Year: 2010

Last night something rather interesting happened, my Wife’s Grandmother was gifted on iPhone 4 for her birthday (12/21). She promptly called us to share her delight and to ask my Wife a few questions about usability. The very first thing the two of them wanted to do was to FaceTime chat with each other (they live in Portland, OR; we are in Seattle, WA).

This of course meant that my wife would have to get her Grandma to connect the iPhone to the WiFi network — by only talking her through it. What ensued was mildly amusing and frustrating for both my Wife and her Grandmother.

The problem they were having was two fold:

1. The Grandmother was not used to typing on the iPhone keyboard.
2. My Wife was glossing over key steps — assuming too much knowledge of the user.

Neither problem was either persons fault and eventually I had to help out a bit. Out of this though I want to give a few tips to readers — no doubt some of you will face these types of problems this Christmas.

1

First and foremost you need to understand that you are talking to a user that has no base understanding of iOS — telling them to press the home button is of no meaning to them. Be very clear and deliberate in the instructions you give. Do not tell them to press the ‘back button at the top’ — instead tell them to press the button with a point to the left at the top of the screen, the one that says “XYZ”.

This type of deliberate clarity will help users to understand what you are talking about with minimal frustration. Once they press it I like to let them know that this is the standard spot to press for “going back”. People pick this up faster than you would think.

2

Passwords are a bear to enter for new users. You can’t see what you are typing in most password fields and nothing is more tiring that constantly being told you typed the wrong password. There are a couple of easy ways to solve this:

1. Send the user a text message with the password and teach them to copy and paste it. This works great for stuff that people likely will never have to enter in again (like WiFi passwords). Or if the password is particularly complex.
2. Have them create a note in the notes app with the passwords and then they can copy and paste — be sure they delete this and that they don’t store passwords there.

Just because you never have problems typing in passwords on your iOS device doesn’t mean that others won’t have problems. They will. Being told they entered the wrong password multiple times in a row will turn a user off very quickly. ((Devs you really need to think about whether masking the password is necessary — most of the time you are only masking it from the person that already knows the password.))

3

The blue arrows (you know the ones on the WiFi screen) cause a lot of problems. When you are teaching someone how to add their WiFi network they may mistakenly click the blue arrow instead of just the network name. Be sure to explain which spot to tap when you are walking people through things.

I often tell people to tap the network name, not the blue arrow. It can get confusing so make sure you know exactly what they are looking at.

4

Never just take the device and set it up for some one. It will cause three problems:

1. They will not understand how to do this themselves.
2. They will think things are more complex than they are.
3. You will become the person they call every time they want to do something.

I hate taking a device from someone, but I it can also be agonizing to walk them through it — especially when something that would take you 15 seconds takes them 5 minutes. Just remember that you were there once and everyone needs to start somewhere. Patience is paramount.

5

Explain the home button. Explain that it is not a back button and that it will always take you to the home screen. Call it the home button. It is the simplest button on the phone, but that does not mean that a new user will know what it does.

6

Open the app store, get them logged in, and have them download a free app. Have them download something you think they will enjoy. The goal is to showcase the app store and show how easy it is to get more apps. Take the fear out of this process.

7

Show off something that will blow their minds. For my Wife’s Grandma it was FaceTime. For others the voice commands on the iPhone may do it. There are a ton of options — I like to show off the live weather radar you can get in apps, oh and find my device from Apple. If you know what the person is into then you should have no problem with this.

Fear

The biggest problem facing new users is the fear that they may ‘break’ the device. I like to start by telling people that there is nothing they can break unless they drop the device on concrete. Anything that they do can be undone with relative ease. Once people know that they don’t have to fear screwing up — well they tend to have fun.

This fear stems form Windows — the knowledge that if you plug that printer in to your USB port BEFORE you install drivers you will be in a world of hurt. Welcome these users to the Apple experience.

