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The iPhone User Experience: A First Look
BY
Bruce Tog
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page
1
by Bruce Tognazzini
A collective gasp was heard around the world following the January 2007 MacWorld Conference, when Steve Jobs pulled the wraps off the long-rumored iPhone. He proclaimed it a revolutionary product with a brand-new “multi-touch” interface as breakthrough and breathtaking as the mouse interface of the 1960s.
Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let’s take a look.
Who’s Talking?
Bruce Tognazzini was hired at Apple by Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin in 1978, where he remained for 14 years, founding the Apple Human Interface Group. He has been a harsh critic of many of Apple’s later innovations, including the notorious round mouse (“farcical”) and the Macintosh Dock (see: Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks)
. He is almost as stingy with his compliments as his partner, Don Norman. That makes this particular column, largely positive, most unusual.
A Brief History of Cell Phones
The original cell phones made one single break with the interface of the wired phones that had come before: The user dialed, then pressed Send, instead of dialing “live” as had been done historically. That’s it. Added later were such niceties as keyboards for message and email construction, borrowed whole, again, from the wired world. (Even the Send button was borrowed from earlier Radio-Telephone technology.)
Occasionally, bits and pieces of interface innovation have found their way into subsequent cell phones, but no one has ever revisited Bell Lab’s pushbutton phone design from the 1950s with its upside-down adding machine keyboard (with the exception of Smart Phones, based on the 1870s typewriter keyboard).
iPhone is revolutionary, not a big surprise coming from Steve Jobs. He knows how to gather a tiny team of brilliant young minds and work them half to death until they innovate beyond any reasonable expectations. He has the common sense to know what will ultimately find favor. And he has the hardened-steel man parts to take a chance and roll with it. What’s a pity is that so few others in this industry share those triple strengths.
Multi Touch Interface History
While the iPhone as a whole may be revolutionary, the individual elements forming the interface are not so new. Bill Buxton was pushing multi-hand input back in the 1980s when the world was just waking up to the mouse, already 20 years old at the time. Several researchers were experimenting with gestural interfaces in 1990s, myself included. I was reminded of this only minutes after Steve’s speech when my partner, Jakob Nielsen, called me to say, “Jobs just announced your pinch interface!”
I hadn't thought about my particular use of the pinch gesture in years. It had been part of my Starfire Project at Sun Microsystems, a look at the future, but, when we turned the project into a film, the scene showing it was cut to keep the film within reasonable bounds. That kept it out of the 1993 film, but not out of my 1996 book, Tog on Software Design, where, on page 78, my two-fingered shrink-objects-via-pinching gesture, working exactly as Jobs described, indeed appears...
(There was nothing magical about the “20 percent” in the above text. That was just how much, in this case, “Hiroshi” was going to need to shrink the object to get the effect he wanted. You could, of course, shrink and grow objects as much as you wanted, depending on how much you pinched or spread your fingers, just as with the iPhone.)
I didn’t try to patent the object-shrink-pinch process in 1992 when I hit upon it—Sun didn’t get “patent madness” until more than a year after I had showed it around—so I can’t claim that I was even the first to come up with it because we never researched prior art.
Bill Buxton has assembled an excellent Multitouch Chronology. It reveals that Myron Krueger was using pinching as a gesture by 1982, although I haven't discovered what meaning he ascribed to it. (Myron Krueger is famous for coining the term, "artificial reality," back in 1973, a scant five years after Timothy Leary had popularized one means of achieving it.)
Innovation of the whole
I could go down through the other “innovations” in iPhone and slowly knock them off. Yes, it’s the first cell phone with a visual display of voicemail messages, so you can randomly move among voicemails, etc., etc. However, such lists have been displayed, in an identical fashion, on enterprise-level voicemail systems and, of course, such lists have been a standard feature in email for decades.
The origins of these bits and pieces, however, is not what’s important about the iPhone. What’s important is that, for the first time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal human beings. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs; that’s the genius of Apple.
It’s also speaks to the limited vision of the cell phone industry. Exactly why have we never had random-access voicemail on cell phones? We’re talking about hand-held devices with more computer power than the Apollo spacecraft that took us to the moon. We’re talking about devices with screens of more than sufficient resolution. Could nobody think of displaying the messages?
