Designing "Mute"

I've previously had exactly the same problem with the iPhone. I was singing in a professional rehearsal and had switched the phone to silent, but somehow in my pocket the iPod app was triggered to start playing some music. It disrupted the whole rehearsal and it wasn't clear where it was coming from at first. I was extremely embarrassed (and livid with my phone) when I realized it was coming from my own pocket. I disrupted a rehearsal that was probably costing $2000/hour.<p>I think Apple made absolutely the wrong choice here. The "silence" switch is next to useless if you can't actually count on the phone being silent when it's switched on.<p>You might ask why I didn't just turn the phone off. I put the phone in "silent" mode when I still want to receive notifications via vibrate, so I can look and evaluate whether I need to slip away and attend to something urgently.

The problem I have with the iPhone behaviour is twofold:<p>1) The most common uses for mute are situations where you absolutely don't want any sound (theatres, weddings, etc). The iPhone behaviour makes it much more difficult to guarantee this than the obvious behaviour.<p>2) It complicates something that has an obvious default behaviour. It's no longer a mute switch, it's a "mute non-explicitly-requested sounds switch".<p>I could see the iPhone behaviour being useful -- it's more flexible after all. I just don't think it's worth compromising the common case.

The solution is simple, just turn your damn phone off completely if you're at a concert.

I've lived with (though not mastered) both an iPhone and an Android device, and I don't think either gets it right. With the iPhone, I was confused how to set the volume of the alarm. The last I remember I would turn "on" sounds, set the volume I wanted the alarm at, and then silence the phone before I went to bed. I never actually learned how to do it and I never trusted it. With android, I had to find how to set the specific "alarm" volume control, which you can access if you try to select a ringtone for the alarm. I've found it once and set it and I don't have to worry about it anymore, but it took too long to figure it out and I didn't realize the alarm had its own volume slider.<p>I'm of the opinion the official alarm and timers should be the only apps that can violate the silence setting, and it should be painfully obvious how to set the volume when you set the alarm.

I disagree with the conclusion.<p>Mute is a temporary state that overrides previous requests to be loud. If thought absolutely necessary that alarms should pierce the mute, then if there are pending alarms when mute is engaged, it can alert the user at that point and give them the option.<p>The real design problem seems to be the lack of vibrate mode on the iPhone. Other phones do this to silently alert the user without disrupting a performance, secret agent mission, or other situation requiring silence. Vibrate mode solves this problem on other phones. If a phone designer chooses to eliminate the vibrate mode function, that is his prerogative but it is a design mistake to then make mute be non-silent as a result of a decision to eliminate vibrate mode.<p>But wait a minute. The iPhone <i>does</i> have a vibrate mode. Ah. Then there is no excuse at all for this is there.

The fundamental problem here is that libcrystalball doesn't exist yet: sometimes you want mute to mute the alarms (in concerts, though why would you need an alarm there) and sometimes you need mute to not affect alarms (when getting up).<p>As far as I can see, there's no way to reliably detect the situation at alarm time. Less and less as the time between setting mute and the alarm getting off increases.<p>Warning the user when turning on mute doesn't help either because for one the mute switch on the iPhone can be operated blindly because the phone wibrates when you mute it, so usually you'd not look at the phone to mute it.<p>And even if you did check its display and it did show that warning: the warning is totally useless for you most of the time (i.e before going to sleep), so that you will quickly be conditioned to ignore it - just like the security warnings in current OSes.<p>Or you are like me and have your phone muted for the majority of the time. Showing me that warning two weeks before the concert wouldn't help at all.<p>No. I believe that the current design which optimizes for the common case (not sleeping through the alarm) is fine. Just be mindful of this feature and check the alarms before the concert starts, or if you can at all afford it, just turn off the phone completely.<p>The hurdle of turning it off is as big as the hurdle of remembering to correctly set a three-state mute feature, but the current two-state one with haptic feedback has the huge advantage of simplicity.

I'm an iOS dev (approaching a million downloads), and fully half of our support requests are from people who don't understand how the mute functionality on their device works - particularly the side switch on the iPad. It's not a big deal for us since we've got a templated response at this point and it only takes a minute or two for us to send a response, but there are clearly a number of users out there that don't understand how the mute functionality is intended to work.

I'm not exactly sure how it did this, but my old Nokia 5800 used to sound alarms, even when the phone was turned off.<p>The device would power on somehow, alarm would go off, you would silence it, and the device would be off again.

