Design Details: Observations on the iPhone UI
Marc is one of the iPhone owners here at Taptu, and following a lunchtime conversation about how we feel about that much-talked-about phone, he was prompted into writing a post about the few things that irritate him about it. (Granted he’s pretty irritable these days with a little sprog who wakes up in the night! 
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1) No ‘Silent mode ON’ indicator in UI
I often flip the Silent switch on when I’m in a meeting. But when I get out I often forget to flip it back resulting in a barrage of missed calls. There are even times when I use my iPhone unaware that it’s still in Silent mode, and will be for the next 4hours. Let’s face it, the Silent switch is pretty discrete. I’m not saying I’d like a gargantuan neon button on the front of the device, I’m just saying that the iPhone is in desperate need of an elegant UI solution - a visual indicator in the header area to remind me when it’s in Silent mode.
2) Privacy of incoming SMS’s
I invested in an Apple iPhone 3G Dock to show off my prized possession in the office and reduce scratching on the back. But there’s an unexpected flip-side: whenever I get an SMS, the backlight comes on and the body of my SMS is shown proud to all - no user-interaction is involved. This is pretty neat when in the confines of your home, but can be pretty embarrassing when you’re in the office and a risqué message comes in from your wife/girlfriend/mistress. Give me a setting for this behaviour, Apple!
3) Dictionary auto-correction drives me nuts
Why doesn’t the dictionary automatically learn the spellings I frequently use?
It’s so irritating to have to dismiss the auto-correction popup every time I use the word “dood” into an SMS or email, and even more annoying to find it has sneakily auto-corrected it to “food” for me leading to much confusion for the recipient. [Ed.: Possible that Apple sees more sense than Marc and thinks "dood" should be banned from the English language? However "w00t!" is accepted and in the dictionary... apparently!]
4) Inconsistency between native applications
Here’s one example: In cover-flow mode in the iPod app you can press the little ‘i’ icon in the bottom-right to flip the album cover-art over and see it’s track listing. Ok, I’ve got the hang of that now - it gives me additional contextual info. So, when I’m checking the temperature in Boston in the Weather app, why does the very same ‘i’ icon flip over the panel to reveal a settings page for *all* my cities? Seems like odd behaviour until you get used to it. Aside from consistently using a flip transition, the panel the ‘i’ icon behaves very differently at times, leading to unexpected behaviour.
5) Where do I go for what?
And don’t even get me started on having to remember to go to the iPod app when I want to play a video… my device isn’t an iPod, it’s an iPhone. ‘iTunes’ would be a more suitable name to get to my music/video as that’s what it’s called on my Mac, so why do I have to relearn the terminology for each device? Here’s a suggestion: relabel iTunes > iTunes Store, and iPod > iTunes.
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October 10th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
#1: The silent indicator is the physical switch on the side. I prefer this to other phones, because I can flip it to silent while it’s in my pocket; rather than taking it out, unlocking it, setting it to silent, then putting it away.
#2: But there IS a setting for this. In Passcode Lock, there’s a toggle for “SMS Preview”
#3: When the iPhone is trying to auto-correct something, if you say “no, that’s wrong” by tapping the “X” next to the word that it predicts, then it will add the current word to the dictionary and never bother you again.
#4: Yeah, you get used to it. It’s hard to cram all of the features you need, but ignore all of the requested features people say they want but don’t really (like youtube in a phone), and all at the same time fitting it into a small, intuitive interface.
#5: I’ll admit this one is a little confusing. At first, there was just the iPod app; then about 6 months later they added the iTunes app for purchasing songs, which was a requested feature from a lot of charter users.