ihoby wog

When I saw iOS 7 revealed during the keynote event I knew there was something wrong with the design. My immediate takes were that it was too bright with not enough contrast for a mobile device, and secondarily that it seemed to be focused too much on a certain market that wasn’t me (or anyone I know). Beyond that I couldn’t really identify what specifically was wrong with the design.

Now that the changes have been spread to both the iCloud web service and I’ve seen it running locally on my iPad (I’m not willing to commit my iPhone to this quite yet), I can tell you exactly what is wrong… and also what they’ve improved.

Gone wrong:

• Lost affordances – most have vanished completely, likely causing current users slight confusion and new users getting utterly lost
  • Menu or button or slider or? – can’t tell until you’ve tapped or slid, depends entirely on user memories
  • Lost affordances not replaced with better design – so Newsstand is still organized in a shelf-like display WHY exactly?
  • Icon to indicator mismatch – orange dot/circle for Mail “flag” saves space at the expense of clarity and meaning
  • Blue dot beside new/updated apps – carries no meaning
• Lost features – no more Facetime video through cellular data?
• Missing gestures – can’t pinch to close a folder? etc.
• Looks awful – enough so to cause eye strain
  • Color scheme – murky contrast obscures details, too bright and/or pale
  • In-app icons – spindly thinness looks cheap and amateur, too abstract to understand
  • Slow transitions – gratuitous animation at the expense of user urgency
  • Gray backgrounds – look cheap and boring
  • Red offset color – looks like my calendar was attacked by Sally Jessy Raphael

Doing better:

• Extra library zoom out features in Photos – good for finding old photos and walking memory lane
• App switcher shortcut – nice to see app previews
• Transparency – layers context and looks cool
• Slowly moving bubbles in wallpaper and Game Center – looks cool
• Parallax – a good beginning, hope it’s not just a gimmick

With the plethora of games out there for smart phones and particularly iPhones, I used to think that there would be plenty of every genre for me to find and play at any time. The problem is though, most of the games out there are centered around mechanics that make them unplayable for the settings I’m able to play them.

What settings are those? Here’s a basic list:

• Waiting for a bus
• Riding on a bus
• Waiting in a place of business
• Holding my daughter so she’ll sleep

So with that set of contexts, a lot of common game elements don’t work for me, like:

• Sound Effects / Music / Dialogue (either can’t hear or can’t have enabled)
• Timed levels / Countdowns (if I focus that long I’ll miss my bus)
• Non-interruptible portions (all four situations are going to be interrupting me at least once)
• Two handed controls (holding my child or standing on a bus, can’t do it)
•  Motion / Orientation controls (I can’t be waving my arm around any of these places, and on a bus will constantly be registering the “shake” motion)
• Multiple continuity decisions (I’m not going to remember where I was before I paused.. that could be one or more days ago)
• Lots of intense action (raised heart rate and perspiration? not the best times for these. quick tapping/swiping will wake up my daughter)
• Intense action with lots of swiping (in warm weather my fingers will sweat, making me unable to swipe)

This list of elements probably describes most of the games currently out there. Not good. I look now at the games that have stayed on my phone, that I’ve been able to keep playing in my various settings, and I find less common elements that enable me to play them:

• Gameplay I can ignore when I look away from the screen
• Single finger/thumb operation
• Tapping vs swiping for difficult portions

I think this is where more games need to go in order to capture me as an audience—and likely others who are in similar circumstances.

Here is my grid for keeping track of how authentication methods compare to one another. Apologies if you’re color blind, since I’m using green for good, yellow for okay, and red for bad. The “hoby netid” method is a protocol of my own design that has yet to be implemented.

Ahh the age old battle between Security and Usability.

I hope in the future that we arrive at these conclusions:

• Obscurity is not security
• Security problems most popular in the news (and in Congress) are the least common in reality
• Current forms of security don’t work for people and the data proves that
• Most implementations widely used only provide the perception of security
• Nothing is uncrackable or unhackable

• Usability is usually more important than security
• Security need only be sufficient to demoralize malice, while usability must succeed in actually enticing interest in an unappealing activity (luring is more difficult than impeding)
• When we make more usable functionality quicker to implement (one line of code) then developers will welcome it
• When we prove with data that many threats are not reality and security is often overkill then employers can feel good about tipping their investment in favor of usability

Currently we have a lot of fearful perception and “what if” corner cases polluting the landscape. Getting consensus on this topic doesn’t easily happen right now. Security is entrenched in technology and that point of view is what wins most often, especially in the States.