&#62; When implementing the Mute switch, Apple had to decide which of a user’s conflicting commands to obey, and they chose the behavior that they believed would make sense to the most people in the most situations.<p>&#62; That’s good design.<p>Choosing one of two conflicting commands <i>without warning the user</i> is terrible design.

One guy's iPhone accidentally goes off and people think Apple made a horrible design decision?<p>Andy and his supporters are wrong. The iPhone (and Android apparently) does it right.<p>First, it's not called the "mute" switch. Apple refers to it as the "ringer" switch.<p>It works the way it must for the alarm clock to have any value at all.<p>Andy's Case A (oversleeping) would be all to common and potentially disastrous. Andy's Case B (an Ebay alert during an "important" meeting) is silly, contrived and inconsequential.<p>3-way switches, bedstand modes and sound profiles are all idiotic.

It's interesting that the controversy is completely centered around the iPhone. The behavior described for mute is exactly how Android's alarm app works as well. So it's not Apple going it alone in some quixotic quest to enforce their own twisted idea of how this should work on users in defiance of the rest of the industry.<p>I'm delighted with this behavior, because it perfectly meets one use case of mine: I want to set my phone to silent mode when I go to sleep and have it stop making notification sounds, but still beep to wake me up in the morning.

The physical mute switch was one of my favorite features when I switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone. It seems to work exactly how I want it to.<p>The only time when I want something different to happen is when I lost my phone and I want to call it from another phone. Luckily the "Find My Phone" service is now free and solves this.<p>It might be nice to expose the alarm while muted feature somewhere in the preferences but it seems like a relatively small problem.

A good solution to the iPhone's mute issue would be a <i>gasp</i> Blackberry-like <i>gasp</i> 'nightstand mode'.<p>Though it would not have saved the day in this instance, it would be a good implementation. So many times I do not want all my apps alerting me with push messages and emails and texts; I just really want phone calls or alarms to come through.

The mute button in iOS has a worse problem: the ability to be repurposed to lock orientation. I say this from my own experience having developed a popular (paid) app and dealt with angry customers complaining that it doesn't have sound.<p>After a little research it turned out that people often don't even know that their device is set to lock orientation, and sound is muted. And how would they - knowing that, other developers purposefully IGNORE mute and so they don't have to deal with a BROKEN feature. I did the same...<p>I just got tired of explaining to my clients that my app is actually fine, it's the other apps (that have sound) that are broken.

My main problem with the "mute" is that there is no visual indication whatsoever on the front of the device that it is enabled. So you have turn the phone on its side and peer at that teeeeeny little orange dot (even harder if you have any sort of case).<p>One of the very few ways the wonderfully designed iPhone is arrogantly "broken". An Android-like (gasp!) icon on the toolbar would be nice.

There are pros and cons of this. I would be late for work every other day if the iPhone did "mute" like my old Nokia. Here, this one guy's musical performance was disturbed.<p>I would probably make the same call as Apple: if you set an alarm and it doesn't go off, you're in more trouble mor of the time than if you set an alarm, forget it, and mute your phone.

Design - Protecting users that expect things do what they say, from themselves, since 1976.

"Mute alarms or don't" is a false choice. The right way to do this is straightforward. When the user presses mute, if an alarm is scheduled and DontShowAgain is false, then pop up a window and ask the user how he wants the alarm to be treated. If the user also checks DontShowAgain, set it to true and never show the window again.

One obvious solution is to have, say, an extra flavor of mute. Say a soft mute and a hard mute, where soft works like the current iOS mute and a hard mute which is a true absolute mute. And give the user a physical switch or in-software toggle between them.<p>Next problem.

I consider myself to be a pretty advanced user, I program for Apple platforms professionally, I've had an iPhone for years, and before I read this article I had <i>no</i> idea that the alarm didn't respect the mute switch. Makes me extremely grateful that I don't use the built-in alarm. When I flip the mute switch, it's because <i>I don't want the phone to make any noise</i>. An exception for music/movies makes since, because I'm requesting it right then and there. An exception for alarms makes no sense to me, as it's something you set previously and, as the unfortunate concert-goer experienced, something you may have forgotten.<p>That switch on the phone has one purpose in life: to keep my phone quiet when I'm in a situation where I don't want it to make noise. Alarms really should not override that.

Awful conclusion.<p>If the user gives conflicting commands, tell them so.<p>That's responsible design.<p>Or, avoid it, by making the switch 3 state. 1St mute: user is telling to silence all, except alarms. 2nd, user is disabling all sounds, whatsoever, even if he turn on noise fart app.<p>That's good design.