The new iPhone X Is A User Experience Nightmare
With the new iPhoneX you’re looking at a UX disaster, the result of eliminating what is probably the simplest, most intuitive form of navigation ever implemented in consumer electronics: the iPhone’s home button is causing a user quagmire. The iPhone X replaces the “home” button with a mess of complicated commands (see the cheat sheet published alongside the Wall Street Journal’s iPhone X review: http://bit.ly/2zskBo2
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This is bad news, because this interaction is a fundamental part of the user experience. We knew this was coming, but the reviews and the sudden spike in “how to navigate your iPhone X” tutorials puts a new spotlight on the interaction problems that the elimination of the home button created.
The simplicity of Apple’s UX made its devices computers accessible and easy to use for the rest of us, which is why their popularity was so universal and viral. Nobody needed cheat sheets to use them to their full potential.
But then, little by little, a divide opened between two types of iOS device users–between regular users who use the iPhone in the simplest way possible and have no idea about most of the hidden gestures and the power users who know the secret navigation moves.
Today, anyone who buys the iPhone X, whether regular or power user, will have to learn new arbitrary conventions–a convoluted navigation system that instead of solving problem adds a new layer of complexity to an already complex device, replacing the elegant, simple, intuitive solution that came built-in with the original iPhone.
With the iPhone X, Apple has completely left behind Steve Jobs’s original motto: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Now it’s the ultimate mess.
Keep it simple stupid!
(Full disclosure: never owned an iPhone and never will, I love my old trusted Nexus 5, after a myriad of drops and many beyond imagination shocks, it works like a charm all over the Globe.)