iPhone interaction

Yes, I stood in the queue last night. Arriving at 5:30pm, there were only a handful outside Carphonewarehouse, though a much larger crowd had formed at the O2 shop just 200m down the street. There was plenty of banter to be had, people discussing what they did with their Mac and how they tried to resist the lure of the iPhone, but couldn’t.

Just for a few moments I felt slightly embarrassed about queueing up for a phone, I mean it’s a phone, it’s not essential to life and if I got it in a few weeks time would my life be any different? Of course it would, as anyone who owns any Apple technology will understand. It’s not just a phone, it’s technology in its highest form, something which is designed to make your life not only easier, but will also do so with elegance and emotion. So why would I want to delay that experience?

Sitting in front of my Mac, I unpack the box. No familiar Apple smell that you get with any Mac or last-gen iPods (not sure about iPod touches), but the overall presentation is still high, though lagging behind that of the early generation iPods. Taking the lid off, you are greeted with the iPhone itself, resting like King Tutankhamen in his sarcophagus. Inside the box there’s also a dock, stereo headphones (let’s remember this is an iPod also) which double as a hands free kit and mains charger, if required.

Activating the iPhone was straightfoward, a step-by-step guide handled via iTunes. This was the most seamless setting up of a new phone I’ve ever had, there was no need to phone the network company to get them to enable features that should work by default. Carphonewarehouse had even prepared generic PAC codes for the iPhone so that no one would have to wait to port their number. No sim cards to put in or fiddle with, nothing, just simplicity.

The iPhone screen now says ‘iPhone is Activated’, we’re in business. The screen is bright, very bright and the colour is vivid and definite. I take the phone out of the dock and brush my finger over the unlock area, say hello to iPhone.

The sync process had automatically set up my six e-mail accounts and downloaded my mail, all my iCal events were already there as were my Safari bookmarks. Connecting to my secure wireless network was a piece of cake, I compare this with the herculean task of trying to connect HP iPAQs and other such devices to wireless networks and I wonder why hasn’t anyone else made it this easy?

Ok, let’s talk about the apps and interaction. I launch Safari, the first thing that hits is me that this is not a diminished web-browsing experience that I have come to expect from other mobiles or handheld devices. This feels exactly like browsing in Safari on my Mac, no compromise other than the inevitable spatial restriction. The fonts are beautifully rendered, very smooth and a pleasure to read. Safari always did handle fonts very well, nothing like the vulgarity of Firefox or IE. Using the synced bookmarks I open up BBC News, Amazon, my online bank, Facebook and several other sites, all are rendered the same as on my desktop. I simply haven’t browsed the web like this ever before on a mobile phone (or PDA for that matter). Then there’s how it works, zooming in, moving around, following hyperlinks is achieved with just a point or flick of the finger. Could it be any easier? Each new page opens fully zoomed out, adhering to Ben Shneiderman’s information visualisation principle of overview first, then detail second (zooming in this case). I went to the London Tube website and clicked on a link to a PDF map of the underground. The PDF opened in a new window, no download window or unnecessary distractions, everything is focussed on the user’s task. The PDF was rendered by Safari as it is on the Mac, and switching between two windows is nothing but unadulterated pleasure. Clicking a button makes the page zooms out and allows me to just scroll between all open windows. Almost like a relative to Exposé in OS X. I can zoom in on the PDF just as if it were any web window.

It’s not only the key apps that impress, but small details such as the alarm clock are a delight. The time is shown using dials, a metaphor that anyone can understand. This makes the UI cognitively transparent, users know exactly how to set the time as dials are commonly used and understood in real life. A flick of the finger and the dials are scrolling around to the correct time. This is really the power of the iPhone, up until now user’s interact with mobile phone merely by pushing binary buttons, now the relationship is much more physical, adding a tangible element that adds depth to the experience. For example, browsing my photos on the iPhone almost feels like I’m holding a physical photo, I move to the next one by moving it out of the way with my finger, I zoom in to specific areas by spatially marking a zone with my thumb and forefinger, the same fingers I would use to hold a photo.

If I were to point to an achilles heel however, it would be typing SMS text messages. The current approach involves typing on a qwerty keyboard layout, which is far from optimal. Even though I have slender fingers, I do make mistakes when typing, sometimes corrected by the dictionary, sometimes corrected by me. There are two key problems here, the first is Fitts’ law, which basically says that small targets take the user longer to hit accurately. So the small keys are at best just going to slow you down, or at worst, cause you to make mistakes. The second problem is that the qwerty keyboard has 26 characters which causes the user to visually search from too many options for the target key. Even though I can touch type, I spent too much time looking for the correct key to type, I don’t type on a desktop keyboard by looking, it’s done by proprioception, so there’s no need to go with this UI approach. To solve this, I think the Apple designers should have went with showing the keypad of a typical mobile phone (9 keys) and using T9 prediction. This would have made each key larger, had less keys for the user to visually scan, and also would have used most user’s current knowledge of how to text. This would have resulted in faster, more accurate texting.

I was hoping that my slow and inaccurate typing was due to my newness of this interaction approach, however Stephen Fry reports in his Guardian column today that he’s had an iPhone for four months and he still finds it difficult.

Streaming TV to the iPhone was as a doddle. My Mac records TV using an Elgato, their recent update allows wi-fi streaming of recorded TV content directly to the iPhone. The flash of the camera has exposed the fingerprints on the screen, these are not seen under normal viewing.

Coming back from London to Brighton on the train today I was able to search for restaurants in Brighton, find reviews of them, then use the maps app to pinpoint them. I’ve just never had this experience on any mobile device before, it really is a generation ahead of anything else I’ve used.

There are many areas I haven’t touched on (excuse the pun), but I can say that I constantly find surprises around every corner and clear evidence of considered thought and design. The OS X experience has finally made it to the phone, or put another way, delight, surprise, pleasure, elegance and intelligence are now on a mobile.