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Goldstein reports, “‘If a user wants to walk from the kitchen to the dining room in her house, she simply walks through,’ Skillman said. ‘It does not work like that in mobile–you have to go through the front door to get to the kitchen. iPhone has a home button which works like a go-back-to-front-door button. This is not a model that human beings are used to. People are spatial.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In related news, Mike Zebkowitcz criticized Fellini’s use of evocative imagery in film. WTF is Mike Zebkowitcz, you ask? Exactly.
Here’s a hint for Apple’s roadkill: If you’re lucky enough to still be drawing breath, STFU and get back to work. You don’t have time for babbling inanities about the steamroller that flattened you.
Yeah, well, clicking the homescreen ain’t much like walking through my front door, or hasn’t Mr. Skillman noticed that.
Goober.
Interesting perspective, but his argument is extremely flawed. When I get a push notification whilst my phone is locked, unlocking it takes me right to the appropriate app. The “home screen” approach is just fine. If you want faster bouncing between apps, there’s the multitasking menu. Seriously, you can almost smell the desperation in his statements.
“MeeGo” as in “Everyone else is bailing out of this place, MeeGo 2?”
Strange, then, that millions of people have no problem spatially orienting themselves on an iPad. The irony of this tool’s surname is not lost on me either, since he clearly has none!
=:~)
That doesn’t make sense. When I’m in an app and want to go to another app, I just double click the home button for the multitasking menu.
If you are going to innovate and do remarkable new products, do it; but do NOT talk about it. Just do it!
It has been proven to by psychologically debilitating to do this personally and I strongly suspect it is true in the corporate world.
Is it just me, or is there an abundance of attacks on Apple out of desperation? Hitting the home screen button takes VERY little effort. When compared to the overall functionality of the iPhone, the need to “home button” your way around goes practically unnoticed. Do competitors not realize that they’re making themselves look worse?????
… that when this guy thinks of walking from the kitchen to the dining room, the user is a “her”?
Fetching dinner?
How ‘1950s’ of him.
Skillman. He should make a plastic button for every app on his phone.
– Facebook
– Yelp
– Maps
– Camera
– eReader
– Music Player
– Web Browser
Awesome. Now I have the perfect phone. Wait. Crap. Call Taiwan and tell them we also need a button for ESPN. And one for TV Guide. And one last one for Wikipedia. Oh drat. My alarm clock too!
And if we could put all 10 of these buttons on the side with icons and titles yeaaaaah. That would be greeeeaaaaat.
Right now, I’m downstairs in the master bedroom taking a crap. I will have to walk out through the bathroom door, through the bedroom door, upstairs, through the hall, to get back to the living room where I was working. I wish I coud hit a button and go home to the hall which would be much quicker.
How would one pick which app they wanted to use without some sort of home screen or menu, etc. to choose from? Am I missing something here?
Apple knows interface design so well that even blind people are praising iOS (and Mac). See links on John Gruber’s DaringFireball for Sunday, “Austin Seraphin on the iPhone for the Blind.” Apple even addressed the “one-dimensional” problem of speech output (iPhone article).
He is right about Andriod. Still what has he done to improve mobile? If he was so good HP would have kept him. iOS led the way. Apple did the KISS idea so a user could easily use a OS on a small divice with low power. It also shows how far Nokia is behind if they are now just getting him.
Going into an app is like going up the staircase. To go back downstairs, you must go back down the staircase
You could say the Home button takes you directly to the front door of the room you wish to enter, and because the iOS doesn’t know which room you want to go to next, it presents them all.
I wonder how Skillman intends to present 40 or 50 different room options without an intermediate step.
My Nokia cellphone had one of the worst human interfaces ( apart from Motorola ) that I’ve ever had. Yet the man from Nokia reckons he can lecture Apple about good interfaces ?
That is like saying that you shouldn’t have to go to the elevator just to go to another floor in a hotel..
obviously this wanker has no clue how to use the Apple OS. There is NO operating system in existence where you can go from inside a running application to another application. Putz.
Whoa, someone criticized an Apple product? Let’s all lose our heads and over react, STAT!
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!
Also people WANT their remote controls to have 56 buttons or more…
… a text based interface is far better than a GUI…
How do you spell CLUELESS…
It depends on how many apps you have and how many folders you have. I tried to organize all my apps into folders that made sense, but sometimes I’ll forget where an app is. The other day I was looking for my YouTube app and for some reason, my eyes were just not seeing it when I clicked all my folders.
