Creative Deletion

I recently got a chance to buy an iPhone. After I had made sure that doable iPhone unlocking methods existed, I went for it.

Unlocking
Engadget recently announced a software unlock. Mainstream media (MSM) has been picking up this story as well as different hardware based unlocks. The only problem with the software unlocks is that they are not available yet.

But it has been possible to use your iPhone with other operators than AT&T for quite some time now, before the ones that mainstream media is currently talking about. One hack is to use a small sim card enclosure called the “turbosim”, but they are sold out. Another one is called the “supersim”. Neither of these methods require you to modify the iPhone hardware. Basically the supersim method works like this: You create a new SIM card that works like your existing local SIM card. Then you use software to activate the iPhone in a way that makes it compatible with this new SIM card. I used the supersim method, and have been using the iPhone with my Danish mobile phone operator since wednesday last week. As far as I know there are only about 5 unlocked iPhones in Denmark right now.

Interface and exterior
The interface is awesome. It’s fun to flick between the pictures and music albums, to zoom in and out on pictures and websites etc. This is really a big step up from the interface of other phones. Like the interface from the Minority Report movie. My previous phone - a Nokia 7610 smartphone feels very 20th century in comparison.

The virtual keyboard works OK - much better than a numeric keyboard with T9. I learned that to avoid typos, you can make sure that the correct key is selected before you lift your finger from the screen - if you hit the wrong key you can slide to a different key before lifting.

The exterior is awesome too. It’s not all hard plastic like my old Nokia, but mostly glass and aluminium and a little chrome and rubber-ish plastic. Like a Mac, Apple has been careful about all aspects of the product and how it all works together. That said, it’s not perfect of course. There is plenty of room for improvement and refinement. I welcome software updates with new features. Preferably those updates should be compatible with the SIM unlock hacks

Email spam filtering
There’s an email application called “Mail” similar to the Mac “Mail.app”. It doesn’t have a spam filter like Mail.app does though. So what I did, was to run my email through a GMail account and use setup the GMail account with POP and SMTP on my iPhone. That’s an easy way to get server based spam filtering.

“Missing features”
The iPhone doesn’t do everything. You can’t use custom ring tones (without hacking it), it doesn’t send MMS etc. But I don’t care, those features aren’t important to me. On the other hand the iPhone has features that no other phones have, but it is really about the product as a whole and not a checklist of features. For what it is the iPhone is really good. Interacting with my phone is now fun instead of being a bit of a pain. If you want a nice phone with a nice interface, email, a proper web browser and an integrated portable music & video player, the iPhone does a good job.

My grandfather complained that the weather widget on his Macbook was inaccurate. No wonder - it’s displaying what the weather is on a different continent! Not a good user experience. After setting up the location and timezone of Copenhagen, Mac OS X automatically adds a weather widget for Copenhagen.

The widget on the left in the following picture is what is displayed as default. The one on the right is a widget where I changed “Copenhagen” to “Copenhagen, Denmark” and degrees F to degrees C:

89 degrees on Wednesday, that’s a lot for Denmark. Water boils at 100 degrees. Oh wait, that must be Fahrenheit. Like every other country in the world, except one, Denmark measures temperatures in degrees Celsius. In the widget settings you can change the units to degrees Celsius though. But if you don’t look out the windows to see what the weather is like you might not notice that something is very, very wrong.

There is a small village in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York named Copenhagen after the capital of Denmark. If you don’t change the default “Copenhagen” to “Copenhagen, Denmark”, the weather displayed is from the small NY village. The problem seems to be that AccuWeather, a service that the widgets are using, ranks American locations higher than others. For instance if you type in London, “London, AR” is proposed. I wonder if Londoners have the same problem. Do they get Arkansas weather by default?

There are many other cases of multiple towns or cities with the same name. I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon which is named after Portland, Maine. Today, if you just say “Portland” most would assume Portland, Oregon (the World Clock widget in OS X does). I can see why the people in Portland, Maine might get upset that another city has the same name. But in the case of Copenhagen there should be no contest about which city is the “true” Copenhagen. Most people would assume that when you say Copenhagen you’re talking about the capital, which, among other things, has a bad ass metal named after it (period table 72) - not a tiny village in the boonies.

What if Steve Jobs was going to Copenhagen and he wanted to know what the weather was like? I don’t think he would be happy about getting a weather report from NY instead. (Some might say that he would pack black mock turtlenecks and Levi jeans no matter what the forecast would say, though.)

This is an example of computer systems trying to be clever and helpful, but where the user would be better of without the artificial cleverness. Defaults are great if chosen with care. In this case it would be better if the default city of the weather widget was a foreign city - San Francisco for instance. You would might confuse “Copenhagen” with “Copenhagen” [sic], but not with “San Francisco”. And when changing the widget to display Copenhagen weather instead you would be presented with a choice between the different Copenhagens of the world. Rather that, than to be mislead into thinking that you’re presented with the local weather, when you’re not.

Apple, you should fix this.

The button to open the doors of a “kystbanen” train I rode today has a very annoying design flaw: lack of feedback. I’ve used this type of train quite a lot, and many times I’ve seen people being confused and pressing the button multiple times to open the doors.

Now, let’s say that you have used this train before, so you know that the door takes a while to open and that you only need to press the button once. So you wait patiently. They take a while to open you know this. But after a while you will realize that it’s not opening. So you press it again and wait again. Did it work now? Yes. You’re out, 10 seconds later than you could have been and maybe slightly embarrassed that you didn’t know how to operate something as simple as a door and kept the 5 other people behind you waiting as well.

Why didn’t it open upon the first button press? Because button presses are only received after the doors have been unlocked. If you press the button when the train has stopped but before the doors are unlocked, you will have to press to button again.

The problem with this door opening design is lack of feedback. The passenger doesn’t know what’s going on.

Donald A. Norman writes about this in his book “Emotional Design” (my emphasis):

An important concept of understanding comes from feedback: a device has to give continual feedback so that a user knows that it is working, that any commands, button presses, or other requests have actually been received. This feedback can be as simple as the feel of the brake pedal when you depress it and the resultant slowing of the automobile or a brief light or flash or sound when you push something.

Now the dark ring in the button (as seen in the top picture with the yellow door) has some LEDs that lights up and show a green circle when the doors are “unlocked” and you will hear a beeping sound. So the designers thought of giving the passengers a cue when the button is ready to be pressed. That is at least something. And the button has a tactile feel, so you can feel that you’ve pressed the button. But there’s no feedback telling you if the button press is received and the doors are actually opening.

How could the system give better feedback? How would I have designed it differently? One way would simply have the doors open immediately with a delay of no more than one second. I’m sure that there are good reasons for the doors to take longer to open though, so let’s look at another solution.

A sound or a visual cue could provide feedback when the button press is received. For instance play a sound and let the LEDs light up in an animated circle like an AJAX type spinner . Then you would have a clue that the doors were opening and you could relax and wait.

With this small design change, the passengers would be a little less annoyed, wait a little bit less and the trains could leave the stations a little sooner.

So the lesson is: let the user know what’s going on with the system they are using. Provide the necessary feedback.