The Macintosh computer did not represent a technological breakthrough either. The mouse was already 20 years old. Pointing interfaces were 20 years old. The Mac was a direct, studied “rip-off” of Apple’s expensive Lisa computer, developed concurrently, but shipped a little over a year earlier. That detracted nothing from the genius of the Mac, for what that team did was to take highly innovative technology and make it (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.
That’s exactly what Apple has done again with iPhone. Multi-touch gestural interfaces have been hanging around in the laboratory, screaming for release, for as long as the mouse hung around. I’ve been pushing multi-touch gestural for over 20 years myself, beginning while I was still at Apple, incredulous that everyone has been ignoring it. Apple stopped ignoring it.
Fulton didn’t invent the steamboat. He just put in the hard work to make it practical. Apple didn’t invent the concept of the multi-touch interface. They’ve just, by all evidence, built the first one that, like the Mac before it, is (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.
The iPhone User Experience
I have yet to get my hands on an iPhone—frustrating! (You can imagine Bill Gates’s frustration. He probably has a cadre of engineers ready to take it apart, put it back together with a couple of screws missing, and paint it brown.) So the following review is based on stuff on the web, including Apple’s demo site, as well as testimonials from those who have actually touched the precious object.
What strikes me about the iPhone interface in general is that it gives ordinary people access to features that have been the private purview of the young and the geeky. For example, cell phones have long had contact lists, but they were typically difficult to build, maintain, and sync.
My own Motorola phone on the Verizon network required a special cord that cost me an hour of research on the web to even discover, along with several software tricks to finally get it communicating with my Mac. I have never tried to load more than a tiny fraction of my contacts anyway, since scrolling is so laborious and resyncing is highly cumbersome.
Young VS Old
The best user interfaces are those that bring advanced features within the easy reach of inexperienced users. Such was the genius of the SRI-Xerox-Apple interface embodied in the Mac, and such is the genius of the iPhone interface. As with other smart phones, Apple starts with a full QWERTY key layout. (You may find it reasonable to spell my name, Tog, “86664,” but old folks don’t. They can’t see the little letters beside the numbers to begin with, and they don’t want to learn.) Then, Apple has made an effort to make normally abstract features, such as Call Waiting and Conferencing, not only attractive, but dead simple.
I’ve read several reviews of the iPhone, primarily from England, talking about how the iPhone may be exciting to the young, but will fall on deaf older ears. They said the same thing about the Mac, yet one of the earliest, most rapidly-growing communities was people over 65. The same may well happen here because this is the most approachable full-featured phone I’ve ever seen.
The Hardware
The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.
For those who might doubt such a high value of cool, consider the self-winding Rolex, which sports 1/10th the accuracy of a Timex at 1000 times the price. With Rolex, the technology is grossly inferior, and still people will pay thousands to own it. With the iPhone, the technology is clearly superior.
The form factor, at only a silly millimeter higher and wider than the Palm Treo, but half its thickness, is an excellent compromise of screen size and handset width. The glistening black color, surrounded by chrome, is pure sex.
The screen itself is high-density, and the lack of a physical keyboard allowed the designers to make it bigger than other smart phone displays. The 320 x 480 size is equal to the practical limits of NTSC television. Yes, NTSC, not HDTV, but we’re taking about a small, highly-portable device here and, unless you wore magnifying glasses and held it up three inches from your face, you would be hard-pressed to see any additional resolution.
Where does the hardware fall down? Its biggest drawback is its five hour battery life. That’s not much talking time for the long-winded and, while it is sufficient for entertainment on domestic flights, it falls quite a bit short for international flights. "OK, so just change the battery!" Unfortunately, it requires a crowbar and a soldering iron to change the battery. That’s a bad interface.
Some folks, including Eugenia Loli-Queru, have taken me to task for the above, based on the probable availability of snap-on external batteries, airplane power cords, and the fact that most other devices are worse. These are all good points. Nonetheless, My favored video device, a PocketDish is simplicity itself. When the first battery dies, I just slap in a spare battery pack, and I'm good to go. (Bonus: The same programs iTunes charge for are all free.)
We also don’t yet know how rugged the phone is. Jobs has a habit of putting out hot-looking, but fragile devices. He shipped a few million titanium PowerBook computers a few years back, forgetting to note that titanium has a rather ugly color, so they’d dipped it in some silver paint. After a matter of months, the paint “chipped, flaked, and bubbled” off people’s machines. (In my case, it wore off selectively where my palms rested when using the keyboard.)