Then I just use the spotlight and type “You..” then YouTube comes up right away.
Even though that is text and doesn’t look as cool, typing three little letters is much faster than navigating to which page on your phone might have the folder that contains the app you’re looking for.
No, what Mr. Skillman is saying is that MeeGo devices will have LOTS of hardwired buttons — a browser button, an MP3 Player button, a phone button, a Search button, user-definable buttons, etc. — all around the screen. MeeGo devices will look like crazy Kindles they’ll have so many buttons. They out-button Blackberries! Even Ballmer would be proud! ‘Cuz, y’know, the idea of only one button is just too difficult for most executives to wrap their heads around.
In the other camp, Apple will probably eliminate the only button they have, like they did w/ the mouse, Macbook trackpads, and now w/ the iPod nano — the whole surface will become a button.
Man is this guy reaching. You can just smell the desperation.
lmao is it just me or was MDN’s take really funny. love this site.
but anyway, I think the guy is dumb.
Those who cannot DO, criticize.
Talk about absurd. It seems as if every vaporware iPad “competitor” is now taking pot shots at the iPad, the iOS, Apple, Steve Jobs and/or all of the above and then some.
Show us what you got, then we’ll talk.
Agreed with the other comments here. MeeGoo still has lots of potential:
1. It could be stillborn
2. It might be roadkill
3. Possibly cannon fodder
4. It might have to survive breathing the exhaust of Apple and Android for most of its pitiful existence.
5. It might be a perfectly good mobile OS, but simply 3 years too late to offer any competition to anyone, just like Palm
Anyways, you catch my drift. Wait till your own child is actually out of the womb before you start talkin’ about how fugly someone else’s child is.
Say what you will about the guy, but he’s absolutely right on this one. Palm had the most intuitive, dare I say, best UI in Palm OS 5. Yes, it’s antiquated now, but he’s got a very good point about the UI.
PS. I love Apple and its products so don’t go flaming me. I just have to agree with him on this point alone.
rick.
PTFU or STFU!
If Mr. Skillman was visiting my house, I would gladly help him jump out of the 2nd floor window so he can get from my study to the patio bypassing the central hallway and staircase.
I supposed if he was the architect, he would propose we drill firehouse like trap doors and sliding poles from every room to every room. Fun idea, but from software security perspective, you will realize how flawed and one-dimensional HIS thinking is.
This is a brialliant analysis which explains why iOS devices haven’t been… catching on with… er..
Never mind.
Almost as bad as the MS dude who spruked that some crappy camera for the XBox would outsell iPads. WTF does a camera for the ShitBox have to do with iPds?????
What does the W stand for Rick? WANKER!
He’s right in that people want to be able to switch out of doing one thing and into another without going “home” first.
Take a look at OS X…specifically the bottom of the screen, there you’ll find the dock which allows you to switch apps (or command-tab).
Take a look at websites, most have navigation bars/menus that allow you to go from one place to another without having to go “home” first.
However, the iPhone interface is MUCH smaller, thus you need some sort of “home” functionality. The bar on the iPhone is a good compromise, but Apple *could* go further and offer dashboard services like SBSettings and Lockscreen can do on jailbroken iPhones.
Whatever Apple does, it’s important to realize that there is a need for “home” and people are use to it. For example, yes, you walk from one room in your house to another without going back to the front door. But that’s because it’s a simple task in a simple environment.
Go to a 100 story building to a random office and then try going to another person’s office without knowing the floor or suite number. You’ll need to go back to “home” to find it whether that’s a front desk kiosk or some navigation system.
The same is true for iOS or OS X or other platforms. Not everything on your computer can be found in the Dock (or the Windows Taskbar). You have to go “home” to the Finder or Explorer.
When user interfaces try to omit the “home”, the burden the user with no sense of hierarchy and lack simplicity in simple navigational tasks. Worse, you end up using a metaphor that’s either wildly inappropriate (walking from room to room) or even further removed from any real-world metaphor.
And when you use a Nokia phone you go through the front door,up the stairs, to the bathroom, to the attic, down the stairs, then finally make it to the kitchen
You know, these guys just give a lot lip service. Apple on the other hand is actually producing the stuff, then talking about it.
You idiots are just making yourselves look even more idiotic. lol
So having one home button is worse than 4 or more other buttons on your phone?
Lucifer criticized God.
MDN’s hint for Apple’s roadkill is brutally and hilariously true.. good stuff!
