Despite the intention of opening new worlds and reaching millions of users, we select our identities from a drop-down menu. We enter one value for our names, gender, sexuality, relationships and ethnicity, constraining our digital personhood in a database schema. These designs limit expression while excluding and erasing marginalized identities. They reflect the restricted imagination of their creators: written and funded predominantly by a privileged majority who have never had components of their identity denied, or felt a frustrating lack of control over their representation. But human identity, relationships, and behaviour are all endlessly complex and diverse: our software needs to start expecting and valuing marginalized identities instead of perpetuating their erasure.
So much of humanity cannot be reduced to simple choices that are “easy” to add to a database schema. Even those of us who seem to neatly fit into the boxes of tech should have the choice not to. Emily also makes an important note: how much of this data do they really need? Even for ad targeting, it would be better for the data collected to be accurate, and free-form input is the way to do it.
One of the difficulties I’ve found in writing about smartwatches is that there’s no good answer about what they are for. There’s plenty that they can do: fitness tracking, notification triage, glanceable information, contextual computing, showing the time—but none of these stands above any of the others. It’s a conundrum I had when I tried using and writing about the Pebble, and it continues to be a conundrum six months into life with the Apple Watch.
That’s not to say I don’t like my Apple Watch. I still wear it every day, unlike John Gruber. At the bare minimum, it’s the best fitness tracker I’ve ever owned, though I haven’t had the same level of success as Jim Dalrymple from using it. Still, the fitness features alone is enough to keep it on my wrist seven days a week. Filling the rings is still insanely motivating, the workout tracking is great for my daily walks, and Sleep++ fills in the missing feature of the FitBits and Jawbones I’ve used in the past. That’s huge.
Everything else? I’m not sure. There’s still a lot of friction to using the Watch to do things that I used to do on my phone. Sometimes, that friction is because using the phone is engrained in my muscle memory. For others, it’s because using the Watch is a clunky experience due to slow software. I’ve ameliorated some of the frustration around app slowness by turning on “Resume to Previous Activity” for the Wake screen in settings. This means that, if I want to do something on my Watch, I can launch the app, lower my wrist, and bring it back up a minute or two later without losing where I want to be. I sometimes forget to go back to the watch face, but that’s less inconvenient than trying to launch an app, checking my watch, and being back on the watch face.
An ongoing thing with my Watch, particularly since the release of watchOS 2 has been determining specifically what information I keep on my watch face and in my glances. What information do I need to see when I turn to my wrist, versus what do I want quick access to, but not immediately on my wrist? I’ve yet to settle on any particular setup, but I want to reduce the amount of redundancy between Complications and Glances. I’m currently using a Modular face with Complications for Fantastical (showing the date), Sleep++, Streaks, Lose It!, and Dark Sky. I also have a Utilty face set up with just Sleep++, Streaks, and Dark Sky for when I need something less busy. Finally, I have an X-Large face for when all I need is the time. As for Glances: I’m using Battery, Settings, an app for NYC subway status, Now Playing, Due, Things, Activity, Lose It!, and the Heart Rate monitor. I keep a few more apps installed, but rarely use them. Some stuff just… doesn’t need to be on the wrist, I think.
I am making a concerted effort to use the watch more—especially Siri. Siri is great in the kitchen for setting timers, provided you give it a little slop time. I’m making sure to track more of my walks as workouts, and I’m trying to train myself to use the controls in the Now Playing glance when I need to control my music, versus whipping out my phone again. Did you know that if you’re playing audio from an app that also has a Watch app (say, Overcast, for example), tapping the scrolling title will take you to that app on the Watch? I didn’t until just recently. If there’s been a theme for the last six months of using my Watch, it’s figuring out what I want to get out of it, and dropping what it’s bad at. Six months from now, a year from now, who knows?
I know there’s plenty I don’t use the Watch for, though. It’s not a great communication device, mostly because I don’t know enough people with both iPhones and Apple Watches to use some of the more interesting communication features. I’ve used quick replies and dictation over iMessage from time to time, but never more than once or twice a month. I’ve only used Digital Touch and Sketches once or twice with some Internet friends who own watches. And since my bank doesn’t support Apple Pay yet, about the only time I ever hit the side button on my Watch is by mistake, or to force quit a stuck app. (Hold the side button until the power screen comes up, let go, and then hold it again until the app quits.) It might as well not even be there. Maybe watchOS 3 will let me customize what I use it for.
Six months in, though, the biggest issue I have with my Apple Watch is speed. Even if it came at the cost of some battery, I would love it if the Watch just was more responsive when using Apps and Glances. The watchOS 2 release has helped a bit in that regard, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Beyond speed, I think the biggest obstacle Apple and the other companies in the smartwatch space have right now is creating a compelling enough use case for someone to not just buy a smartwatch, but keep wearing it. A smartwatch needs to add something to a person’s life beyond just another place to check for more information. That’s nice, but it feels like this can and should do more, and do it with less effort on my part. The perils of early adoption, I suppose.
It’s no secret that the interface redesigns of iOS 7 and MacOS 10.9 have been divisive among certain groups of computer users. Three years into the transition, people are still complaining. Case in point—a recent piece by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in Fast Company that claims “Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name”. They lay out the argument up front:
The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles.
