<i>Pressing a button is an action that a gestural UI can communicate visually, but there are a number of other actions that have no visual cue. Direct manipulation gestures such as tap (on something other than a button), double-tap, tap-and-hold, swipe, and pinch/zoom are far more difficult to communicate. These rely on user experimentation and memory.<p>Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.</i><p>I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.<p>It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom, undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement <i>at all</i> is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy requirements as much as they have.
This is a very good essay that reminds me of my favorite passage of Jacob Nielsen's, from "2D is Better Than 3D":<p><a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html</a><p><i>Note that 3D works for games because the user does not want to accomplish any goals beyond being entertained. It would be trivial to design a better interface than DOOM if the goal was to kill the bad guys as quickly as possible: give me a 2D map of the area with icons for enemy troops and let me drop bombs on them by clicking the icons. Presto: game over in a few seconds and the good guys win every time. That's the design you want if you are the Pentagon, but it makes for a boring game.</i><p>The guy does undersell the iPhone's usability, though. In particular, the key phone feature -- dialing the name of someone on your contact list -- is <i>far</i> more usable than an old-school dial telephone (where you have to remember a number) and likewise far more usable than on a cheap cell phone (where you have to do a lot of button-press scrolling, or use a numeric keypad to type the letters of someone's name... which means you have to <i>remember</i> the name in advance.) Indeed, the iPhone has exactly what the usability folks have been agitating for for years: A big flat list of people's names or pictures, where you touch one and it immediately dials them.<p>I think the moral of that story is Pareto's Rule: if you nail the usability of <i>one</i> common feature, people will praise your device's usability in general, even if the rest of it plays out like an adventure game.
What works 11 years ago might not have worked today. Same for user interface design for the web. No one recognizes the drop down suggestion. User interface evolves like technology, and without doubt, the iPhone is a class of device of it owns that have never existed before any other. So I would give Apple the thumbs up for creating an user interface that not only is fun but usable on a revolutionary device.
I don't think tutorials are a good idea. Let the user figure it out by themselves so they develop some basic intellectual curiosity to learn on their own. It's not like there are millions of confused iPhone owners out there completely baffled by the iPhone UI. It's pretty obvious stuff. Basic "learn by mistake" experience exposes all the less obvious iPhone UI features after a few hours of use.
It's funny to see the critique of iPhone usability go up and down. First there was the critique that it couldn't do enough, there was no undo, no copy or paste, no easy way to delete things, the UI was too much like it was on the Mac.<p>Now that those features have been added and the UI for the iPhone has become more distinct from the Mac, you get the critique that it is all way too complex.
Maybe the iPhone could be easier to use, but it's much easier than a lot of the phones out there. I have heard a bunch of people in their 50s and 60s complain about the Blackberry Storm, and how difficult it is to use when compared to the iPhone. It's fairly simple to figure out how to do the basic stuff on the iPhone, which is really all most people are looking for.
It seems like there is an obvious point left unsaid- touch user interfaces are more fun. Sorry, no citation, this is just my impression. If you had to operate the iPhone with a mouse and keyboard the experience would be entirely different. It just seems a lot harder to try and make a website playful because using a mouse is not fun.
I think emphasizing "fun" and "playing" misses the point. Take a step back. The web browsing experience on the iPhone is literally an order of magnitude better than what came before. The screen is huge and gorgeous and responds to your touch. The interface and apps, by and large, are super-slick and polished in all respects. So of course it's "fun"! But these are also the reasons it's tremendously "usable" as a device.<p>It's ridiculous to pick on the iPhone for its "swipe" and "shake" gestures, declare it "hard to use", and look for some other adjective that doesn't have to do with usability to explain its strengths.
So who is gonna be the first to write the application that solves this guys problem? I mean, he just laid out an interesting problem. I'm not even an iPhone user but I'd be willing to bet you can't man most iPhone apps; here's an interesting idea, unlike man, how about an application that takes the user on an event-per-view tour of the application. I mean is there not a way to dig into an existing applications events, am I missing something here, or is accessibility really this big of an issue?
<i>Not only do users have to learn and memorize what the device does, they have to learn how each application makes use of those functions!</i><p>Heaven forfend!
To me it seemed like the author was just fumbly with his fingers. Triggering undo and such. This information can be found online or in the manual so if he would just rtfm it would be obvious how he caused the delete button to show up.<p>Also, the other glaring example here is the one about the mail client refresh-vs-reply arrows. Aren't these two icons the exact same icons used for pretty much the whole history of the internet? Circular arrows = refresh; Left arrow = reply.<p>New things sometimes require just a bit of effort because you aren't familiar with it. In other words, easy-to-use != just like every other phone out there. It's pretty close to a 'fundamentally new UI' - just because you don't grok it within 5 seconds doesn't make it hard to use.
before reading this, I thought I was going to respond with some witty retort like "anecdotal evidence proves otherwise", but it's actually a very good essay.