The first iPod Nano required exquisite care to keep from scratching it. This knocked the user experience down several notches below ideal.
The iPhone may be able to withstand everything up to a nuclear incident. It may not. We just know it is coming from a development team that twice has put out products that they either knew or should reasonably have known were subject to serious fit-and-finish defects once the buyer’s check had cleared.
The Interface, Step by Step - iPhone as a phone
This discussion tracks the features as demo’d on Apple’ s site I have taken them slightly out of order with Phone before iPod, then Internet—to make this discussion flow more smoothly. Besides, it’s supposed to be a phone, so with Phone we shall begin.
Calls
iPhone appears able to handle perhaps 10x the number of contacts of the average cell phone without undue burden on the user. The acceleration algorithm, coupled with the “friction” algorithm, appear to let the user “throw” the list with learned speed, then have it slow on its own as it nears the target, making it simple to hit the target on the first try. Very nice.
Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.
Voicemail
Random-access voicemail I’ve already commented on. To reiterate my position: It’s about time.
SMS
SMS is a wonderful feature if you’re in Europe, where the cell phone companies don’t gouge you for using it. Notwithstanding its financial handicapping in the US, Apple has made it clear and accessible, again vastly enlarging the number of people who would feel comfortable and confident using it. This impacts the young, too, since, for the first time, they will be able to text-message their parents, knowing they’ll not only notice it, but be able to read it.
The SMS interface should include an interpreter that can expand standard messaging abbreviations, converting terms such as GBTM into “Get back to me.” This is required if people are to communicate across generations without undue burden. One option would be to have the system highlight such contractions, revealing the meaning when they are touched. This would facilitate learning.
I have seen nothing to indicate that the phone has such a feature as yet.
Bruce Tognazzini
Designer, Engineer & Publisher
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© 2003 - 2007 by TAXI Design Network. All rights reserved.
A collective gasp was heard around the world following the January 2007 MacWorld Conference, when Steve Jobs pulled the wraps off the long-rumored iPhone. He proclaimed it a revolutionary product with a brand-new “multi-touch” interface as breakthrough and breathtaking as the mouse interface of the 1960s.
Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let’s take a look.
Who’s Talking?
Bruce Tognazzini was hired at Apple by Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin in 1978, where he remained for 14 years, founding the Apple Human Interface Group. He has been a harsh critic of many of Apple’s later innovations, including the notorious round mouse (“farcical”) and the Macintosh Dock (see: Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks)
. He is almost as stingy with his compliments as his partner, Don Norman. That makes this particular column, largely positive, most unusual.
A Brief History of Cell Phones
The original cell phones made one single break with the interface of the wired phones that had come before: The user dialed, then pressed Send, instead of dialing “live” as had been done historically. That’s it. Added later were such niceties as keyboards for message and email construction, borrowed whole, again, from the wired world. (Even the Send button was borrowed from earlier Radio-Telephone technology.)
Occasionally, bits and pieces of interface innovation have found their way into subsequent cell phones, but no one has ever revisited Bell Lab’s pushbutton phone design from the 1950s with its upside-down adding machine keyboard (with the exception of Smart Phones, based on the 1870s typewriter keyboard).
iPhone is revolutionary, not a big surprise coming from Steve Jobs. He knows how to gather a tiny team of brilliant young minds and work them half to death until they innovate beyond any reasonable expectations. He has the common sense to know what will ultimately find favor. And he has the hardened-steel man parts to take a chance and roll with it. What’s a pity is that so few others in this industry share those triple strengths.
Multi Touch Interface History
While the iPhone as a whole may be revolutionary, the individual elements forming the interface are not so new. Bill Buxton was pushing multi-hand input back in the 1980s when the world was just waking up to the mouse, already 20 years old at the time. Several researchers were experimenting with gestural interfaces in 1990s, myself included. I was reminded of this only minutes after Steve’s speech when my partner, Jakob Nielsen, called me to say, “Jobs just announced your pinch interface!”
I hadn't thought about my particular use of the pinch gesture in years. It had been part of my Starfire Project at Sun Microsystems, a look at the future, but, when we turned the project into a film, the scene showing it was cut to keep the film within reasonable bounds. That kept it out of the 1993 film, but not out of my 1996 book, Tog on Software Design, where, on page 78, my two-fingered shrink-objects-via-pinching gesture, working exactly as Jobs described, indeed appears...
