Last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump offered feedback for Apple CEO Tim Cook regarding the company’s iPhone, especially its Home button or lack thereof. In a tweet, the leader of the world’s largest economy called out the Apple CEO and lamented the loss of the Home button on the company’s smartphones.
To Tim: The Button on the IPhone was FAR better than the Swipe!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2019
A former Apple user interface prototyping team member responded.
As an iPhone UI designer, you need to have a thick skin. First, you have to defend your idea internally at Apple. Then members of the public endlessly critique your work upon its release. The one thing you probably don’t expect, though? For the president of the United States to slam your painstaking creation.
That’s exactly what happened to former Apple user interface prototyping team member Linda Dong. In a Sunday tweet, she commented on President Donald Trump’s recent declaration about the iPhone X interface.
☑️ Do the dishes
☑️ Go for a walk
☑️ Have the President of the United States tweet he does’t like the UX your team worked on
☑️ Water the plants pic.twitter.com/mZSqVt0eqk— Linda Dong 🥽 🌸 (@lindadong) October 27, 2019
Dong left in April 2015, years before the iPhone X shipped in 2017, but it appears that the swipe-based interface was designed during this time.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, the Home button is an anachronism. The Home button is awful. Any user who gives the swipe-based UI five minutes will get used to the new, better way of doing things – it’s much more fluid and faster without the constant staccato interruption of clicking that damn antiquated Home button. Whenever we run into an old iPhone or iPad with a home button, we curse it.
Most of us accomplished our five-minute conversion back in 2017 with iPhone X, but government moves at a glacial pace at best, so it’s actually surprising that a Home button-free, gesture-based iPhone made it to the president this soon!