“Skillman said that Apple’s approach to the user experience is flawed because it forces users to hit the home screen before using a new application.”
Well create a better user experience and the world will beat a path to your door.
“When you got to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” – Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Juan María Ramírez (fromThe Good,The Bad, and The Ugly)
The problem for him, for MeeGo, for Windows Mobile, etc., is something they just will never choose to admit. By going for the highest possible marketshare based on unit sales, they offer their software to whoever wants to license it. What makes Apple so great is they couple the software with the hardware and don’t license to other hardware makers.
That’s why user experiences fail because the software has to run on literally thousands of different devices, not to mention the software isn’t that great to begin with. Different processors, GPUs, screen resolutions…
And most smartphones are running scaled down processors with little power to drive what they ambitious mobile OSes can theoretically do. As long as Microsoft, Google with Android, even Nokia with Symbian and its million different smartphones… as long as they follow this strategy they won’t match Apple’s performance and user experience.
It’s the same old pipe dreams from these guys. Promise California, deliver Minnesota.
Most laptops still suck, outside of Apple’s and Sony’s. Most operating systems suck, cept for OS X, iOS and Windows 7. Most desktops suck, except for the Mac Mini and iMac…
Nothing has changed for years. Just plastic crap with crap software. MeeGo is as big a threat to Apple as the operating system running on Patrick Bateman’s 1988 cell phone in American Psycho.
Just change the name of the button from home to START,
Problem solved.
@ron
ROFLMMFAO!
I love mythology!
@MDN. Is there no editorial control exercised for blatant and unwarranted abuse of other posters like Fergman does above?
Good post by MacSlut. Basically Silkman is right going through home is less than ideal, but any other solution would require more buttons, or encroach on limited screen real estate and destroy the simplicity of the look of an App in the process, neither of which are better alternatives.
I’d like a gesture that would take me to the App I was using previously (like a browser back button). Do it again for the App before that. Similarly a forward to next App gesture.
@kevt
The gesture is: double click, tap.
Not so bad, is that?
He can say stuff like that because MeeGo users only have a handful of apps to worry about. An iOS user has dozens on the device (and a few hundred thousand choices at the “store”).
First name:Peter
Middle name: Imnota
Last name: Skillman
@ Sigh
Hey, don’t dis Minnesota! We’re in debt buy not like California. It’s 77 degrees here and the first place Twins are ahead of Cleveland. Cleveland is catching up so I better post this quickly.
Skillman criticized but did not provide any alternative. Dismissed.
Skillman says people are spatial. He probably even went to spacial education. On a short bus.
And the Palm Pre approach was…
yeah I thought so.
The iPhone is an example of Jobs’ obsession with minimalism gone too far. Power users know that to get the most out of OS X, you need a two-button mouse. Adding a couple of buttons in the empty space next to the home button would have made its interface much more efficient, and avoided after-thought kludges like double-clicking the home button to add functionality.
OMG!!!! He is right. It is so hard to push that little home button.
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Of course, people have to spend half their time killing programs in other OSs just to conserve battery life.
@The_Steve,
I’m so glad you have no influence on Apple design.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Let’s not forget Palm WebOs was so successful that Palm went bankrupt.
I am surre that the Chevy dealers rag on Fords and vice versa….Yawn!
Just my $0.02
Skill-less Man is right. (Pant! Pant!) Now I’ll have to walk all the way back to the front door of my iPad and come in all over again (pant! pant!) before I can go into another app. Oops! That failed! (pant! pant!) Oh well! Here I go walking all the way around the fence, and back to the front door (pant! pant!) YIKES!! The pit bull is after me!! HELP!! Damn Jobs guy! (pant! pant!) … making me do all this walking!! ……
I see his point, but flawed? Its nit flawes. Apple’s approach works very well and it seems no one has a problem with it. He is obviously talking his own book, it’s his job to talk down competitors. It’s just his opinion. It has no bearing.
leave the space next to the home button alone! the iphones beauty lies in its simplicity. Plus, how lazy can a person be to not want to press the home button twice? seriously?
the palm pre’s OS was actually pretty good, second only to Apple’s. One of the problems was the hardware and non-existent app support.
The man is dumb and freakin nuub. MDN is a great and must have site. iOS apps rock and are my daily friend alert
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PS – yes i had freakin Nokias for ages (more or less 8)…. and yes i set myself free in 2007. Nevertheless, still have a PC to play Wow
Keep up the awesome work.
All the best from Lisbon/Portugal.