(There was nothing magical about the “20 percent” in the above text. That was just how much, in this case, “Hiroshi” was going to need to shrink the object to get the effect he wanted. You could, of course, shrink and grow objects as much as you wanted, depending on how much you pinched or spread your fingers, just as with the iPhone.)
I didn’t try to patent the object-shrink-pinch process in 1992 when I hit upon it—Sun didn’t get “patent madness” until more than a year after I had showed it around—so I can’t claim that I was even the first to come up with it because we never researched prior art.
Bill Buxton has assembled an excellent Multitouch Chronology. It reveals that Myron Krueger was using pinching as a gesture by 1982, although I haven't discovered what meaning he ascribed to it. (Myron Krueger is famous for coining the term, "artificial reality," back in 1973, a scant five years after Timothy Leary had popularized one means of achieving it.)
Innovation of the whole
I could go down through the other “innovations” in iPhone and slowly knock them off. Yes, it’s the first cell phone with a visual display of voicemail messages, so you can randomly move among voicemails, etc., etc. However, such lists have been displayed, in an identical fashion, on enterprise-level voicemail systems and, of course, such lists have been a standard feature in email for decades.
The origins of these bits and pieces, however, is not what’s important about the iPhone. What’s important is that, for the first time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal human beings. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs; that’s the genius of Apple.
It’s also speaks to the limited vision of the cell phone industry. Exactly why have we never had random-access voicemail on cell phones? We’re talking about hand-held devices with more computer power than the Apollo spacecraft that took us to the moon. We’re talking about devices with screens of more than sufficient resolution. Could nobody think of displaying the messages?
The Macintosh computer did not represent a technological breakthrough either. The mouse was already 20 years old. Pointing interfaces were 20 years old. The Mac was a direct, studied “rip-off” of Apple’s expensive Lisa computer, developed concurrently, but shipped a little over a year earlier. That detracted nothing from the genius of the Mac, for what that team did was to take highly innovative technology and make it (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.
That’s exactly what Apple has done again with iPhone. Multi-touch gestural interfaces have been hanging around in the laboratory, screaming for release, for as long as the mouse hung around. I’ve been pushing multi-touch gestural for over 20 years myself, beginning while I was still at Apple, incredulous that everyone has been ignoring it. Apple stopped ignoring it.
Fulton didn’t invent the steamboat. He just put in the hard work to make it practical. Apple didn’t invent the concept of the multi-touch interface. They’ve just, by all evidence, built the first one that, like the Mac before it, is (relatively) inexpensive, attractive, and accessible.
The iPhone User Experience
I have yet to get my hands on an iPhone—frustrating! (You can imagine Bill Gates’s frustration. He probably has a cadre of engineers ready to take it apart, put it back together with a couple of screws missing, and paint it brown.) So the following review is based on stuff on the web, including Apple’s demo site, as well as testimonials from those who have actually touched the precious object.
What strikes me about the iPhone interface in general is that it gives ordinary people access to features that have been the private purview of the young and the geeky. For example, cell phones have long had contact lists, but they were typically difficult to build, maintain, and sync.
My own Motorola phone on the Verizon network required a special cord that cost me an hour of research on the web to even discover, along with several software tricks to finally get it communicating with my Mac. I have never tried to load more than a tiny fraction of my contacts anyway, since scrolling is so laborious and resyncing is highly cumbersome.
Young VS Old
The best user interfaces are those that bring advanced features within the easy reach of inexperienced users. Such was the genius of the SRI-Xerox-Apple interface embodied in the Mac, and such is the genius of the iPhone interface. As with other smart phones, Apple starts with a full QWERTY key layout. (You may find it reasonable to spell my name, Tog, “86664,” but old folks don’t. They can’t see the little letters beside the numbers to begin with, and they don’t want to learn.) Then, Apple has made an effort to make normally abstract features, such as Call Waiting and Conferencing, not only attractive, but dead simple.
I’ve read several reviews of the iPhone, primarily from England, talking about how the iPhone may be exciting to the young, but will fall on deaf older ears. They said the same thing about the Mac, yet one of the earliest, most rapidly-growing communities was people over 65. The same may well happen here because this is the most approachable full-featured phone I’ve ever seen.
The Hardware
The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.
For those who might doubt such a high value of cool, consider the self-winding Rolex, which sports 1/10th the accuracy of a Timex at 1000 times the price. With Rolex, the technology is grossly inferior, and still people will pay thousands to own it. With the iPhone, the technology is clearly superior.