Squarespace has been one of those companies that has intrigued me from day one. In fact I have a Squarespace site for hosting my Photography portfolio — I chose Squarespace because I wanted something cheap, easy and reliable. That is exactly what the service has been since I have been using it and I rather like it. Not in the way that I want to move everything I have to Squarespace, but in the sense that I have nothing bad to say about it and until recently, nothing great to say about it.

Then they had to go and release an iPad blogging app that is bar none the best iPad blogging app out there.

Damn. Now I kinda love Squarespace.

The App

I want to make two things clear: this is not a ‘formal’ review and this app is not just good because it is better than the meager offerings currently available on the iPad.

There are still some very real glitches in the app — glitches that I would have hoped never made it through the beta period, but they did. Switching between comments and posts sometimes makes the UI cut off the top of a post in the preview. Scrolling is a little janky at times — which is very odd when you are used to the smoothness of iOS. The rest are minor UI problems that seem to stick when they shouldn’t.

What makes the Squarespace iPad app so good is that it is leaps and bounds better than the web interface Squarespace gives you. It is infinitely less confusing to use.

Using Squarespace in your web browser makes you feel like you are building single web pages — not like you are using a sophisticated CMS. Using the iPad app makes you feel like your Squarespace account is an actual blogging account — that is no small feat.

Everything that can be done in the app is done beautifully — the entire app reminds me of Reeder. The stylings are very similar. There really isn’t much else to say since the app is free I encourage you to give it a try for yourself.

Matthew Ingram on GigaOm had this to say about Flipboard:

But I wonder whether the flip-style interface for the app isn’t inherently contradictory to using it as a business or work tool — since it seems more like browsing as you flip through pages, does that make less appealing as a serious content consumption or information-intake tool?

Oddly enough the night before I read Ingram’s piece I made a note for a blog post idea in OmniFocus, that note was titled “Flipboard — useless” and in the notes field I wrote:

I digest. It browses.

Which is a rather incomplete thought meant to spur my brain when I would later see the note. Ingram said it better in the title to his blog post:

Is Flipboard Too Much Fun to Be Useful?

The short answer is: yes, but only for power users.

What started me thinking about all of this was an email I got from my dad pointing me to a blog post he read — at the bottom of this email was a line that said: “(Sent from Flipboard)”. This shocked the hell out of me — my dad uses Flipboard? I don’t even use Flipboard…

So the question is: why does my Father use Flipboard and not me?

The answer is rather easy: Flipboard promotes a browseable news experience — I being a power user prefer not to browse news — I prefer to consume news. It is the difference between an electronics store like Fry’s (or if you are old enough to remember when Radio Shack used to have parts to fix stuff) and a boutique store that you find at an over priced galleria in Beverly Hills.

At Fry’s you need to dig to find what you want — the reward though is often low prices on something you never knew existed. A boutique store shows you just a tiny bit, while the rest may be lying behind the curtain you miss it and keep looking at other things. To me that is the difference between an app like Reeder and something like Flipboard.

Flipboard is a great app for most casual users — what it isn’t and what it doesn’t pretend to be: is an app for power users.

More Power

Essentially my problem with FlipBoard is that it does too good of a job curating the content it displays. That was true at least until the most recent update, as you can now link FlipBoard to Google Reader — all of your RSS subscriptions displayed in FlipBoard.

That maybe a pretty cool feature for people that subscribe to just a handful of sites, but when you subscribe to more than 500 and are getting around 50-100 new items each hour — well flipping through virtual pages becomes highly inefficient.

Flipboard is perfect for the audience it targets and truly it doesn’t surprise me that someone like my Dad uses it. The problem is that the casual browsing nature of FlipBoard is just wasted time for a power user that knows what they are looking for. Thus the reason that I prefer a less visually stimulating app ((In the sense that Flipboard shows pretty pictures all over the place.)) like Reeder.

I think it is a great way to tell how serious people are about news: serious users are not serious Flipboard users – it just doesn’t meet their needs.