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iPhone UX issues and inconsistencies

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I've noticed a few iPhone UX inconsistencies and issues in my cursory poking at the device.

Widgets everywhere: Upon playing with the iPhone, it's pretty clear that most of the apps are actually widgets. My first thought is that you can consider all of the 12 icons on the upper part of the screen to be widgets. Stocks, weather, clock, calculator, and notes are the most obviously widget-y of them, since they're already familiar to OS X dashboard users. Only the four apps in the lower part of the screen (phone, mail, Safari, iPod) are real apps. I wonder if Apple will allow developers to create iPhone widgets before they'll allow developers to create real apps.

Yahoo! everywhere: The iPhone is getting a lot of data from Yahoo! instead of other sources. The OS X weather widget gets its data from AccuWeather, and the stock widget gets its from Quote.com. This is a great opportunity for Yahoo! to try to rebuild its mindshare in the face of the Google juggernaut.  Okay, so strictly speaking, this isn't an issue.  It's just interesting to note the difference between them.

iPhone widgets aren't identical to their OS X counterparts: While many of the widgets are ones that are already on OS X, there are a few differences in them. The only difference between the OS X calculator widget and the iPhone calculator widget is that the iPhone one doesn't have an orange border. The iPhone weather widget is vertically-oriented instead of horizontally-oriented. The iPhone stock widget is virtually identical, but here's a couple of minor differences in how you enter additional stocks.

Reordering in widgets: The clock is the most fully-featured of the widgets, and it's the one that introduces the UX inconsistency. In the clock, enter the edit mode, and add your cities. The resulting city tiles have a little grab-handle on the right side, which you can use to drag them around. However, the other widgets just don't have that. The only way to get the items in those widgets in the right order is to enter them in the correct order from the beginning.  

How much information is there? : Apps with more than one screen of information have scrollbars, but they only become visible when you're scrolling the screen. In some apps, it's obvious that you have more below the fold. But in some apps, such as the clock widget, it's easy to glance at the screen and not realise that there's more below it. One easy way to solve this without having to show the scrollbars is to not make the tiles fit perfectly on the screen. Instead, show me half of one of the tiles that's off-screen. Then I know there's more below (or above).

Stop with the stock apps: What is it about new gadgets that make people think that the one app that I simply must have is something to keep track of my stocks? Yes, I do own some individual stocks, but I'm not a day trader. I pay very little attention to what my stocks are doing on a daily basis, or even a weekly basis. I'm vaguely annoyed that I have to have this stock widget on my iPhone screen all the time, even though I'm never going to open it after I've set up my stocks in it the first time.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2007
    Your widget dragging inconsistency is illustrative of your improper assumption - likely the 'real' APIs provide richer drag functionality and used in real apps. The most likely answer is that the Clock is only partially a widget and uses application level parts where applicable (everything not in the widget on OS X). In addition, I'd say most of the apps are real apps based on the depth of what they do and the richness of said experience - Phone, Mail, Safari, iPod, SMS, Camera, Photo, YouTube, Google Maps, Calendar, and Settings. Obviously only a handful are driven with widget technologies.

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2007
    How they're coded (widget vs app) doesn't matter to me as a user.  What matters to me is that one app has one kind of behaviour, and another app has another kind of behaviour.  

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2007
    doesn't the re-ordering of call favorites work the same way as the re-ordering of clocks? that would be consistent. but, i'd say the ux is what sets this device apart from all before it. the emotional impact is there. you know, the problem with ux people is they concentrate on nothing but the logic behind a ui and forget about the emotion of it. finally, i think with this phone, that's proved the wrong way to go about it. i work for a rather large mobile company - our products' ux has obviously been defined by vapid engineers - and it shows. maybe now they'll listen to designers a bit more closely.

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2007
    Stumpy - You know, I haven't tried that yet, so I'll have to do that next. I don't think that it's fair to characterise me as forgetting about the emotion behind the UX, although I understand why you might think that from this post.  I only whinged about a few things, I didn't post about the parts that I like.  That post is half-written and coming soon. :) This afternoon, I discovered the sheer joy of playing around with the bouncing effect when you hit the edge of the screen.  You can swipe diagonally, and the page bounces on that angle.  That's going to provide me hours of entertainment.  (Yes, I know, I'm easily amused.)

  • Anonymous
    July 01, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2007
    Ronne - regular calculators calculate as they go, you are expected to be the determiner of the order of operations and enter your calculation correctly.   It's true that some calculators allow you to enter an entire formula (2 + 2 * 2) then hit "=" In that case the calculator performs the order of operations for you. But in the iphone calculator, (and the one on my site, MiniCalc) when you enter 2 + 2, then hit * the total is calculated (4) and that total is then multiplied by the next digit entered (2) which gives the answer of 8. MiniCalc also adds the sine and exp functions that the iPhone Calculator omits.  I'm still adding functionality to it. I could see an iPhone software update adding a more robust calculator.  We'll see.

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2007
    This is annoying. As stated above, macs and iphones get their weather data from 2 different sources. So, RIGHT NOW, my iPhone says it's sunny today, but supposed to rain for the rest of the week. My MacBook Pro says it's supposed to rain today and tomorrow, but be sunny the rest of the week. The current temps are 2° off. Completely ignoring which is more ACCURATE, it'd sure be nice if they were at least the SAME. A buddy reminded me,  that "a man with a clock always knows the time. A man with two clocks is never sure."

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2007
    I am so used to burning a CD in iTunes that now when I get a new text message on my iPhone, I am confused for about 5 seconds since it uses the same sound.