The form factor, at only a silly millimeter higher and wider than the Palm Treo, but half its thickness, is an excellent compromise of screen size and handset width. The glistening black color, surrounded by chrome, is pure sex.
The screen itself is high-density, and the lack of a physical keyboard allowed the designers to make it bigger than other smart phone displays. The 320 x 480 size is equal to the practical limits of NTSC television. Yes, NTSC, not HDTV, but we’re taking about a small, highly-portable device here and, unless you wore magnifying glasses and held it up three inches from your face, you would be hard-pressed to see any additional resolution.
Where does the hardware fall down? Its biggest drawback is its five hour battery life. That’s not much talking time for the long-winded and, while it is sufficient for entertainment on domestic flights, it falls quite a bit short for international flights. "OK, so just change the battery!" Unfortunately, it requires a crowbar and a soldering iron to change the battery. That’s a bad interface.
Some folks, including Eugenia Loli-Queru, have taken me to task for the above, based on the probable availability of snap-on external batteries, airplane power cords, and the fact that most other devices are worse. These are all good points. Nonetheless, My favored video device, a PocketDish is simplicity itself. When the first battery dies, I just slap in a spare battery pack, and I'm good to go. (Bonus: The same programs iTunes charge for are all free.)
We also don’t yet know how rugged the phone is. Jobs has a habit of putting out hot-looking, but fragile devices. He shipped a few million titanium PowerBook computers a few years back, forgetting to note that titanium has a rather ugly color, so they’d dipped it in some silver paint. After a matter of months, the paint “chipped, flaked, and bubbled” off people’s machines. (In my case, it wore off selectively where my palms rested when using the keyboard.)
The first iPod Nano required exquisite care to keep from scratching it. This knocked the user experience down several notches below ideal.
The iPhone may be able to withstand everything up to a nuclear incident. It may not. We just know it is coming from a development team that twice has put out products that they either knew or should reasonably have known were subject to serious fit-and-finish defects once the buyer’s check had cleared.
The Interface, Step by Step - iPhone as a phone
This discussion tracks the features as demo’d on Apple’ s site I have taken them slightly out of order with Phone before iPod, then Internet—to make this discussion flow more smoothly. Besides, it’s supposed to be a phone, so with Phone we shall begin.
Calls
iPhone appears able to handle perhaps 10x the number of contacts of the average cell phone without undue burden on the user. The acceleration algorithm, coupled with the “friction” algorithm, appear to let the user “throw” the list with learned speed, then have it slow on its own as it nears the target, making it simple to hit the target on the first try. Very nice.
Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.
Voicemail
Random-access voicemail I’ve already commented on. To reiterate my position: It’s about time.
SMS
SMS is a wonderful feature if you’re in Europe, where the cell phone companies don’t gouge you for using it. Notwithstanding its financial handicapping in the US, Apple has made it clear and accessible, again vastly enlarging the number of people who would feel comfortable and confident using it. This impacts the young, too, since, for the first time, they will be able to text-message their parents, knowing they’ll not only notice it, but be able to read it.
The SMS interface should include an interpreter that can expand standard messaging abbreviations, converting terms such as GBTM into “Get back to me.” This is required if people are to communicate across generations without undue burden. One option would be to have the system highlight such contractions, revealing the meaning when they are touched. This would facilitate learning.
I have seen nothing to indicate that the phone has such a feature as yet.
Bruce Tognazzini
Designer, Engineer & Publisher
..........................................................................................................
| Bruce Tognazzini is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Groupthe "dream team" firm specializing in human-computer interaction. Tog was lead designer at WebMD, the super-vertical start-up founded in February, 1996 by Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. During his 14 years at Apple Computer, he founded the Apple Human Interface Group...
Click on picture to read more about Bruce Tognazzini | |
| Editorial USA Contributor |
..........................................................................................................
 | Ademilson Batista da Silva a.k.a Adhemas Batista is a Graphic designer and Illustrator from Brazil. His story is an inspiration to many around him who look up to him, as an artist and a person. He was borne in November of 1980 in the south of Brazil, São Paulo city...
Click on picture to read more about Adhemas Batista. | |
| Illustration Brazil Correspondent |
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Read SIMILAR ARTICLES on THE DRIVER SPEAKS
..........................................................................................................
© 2003 - 2007 by TAXI Design Network. All rights reserved.