While the Apple iPhone is known for its great simplicity, some apps drive users absolutely crazy. The problems stem largely from certain app's poorly designed manipulation of the iPhone's touch features, as well as confusing button placement.
“There's a set of guidelines [developers] can get from Apple that say, here's what icons you should use for these type of functions and here's how you should lay them out,” says Bill Westerman, principal and CTO of Create with Context, a design and research firm. “This gets you 70 percent of the way there, but then there's this other 30 percent that are de facto standards which have evolved over time.” And if developers don't follow them, user frustration ensues.
Create with Context, whose customers include Accenture, Adobe and Yahoo, recently brought iPhone users to its Silicon Valley lab to observe how they interacted with iPhone apps. Researchers found that users in the study became confused due to app and button inconsistencies, buttons with graphic designs that didn't reveal their functions, poorly laid out buttons, screen layouts that lacked visual cues, and, of course, ugly icons that blemished the home screen.
Here's a look at the five most annoying app design flaws:
–Aggravating App and Button Inconsistencies
When it comes to button placement on a screen, users balk at inconsistencies between apps. For instance, touch the “+” button in the Calendar app in the upper right corner and you can create a calendar entry. The same button in the World Clock in the upper right corner brings up a clock for a new time zone. But in the Safari app, the “+” button is at the bottom of the screen, not in the upper right corner where iPhone users have to come to expect it.
The problem gets worse when a similar looking button has different functionality between apps. The main screen in the new Facebook iPhone app, for instance, lets you add buttons linking to preferred pages. In the upper right corner of a preferred page, there's a box with an arrow in it. This button design is commonly used in other apps to send information; many users naturally assume they could send the Facebook page to a friend. But in this case, the button is used for deleting the page from the main screen.
–If I Tap This, What Will Happen?
The Facebook problem is often repeated in other apps — that is, in many apps the graphic design of the button is either misleading or ambiguous.
In Safari, for instance, novice users at Create with Context's lab didn't know that the “X” button near the URL box deleted the URL text. Some mistakenly took it for the “Go” button, and as a result had to re-type the URL. They also mistakenly thought that the magnifying-glass button (which opens up Google search) in the URL box or the “+” button at the bottom of the Safari app (which enables bookmarking or emailing links) would increase text size.
Sure, newbies will figure these kinks out eventually, but there's no excuse for buttons with graphic designs that are completely ambiguous. Just look at Google Maps' button in the bottom right corner: Its unfurling paper icon gives no indication of its purpose.
Other buttons are ambiguous simply due to their placement. Again consider the Google Maps app: In the box at the top, users are supposed to enter either a search location or directions, depending on which button was pressed on the bottom of the screen. “It's a little bit confusing for new people to understand how to change from one function to another,” Westerman says, because the buttons are so far apart.
Another example of this is the YouTube app. The app provides a list of videos each with a screen shot and video title (along with starred reviews and time length), followed by a blue arrow. Most people naturally hit the blue arrow thinking it will start the video — but instead the blue arrow provides a list of related videos. You have to hit the screen shot if you want to see the video.
–I Didn't Tap That Damn Button!
An iPhone app's screen layout is usually created with an iPhone lying neatly next to the developer's computer in an air-conditioned cubicle. The real world, however, isn't so manicured. People use their iPhones while on the go, perhaps walking briskly down a busy street with the wind howling or standing in the snow trying to manipulate the iPhone with one hand with the other in a warm pocket. Users might have stubby fingers or long nails. All of these factors can lead to the accidental tapping of the wrong button.
To make matters worse, buttons are sometimes laid out close together on the screen. With the Calendar app in month view, for instance, there's not much space between the “+” button (which adds a calendar entry) and the right arrow button (which advances the month). “Somebody [in the study] would try to get to December and instead get a brand new event, and they'd say, 'What on earth just happened here?' It was very confusing,” Westerman says.
Along these lines, why are the “Delete” and “Go” buttons on Safari's keyboard nearly on top of each other? “That was frustrating to watch,” Westerman says of his experience at the lab.
Inside Create with Context's lab, frustration mounted for women with long nails as they repeatedly miss-hit buttons. “When you're trying to target a small thing on the screen, you tend to use the point of the finger tip to get that precision,” Westerman says. “When you have long nails, it's extremely difficult. I saw some real finger calisthenics as people tried to get around and tap the different buttons.”
–Where Are My Visual Cues?
Some apps excel at letting you know where your fingers are on the screen, much like the glow spot on the Palm Pre that indicates where your finger is touching. The iPhone keyboard, for instance, highlights the letter or number that's being tapped, and the water in the Koi Pond app is visibly disturbed wherever the finger touches or moves.
Without visual cues, users must learn finger-gesture capabilities through trial and error.
In the Google Maps app, novices at the Create with Context lab zoomed in by tapping; they didn't know that they could zoom in with a two-finger reverse pinch gesture. Yet even those familiar with the iPhone were not aware of the two-finger single tap to zoom out on Google Maps.
The biggest issues with visual cues relate to swiping and scrolling. In the iPod app, a horizontal view of the playlist graphically shows that there are songs to explore simply by swiping. But many apps don't have such visual cues. In some preferences panes, users don't see any reason to scroll down.
The text is aligned nicely with the bottom of the screen, hiding the fact that there are more options below.
“One developer who had this problem ended up intentionally pushing preferences further down the page so that the text was cut off [in half], giving people the hint, hey, there's more to go look for underneath,” Westerman says.
There's also some functionality that users would expect due to visual cues and learned user behavior that just isn't there. In the iPhone Calendar app's monthly view, for instance, there are arrows pointing right and left at the top of the screen to move from month to month. But many users in the Create with Context lab naturally tried to use a finger-swap gesture because, visually speaking, it made sense.
–Ugly Icons on the Home Screen
In another visual flop, some iPhone users can't stand apps with poorly designed icons when looking for apps in the App Store or having the app on the iPhone. According to Create with Context, initial perception of application quality is largely influenced by icon design.
Bright red colors send out alarms: danger, stop, error. Poorly designed or blurry icons keep some users at bay in part because they probably don't want to have that icon blemish on their iPhone. A crisp, vibrant, high-res icon, on the other hand, “does have a big impact on my actually going to look at what that is,” says a participant in Create with Context's study.
Also, the names of the apps could cause consternation among iPhone users. Clever names catch people's attention during the buying process, but may lead to confusion after a while. As an iPhone's main screens become cluttered with apps, users need simple app names to remind them of their functionality.
