking new ground in the fight for feature creap as well. Helping us to push our agendas on simplification of our UIs as well.
There are a bunch of hard-to-discover iPhone features, but I don't think this one is really that bad a design choice as far as those go. First, they are betting that people will accidentally discover it because a common thing to do is pause on the e, say, as they think "how do I type é?" and pausing will bring up the solution. Second, a lot of people will discover it accidentally (and perhaps with irritation) before they ever need it, just by typing slow. Third, it's the kind of thing that only needs to be learned once -- later reminders aren't necessary, so cluttering up the keys with accent marks would be overkill.
In non-English markets, this might be more of a factor... the prediction feature probably helps a lot in that case.