How people really use the iPhone

http://www.slideshare.net/createwithcontext/how-people-really-use-the-iphone-presentation/

by wird • 18 years ago

155 60 18 years ago

Great find.

DenisM2• 18 years ago

Surprisingly, article matches it's title. They actually did put camera and recorded how different users used iphone given specific tasks. This looks like good data to me, i'll go finish the slide deck.

dangrover• 18 years ago

This is great!

The thing is, though, for a lot of the "problems" they found with Apple's UI, fixing it would cause other problems. Such is the nature of design.

DenisM2• 18 years ago

I think the idea is not to avoid all problems, but rather avoid unnecessary problems.

unalone4• 18 years ago

Yeah. For instance, a lot of the button-consistency issues could be fixed without harming the interface.

shimi• 18 years ago

Thank you for sharing that!

Pure gold!!!!

briansmith2• 18 years ago

This was awesome, but I recommend viewing the high-res PDF instead: http://www.createwithcontext.com/landing-iphone.html

Incidentally, Scribd and Slideshare have given me a newfound appreciation for Adobe Acrobat. A couple of years ago nobody would have said "I just want a good old PDF."

alaskamiller• 18 years ago

I love PDFs. I hate Acrobat.

kirubakaran4• 18 years ago

I love xpdf.

briansmith2• 18 years ago

I used to feel that way until Acrobat 8 because Acrobat was always so slow. However, versions 8 and 9 open PDF files much faster and are more reliable than previous versions, so I don't see the point of the alternative PDF viewers any more.

PieSquared2• 18 years ago

Does anyone know of alternative PDF viewers which deal well with large images? Because I know Acrobat, Foxit, and Evince all aren't great and slightly choke up.

unalone4• 18 years ago

Thanks a ton for the link!

For me, my opinion shifted once I had a Mac, and Preview.app. Before then, I loved Scribd (though Slideshare is just horrible). Now, it seems inefficient by comparison.

ovi2562• 18 years ago

Yeah, Preview is awesome. Bu Firefox on Mac OS X by default saves all docs, this sucks.

bd• 18 years ago

Slideshare presentation is also high-res, just hit "full screen" button in the lower right corner.

technoguyrob• 18 years ago

Some people read that presentation in NOT full screen?

Maybe someone should write a "How People Really Use Slideshare" post...

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

Thanks for providing an iPhone friendly version.

My biggest gripe with the iPhone is that the optimal zoom for viewing a web page is slightly larger than the width of the phone. To read a page, I have to constantly swipe left and right a bit. I wish they had a text-only zoom mode that would fit pages to the width of the phone at a comfortable text size.

auston• 18 years ago

How many people participated?

timtrueman2• 18 years ago

Wow, slide two was TERRIBLE! I couldn't read the text with that very distracting background, who does that?

DeadlyBrad42• 18 years ago

Yeah. For a slide show investigating design, readability, and ease of use, the second slide seems a bit out of place. Luckily, the rest of it is easy to understand, and very useful and interesting.

spohlenz• 18 years ago

It looks fine in the PDF. It seems like a translucent layer is missing in the slideshare version.

timtrueman2• 18 years ago

Oh that makes a lot more sense. Good catch.

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

I'd love to see more details of this or follow on research. They did an excellent job. None of the suggestions here would be surprising to a UX expert but having them in context is really helpful.

avinashv• 18 years ago

Wow--it really surprised me how much I take for granted in interacting with a UI. The big piece of information for me was the placement of the buttons in Safari. Extremely interesting.

The carrier in the images is T-Mobile; jailbroken iPhone?

johns2• 18 years ago

Or T-Mobile Germany

unalone4• 18 years ago

The things that interested me were the comments that people made: the more specific pieces of information. Not having enough dexterity to manipulate the phone, for instance. I never would have thought about that.

I also found the comment about not knowing album art slightly sad, even though I've had the same feeling before. It feels very slightly like the end to yet another music era.

johns2• 18 years ago

You can two finger tap to zoom out in Maps?! Frick. Did not know that. I suck at iPhone.

unalone4• 18 years ago

I think that was their point: it's an incredibly small feature that doesn't advertise itself well.

That was my first reaction too, though. I must admit.

axod4• 18 years ago

One thing that seems to get people is 2 finger to scroll divs/iframes in safari. Pretty intuitive when you think about it, but some don't. Especially when the scrollbars aren't obvious.

markessien• 18 years ago

Intuitive? I'm not sure you understand that word.

axod4• 18 years ago

OK, what other method could you have to scroll a div/iframe? It was the first one that I thought might work, so I tried it. Unless I'm mistaken that made it intuitive for me.

I do get your point though - for some people it's not obvious...

d0mine• 18 years ago

"Intuitive" means I did similar things a hundred times in the past.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

I think the whole gestures thing is NOT intuitive. There is nothing that invites the user to do that stuff. I think scrolling is OK because we have all seen it in the iPhone advertisements. But do stuff with 2,3 or even 4 fingers? Why would I ever even try it? It's like pressing CTRL+@+ALT+AppleKey+xyz.

axod4• 18 years ago

If it's not something you'd try, what would you try?

pxlpshr• 18 years ago

great stuff in that presentation! what also interested me was the bit on application pricing because that's what I'm struggling with at the moment.

do we go the .99 cheapy-route or price at a premium to maintain a status-quo. hmmmmmm

jcl3• 18 years ago

One guy I heard from recently recommended pricing cheap until you get on a top-100 list, then jacking up the price. Of course, he was trying to market a game, which probably has different market dynamics than an application.

jamesjyu• 18 years ago

This just goes to show you that nothing beats good old fashioned usability tests with actual users. They'll unearth the most obvious problems with interfaces that you're blind to.

AndrewWarner• 18 years ago

I thought I was the only one who found "the most intuitive phone in the world" a bit confusing. I also hate touching the screen because I sometimes accidentally click something I didn't mean to.

golmuso• 17 years ago

when you use msn on iphone does it charge to your usage? if so, how much usage does msn take

How people really use the iPhone

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