Comics / Comics News

Apple Don’t Blame the User, Blame Yourself for Poor Usability

By Hervé St-Louis
October 26, 2015 - 11:09

I came across an article from Sébastien Pagé, the editor-in-chief of the Apple-related blog iDownloadBlog. Pagé criticized users who shut down apps operating in the background of iOS devices to save battery life. This article annoyed me because it repeated all the common tropes of technology elites who lambast the common users for their own inabilities to design products that work the way people think they should work.

Pagé’s main argument is that iOS is very smart at handling the memory load of apps in the background. iOS, he writes, freezes apps that are not operating in the foreground. When trying to relaunch a previously shut down app, the memory load increases and is more significant than if then letting run in the background, according to Pagé.

While trying to help users, Pagé was criticizing the average Joe for not understanding how iOS operates while exhibiting his own insider knowledge of iPhones and iPads. Besides Pagé’s patronizing approach to understanding users’ interactions with technology, he also left Apple off the hook for creating a product that the average user does not understand. If users force quit their apps thinking that it will make their battery last longer, it’s Apple’s fault for not understanding how the average Joe interacts with iOS devices. Pagé, as I am doing now, should blame Apple, not users.

Usability scholar Don Norman coined the term mental models to explain how users perceive technology. For most users, shutting apps saves power. Manufacturers like Apple who fail to understand users’ behaviour and practices commit errors when they try to force users to change by making technology that does not work the way users think it should.

Most users have been brought up thinking that shutting the lights off saves power; that shutting the fridge’s door saves power; that turning off your car when parked for an extensive period of time, saves the battery; that shutting unused apps on your computer allows the computer to multitask and handle the memory load better, allowing the front-running app to run and provide a better user experience.

Instead, cheerleaders like Pagé tell people that they are wrong and to let Apple do things its way. It’s bad user experience. Apple and its fans like to think that iOS devices provide good user experience. They don’t. Most people continuously mistake user experience for design. User experience is about enhancing usability while taking into account the context in which users interact with technology. When Apple fails to understand that most users since they were in diapers were told that shutting down a technology saves power, it promotes bad user experience.

Readers’ responses to Pagé’s article were symptomatic of users blaming themselves for being technological illiterate.  Many were apologetics and felt like idiots for not knowing that Apple managed their devices’ memory well. When users blame themselves for not understanding technology, it reinforces the technology elite’s insider knowledge and culture versus the boorish mass of idiots who aren’t “holding their phone right.” There is no merit in being part of a clique that gets it when you promote products that are supposed to be easy to use but are not.

Users should never apologize for not understanding how to interact with technology that they should understand how to with minimal training that adheres to their mental models. If users feel ashamed for not understanding the intricacies of the iPhone after having used it for a while, Apple is to blame for this. Apple changed multitasking and how apps operate in the background years after the introduction of the iPhone. Even long-term users of iOS devices probably think that shutting apps saves power. Who’s to blame here?

User experience has become a buzzword used by marketers and many Silicon Valley insiders, inspired by the design aesthetics of Apple since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. User experience is not about beautiful icons and nice menus. User experience is about understanding the context in which users interact with technology and to make products that match their mental models and require minimal easy to recall training. If users think that shutting an app saves power, then it’s up to Apple to make it so. Criticizing iOS users as Pagé does, is not the solution.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12