Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Teo Yu Siang

FastCo Design recently published an article on the iPhone X, explaining (and lamenting) how the iPhone has gone from “the most elegant user experience ever” to a “nightmare”.

The iPhone X Is A User Experience Nightmare

It’s an interesting read, and there are a number of valid points. For instance, FastCo notes that the number of iOS gestures has reached a record high, and that necessarily results in increasingly complex UX. Many of the gestures are also hard to perform.

But it’s not a very good article.

Not because it’s an Apple-bashing article (again, the points raised were fair). It’s not good simply because it doesn’t contain a well-rounded discussion of the UX issues at the heart of the issue. It cites the problem—iPhone X’s missing home button, and the gestures introduced to replace it—and concludes that the iPhone X has disastrous UX.

And then there’s this image, created by WSJ’s Joanna Stern, that FastCo held up as non-refutable proof of iPhone X’s horrible UX:

The Internet may not need another iPhone X review but it absolutely does need the @JoannaStern iPhone X user manual: https://t.co/tS05fiLSvv

— @JoannaStern

Except it’s not a very convincing proof (I’ll explain why below).

Here are a few reasons why the iPhone X’s UX isn’t quite as nightmarish as FastCo claims it is.

The home button is over-glorified

Change is difficult. Perhaps that’s why when the iPhone X ditched the home button, it seemed like a bad design decision (and conversely, the home button seemed so attractive). Just listen to the article:

You’re looking at a UX disaster, the result of eliminating what is probably the simplest, most intuitive form of navigation ever implemented in consumer electronics: the iPhone’s home button.

There’s just one problem—the home button isn’t as simple and intuitive as it’s made out to be.

Simple navigation in a simple operating system

Sure, when the first-generation iPhone came out, the home button could only perform one action. But the original iPhone could only perform limited tasks (copy and paste, anyone?). Then multitasking came to iOS, and the home button was used to open the app switcher. And then came Siri and Touch ID.

The cost of adding more features to iOS—features that add to the user experience of an iPhone—is that the operating system must become more complex to use.

So the original home button was simple — but not really because it followed a grand design principle of simplicity, or because Apple had better designers in the good old days. It was simple because iOS was (relatively) primitive.

Design is about finding the right balance between overly simple designs (that won’t be of much use) on the one hand, and designs overstuffed with features (that become too complex to use) on the other. When smartphone design has reached maturity, this balance is exceedingly difficult to achieve.

Dedicated buttons vs buttons with multiple modes

When you add a new feature to a smartphone, such as a smart assistant or a multi-tasking app switcher, you have two choices:

Build a dedicated button for the new feature, or
Make an existing button work with multiple modes

Like most design decisions, there are pros and cons to each approach.

Building a dedicated button for each feature will quickly create a Frankenstein device with so many controls it becomes unusable. On the other hand, adding a new mode to an existing button makes operating with that button more complex.

Faced with this choice, Apple and Google overwhelming preferred the latter. That’s why the volume up button is also the button to capture a screenshot on the iPhone X, and why tapping Android’s recent apps (square) button once, twice, and holding it triggers different actions.

The problem with the assertion that the iPhone X’s UX suffered a lot with the removal of the home button is that it misses the point that the home button is already a button with multiple modes (and therefore not easy to use). The multiple actions weren’t newly introduced with the iPhone X, they had just shifted from the home button to the screen. There was no jump in complexity.

iPhone X requires a complicated user manual—and so does every other smartphone

Now we return to Joanna’s witty iPhone X user manual.

The Internet may not need another iPhone X review but it absolutely does need the @JoannaStern iPhone X user manual: https://t.co/tS05fiLSvv

— @JoannaStern

At first glance, the iPhone X is clearly way too complex. Just look at the amount of commands you need to master! But hold that thought, and look at this user manual I’ve created for Google’s Pixel 2 XL:

The point is, just because you can create a user manual pointing out every function a device can perform, doesn’t necessarily mean that its UX is horrible. Going back to my previous point, the more features you add to something, the more complex it gets.

Furthermore, just as there is a spectrum of design simplicity (from overly simple to overly complex), there is also a spectrum for the kinds of users.

One of the goals of design is to make the product easy enough for casual users, but complex enough to satisfy power users too. With the iPhone X (and Pixel 2), there is clearly an effort to keep key actions like returning to home and app switching simple. But, as with most things, YMMV.

Claiming that the iPhone X has horrible UX — and that it’s caused by the removal of the home button — is not only nonsensical, but also not useful. It sidesteps the problem—that smartphones in general are getting more and more complex. It also doesn’t consider the utterly challenging design decisions that companies like Apple and Google face.

Perhaps the smartphone, as a form factor, is itself problematic. After all, it has very limited physical space, and constantly over-promises what it can do. But that’s less of an iPhone X problem, and more of an industry-wide problem. And it’s less about removing a home button, and everything to do with adding even more features to the smartphone.

The iPhone X’s UX is a nightmare… not was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The iPhone X’s UX is a nightmare… not

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