Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Amrit Pandey

Necessity was the mother of invention in mobile manufacturing industry.

Why do I say ‘was’? It is because, companies like Apple and Google are forcing user experience adaptation by compromising obvious user needs, hint: removal of head phone jack.

Evolution in design is possible only when companies work for improving user’s life and make things stupidly easy to use. But today, we are seeing force adaptation of experiences as removal of most needed elements of any smartphone like headphone jack, home button and more, leaving users no choice but to accept the situation.

It is 2017, companies have finally started caring about specifications in devices but somewhat disregarded real user experience. Let us see how new iPhone X has affected some of the basic user experiences.

Ambidextrous all the time

Imagine yourself holding iPhone X in your right hand, now swipe down the control panel with left hand finger, It is pretty easy. But, now try to open notification panel from your right hand finger itself, you have to change the holding position of your hand to touch the top left corner of the screen! A slight jerk, and your phone will fall in later situation.

Half the population of users, use phone with one hand, those include people with disabilities as well. But iPhone X notch is a big trouble when you want to touch the top corners of the phone, with smaller surfaces, and operate the device with just one hand.

See this clip, where person have to use his other hand to operate iPhone X.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/20f9e346d333c52d62c0de6834367da5/href">https://medium.com/media/20f9e346d333c52d62c0de6834367da5/href</a>

Everyone knows your password!

Congratulations, with FaceID the probability of people unlocking your phone is one in a million, except everyone knows what’s the password.

Google : Password is a secretive phrase or code that is required to gain admission to a place.

Imagine yourself sitting in a restaurant with your friends, one your friend saw a shiny, edge to edge 5.8inch screen device on the table. Out of curiosity she raises the phone(the screen lights up), and pointed the IR blaster towards your face and asked “Is this yours?”, iPhone recognizes your face and unlocks the phone, and she is now in possession of your personal data in her hand, to which she doesn’t even had to ask. FaceID have also failed to compare similar looking faces.

People can be very creative unlocking your iPhone X now, if they can physically access it, at least touch ID gave us 10 ways or 20 if you use all the fingers in your body.

What should you call your phone?

Should I call it X or Ten?

Much before specification of iPhone were taken care of, much of its fame was because of its name. Today we have numerous smart phones in the market, but iPhone have their own category, with numbers attach after their name, describing about how good they are from other devices in the family.

Now, when there is an unexpected roman numeral that decide its version number, that particular iPhone deviates from its legacy. Users are debating over iPhone X name, whether to call my device X or ten. Some feels they are now forced to visualize uppercase X as ‘Ten’.

If you ask me, the first time I heard ‘iPhone Ten’ from Tim Cook, I took ‘ten’ as ‘tan’ like tangent in trigonometry. Funny huh? I know.

The return of Camera Bump

I believe Steve Jobs would have agreed on this with me.

Steve Jobs knew that essential things like camera, speakers and microphones must be integral parts of any device, specially computers, and also they must feel the same, how can we forget the aesthetics of iPhone 4!

After iPhone 6, Apple is rampaging to make camera bump bigger and bigger not only in thickness but also in surface area. It is a distraction in iPhone’s design principles and overall look.

Headphone Jack is not coming back!

A decade ago mobile phones came with just one port, and quite surprisingly, the single port was used to charge and listen to music with headphones.

Single port on iPhone X reminds me of the reverse turn companies have taken in design principles. Apple do have wireless Air Pods but, they don’t give you one with the phone, so a question arise here, whether Apple really want user experience to evolve?

You can either deal with the single port or buy freakishly expensive two small buds for more than $140, which by the way can easily be lost.

There maybe no conclusion to this

At the end, it has always been the companies like Apple or Google who have truly worked for people and making their life easier. But present events have worked against user experience.

Apple needs to care a bit more about user experience than to make pretty products that falsely improve lives of people by compromising most needed user experience.

iPhone X : Disregarding obvious User Experience was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

iPhone X : Disregarding obvious User Experience

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