I don’t agree with this sentiment, at least not completely. I’m particularly amused the historical claims to Apple basing their UI design on “experimental science as well as common sense.” Anyone who remembers dragging a floppy disk icon to the trash can to eject a disk can tell you that it was a UI decision that was far from “common sense.” Especially if you were coming from a PC in the mid 90s. Nearly all computer interfaces are unintuitive from the get go. There’s a quote that floats around, attributed to open source programmer Bruce Ediger, that “[t]he only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that it’s all learned.” It’s apocryphal, but Ediger did coin a useful variation:
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned.
And, look, I’ll be the first person to admit that I turned on a bunch of accessibility stuff on my iOS devices: “Button Shapes” and “Reduce Motion” on my iPhone, plus “Reduce Transparency” on my iPad—though that one’s more for performance. There are serious UI issues and quirks, especially in iOS’s Music app. (Insert another plug for Cesium here.) Plenty about the iOS and MacOS designs demand to be fixed, but are they bad enough as to be unusable? I doubt it.
The fundamentals of iOS and MacOS have not changed since their initial releases. If you know how to use the original iPhone and the original Macintosh, you can get up to speed on their modern equivalents pretty quick. The hardest adaptation might be the lack of scrollbars on the Mac—a legitimate usability issue. Take a look at the iOS ecosystem now, compared to how it was in 2012, when iOS 6 came out. There were two sizes of iPads, with the same addressable pixel dimensions, and two sizes of iPhone, one with a taller screen than the other. Both could only display a single app at a time, and scaling an app for the taller iPhone wasn’t much of a resource challenge for graphically rich user interfaces. iOS 7 set the seeds for a more diverse iOS ecosystem. In 2015, we have three sizes of phone screen, and two sizes of iPad screen that can display two different apps at two different sizes. You can’t keep the skeuomorphic design of iOS 6—which had its own usability quirks—and have displays of that many sizes. Something had to give.
When Jony Ive spoke from his magic white room during the iOS 7 WWDC keynote, he mentioned that the typographical navigation was inspired by the web. The idea being that people in 2013 know how to navigate through links, which are usually offset through color on a web page. Carrying that idea into a computer interface doesn’t seem like a bad one. Of course, links on the web are often discerned by underlines, too, which is something iOS doesn’t do—and I can hear Jakob Nielsen screaming from here. The new UIs can be refined, but as long as the fundamentals remain the same, we’re doing okay.
Then there’s Norman and Tognazzini’s complaints against gestural interfaces:
[W]hen Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles. No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of feedback. Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity.
Pish. Tosh. What are the important controls iOS hides? The most important things an iOS user can do are launch apps, and quit apps. These are prominent, up front, and obvious to even a toddler. Again, all things are learned. Your average user can navigate iOS just fine for the most part—textual links getting lost aside. Slide to unlock. Tap passcode. Tap app. Hit home button to leave app. For 90% of users, 90% of the time, this is all they’ll need to do. It doesn’t take long for someone new to mobile OSes to grasp the fundamentals, because the interfaces involve direct manipulation of the elements. It’s why kids pick up on tablets faster than their parents. Things behave in a (generally) predictable fashion. If you do something seemingly unpredictable, like, say, sliding down on your iOS home screen and getting a search box, it’s replicable.
And these are for advanced features that most people don’t need to fiddle with. Most people work with computers, whether using a traditional Mouse/Touchpad and Keyboard UI, or a gestural, iOS-style UI, using a task-based approach. They learn the steps to complete a task, and those steps, if they lead to a successful completion, are how they will continue to work. You can show them a faster way, you can show them your preferred way, but the steps they choose make logical sense to them. There shouldn’t be just one way to do anything in an interface—and this is something iOS gets wrong in more than a few places. There should be an intuitive way that a user can figure out on their own, and there should be a faster way a user can discover once they have the basics down. iOS nails this.
There’s ways in which iOS can improve. I’m with Norman and Tognazzini about font weights in iOS, for example. It is possible to get lost, and certain apps (coughMusiccough) are almost inscrutable mazes of UI complexity and confusing menus. The situation is not as dire as they think. Remember that the Macintosh UI did not spring, fully formed, out of the forehead of Steve Jobs like Athena out of the forehead of Zeus. It drew from Xerox’s research, and that drew from Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. But gestural interfaces? They’re still new, and we’re still figuring it out. As long as people are able to get the basics down, the rest will come in time. That goes for designers as well as users.
Online harassment is a digital rights issue. At its worst, it causes real and lasting harms to its targets, a fact that must be central to any discussion of harassment. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to craft laws or policies that will address those harms without inviting government or corporate censorship and invasions of privacy—including the privacy and free speech of targets of harassment. But, as we discuss below, there are ways to craft effective responses, rooted in the core ideals upon which the Internet was built, to protect the targets of harassment and their rights.
Important reading for those of you who still don’t see online harassment as a problem. What good is free speech when speaking up puts your safety at risk? I trust the EFF to find solutions that maximize everyone’s freedoms. I’m particularly a fan of counter-speech. Silence in the face of abuse is consent to it continuing.
[W]hat if in 2000 years we look back on our current internet, and think of it as a fascinating but heartbreaking tale of hubris. A moment in time where people were consuming a type of technology they knew wasn’t good for them because it conferred status and prestige. And that thing they craved so much was slowly making them lose their minds.
Fascinating food for thought. Are we truly able to handle globally scaled, constant connection without going mad? The jury is still out on that, but remember that it only took the Romans two centuries to connect their plumbing with their illness. But if the Internet, as we know it now, is making us sick, can we even fix it?