The key to the iPhone's usability lies in its ability to create visual and isolated widgets. Publishing Dynamics' VP of strategic services explores the marketing value of this powerful combination.
Version one of the iPhone has a lot to teach interactive marketers about usability. Up to this point, cell phones of all shapes and sizes have grappled with how to make an ever-expanding list of desired functions work in such a limited physical environment. But most of us agree that the iPhone is the first truly usable phone interface.
Many have posited that the overall lack of usability resulted from the torrid pace of development, where new phones with new features have to come out so fast that the technology outpaces a company's own ability to streamline the software. But the iPhone is the first to acknowledge that once the phone is bought, it's the software that users rely on every time they reach for the device, which to me is the real driver of the initial popularity. Finally, a cell phone that hangs its hat on being feature-rich and easy to use.
The usability of the iPhone isn't "version one" at all; it applies Apple's fairly mature Dashboard environment to common phone tasks. In a world where everything is about placing widgets on websites, Apple has shown just how powerful the concept can be when adapted to any set of common tasks placed within a digital interface.
Specific, visual, self-evident
Most cell phones followed the flawed usability plans of bad websites: Let's cram as many features in one category as possible, and then pick an ambiguous name to describe this collection. My favorite is the MediaNET category on my wife's cell phone. She's had the cell phone for about two years now, and every time I pick it up it makes me think for a second, "What happens when I select this?" I simply cannot remember if it refers to accessing the web or to the phone's media settings.
Typical frustrating cell phones usually start on the premise that making a call is the single most important use, and that everything else just gets piled together in seemingly endless mazes of menus.
Steve Krug's awesome "Don't Make Me Think" crystallizes much of Jakob Neilsen and Jared Spool's seminal work by insisting that interfaces be immediately self-evident. User choices must be visual, direct and instantly apparent as to their purpose. Most people don't care at all how an interface works, they just want to scan and satisfice: quickly find the nearest choice to meet their need.
Making specific tasks isolated and visual is exactly what widgets do, whether it is on the Mac Dashboard, the Vista Sidebar, or in the Yahoo! and Google Desktops.
On the Mac dashboard, though, we can find the basic elements of the phone, and how these act equally well -- but in different contexts -- on the phone:
Dashboard selector/iPhone home
What almost seems like an afterthought on the dashboard is the initial iPhone view now synonymous with ease-of-use.
On the desktop, this menu serves as an easy, visual way to choose which of your widgets you want to appear on the screen. They also occupy the same order of hierarchy; that is, no one widget is given importance over another. It's just a drawer you pull open.
On the iPhone, this selector is ordered hierarchically, because it's the starting point of the experience. Oddly, this is one of the few areas of the iPhone where you can't change the order. But it gains even more power in this context, separating each task-path into a clear visual, actionable button.
The selector widget/iPhone menus
I suppose that the lack of use of the selector in the Dashboard is what led Apple to develop the precursor of the interior navigation in the iPhone: the selector widget.
The initial challenge on the desktop is to make a widget that controls widgets. When you have the entire width of the screen, as in the initial selector, it's easy to develop an interface that is highly visual and quick to navigate. Within the confines of space on a widget, though, the task becomes harder.
With its use of shading and simple icons, Apple accomplished a decent degree of usability to understand which widgets are loaded, and whether you want to delete them, as a long list.
This construct works exceedingly well on the iPhone when combined with the finger-flicking ability to control the speed at which users scroll through long lists of options on the phone.