Showing posts with label little. Show all posts
Showing posts with label little. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Its the little things What we like and dont like in iOS 7
Now that we’ve been living with iOS 7 for a while, we’ve had a chance to uncover some little things we might not have noticed at first.
Some of those little things are good, others not so much. Here’s our list. What about yours? Let us know in the comments below.
What we like
Wayfinding and leveling with Compass: In iOS 7, Compass received a thorough revamp, gaining a couple of cool new features. One my favorites: Say you’re trying to find your way in a specific direction. Just orient yourself in that direction, and then tap the compass. Now, when you start to stray from the direction you specified, a red bar on screen indicates just how far off course you are. My other favorite: If you swipe to the left on the compass, you bring up the new level, which works when you place the phone flat on a surface or set it on its side.—Dan Moren
Wayfinding and leveling with Compass: In iOS 7, Compass received a thorough revamp, gaining a couple of cool new features. One my favorites: Say you’re trying to find your way in a specific direction. Just orient yourself in that direction, and then tap the compass. Now, when you start to stray from the direction you specified, a red bar on screen indicates just how far off course you are. My other favorite: If you swipe to the left on the compass, you bring up the new level, which works when you place the phone flat on a surface or set it on its side.—Dan Moren
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| The iTunes Store wish list. |
Wish List in the iTunes Store: I’ve used the Wish List in iTunes on my Mac for years to keep track of music I want to buy someday. I was never able to access that list from my iPhone—until iOS 7 came along. Now, I can tap the list icon at the top right of the screen in the iTunes Store app to get access to my Wish List. (There’s also a list of tracks I’ve previewed or played in iTunes Radio.) Coincidentally, my Wish List is also more accessible now on my Mac, too, thanks to iTunes 11.1: For example, when I like a track in iTunes Radio, I can add it to the list with one click on a contextual menu.—Dan Miller
Specifying short names in Mail, Messages: The new Short Name feature, which you can find by going toSettings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Contacts, lets you customize how contact names display in Mail and Messages, when real estate is at a premium. If you activate it, you can opt to show first name and last initial, first initial and last name, or first or last name only. Moreover, you can ask iOS to show nicknames to shorten things even more, so you see ‘Dan’ instead of ‘Daniel’, for instance.—Dan Moren
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| Timestamps in Messages. |
Reminders geofence perimeter: The geofencing capabilities of Reminders are handy when you need a location-based reminder. But if you’ve ever wished for more fine-grained control over when your phone believes you’ve arrived at your Home or Work location, iOS 7 can help. When you select a location, you’ll now see a small map, with a blue circle around the location’s address. By tapping and dragging on the black handle of that circle, you can expand or contract the area in which your reminder will fire. So if you want to remember to call someone when you’re a couple of miles from home, Reminders is your new best friend.—Dan Moren
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| Shared links in Safari. |
Timer on the home screen: You probably know that you can set a timer using Siri—it’s even more efficient than using the timer shortcut in Control Center. But when you want to check on that timer, the easiest thing to do, by far, is simply to wake up your iPhone. You’ll see the current timer, counting down, on the lock screen, right beneath the clock. Even better, when the timer is done, you can silence it from the lock screen, with just a tap.—Dan Moren
More info in Weather: The Weather app now includes sunset and sunrise times, as well as the basic high and low temps. Just side-scroll on the hourly forecast section, and it’ll include the time the sun is coming up or going down—handy whether you’re trying to plan a morning run or you’re a vampire concerned about curfew.—Scholle Sawyer McFarland
Swipe right to go back: In most stock iOS apps, as well as many apps that have been updated to support iOS 7, the familiar Back arrow in the upper-left corner of the screen is gone. You now navigate to the previous view (whatever that was) by swiping to the right from the left edge of the screen. I initially disliked this approach, because it wasn’t obvious and I didn’t know exactly where that gesture would get me. (The arrow would always include the name of the previous screen or section.) But after using iOS 7 for a while, I have to say the swipe-back gesture has grown on me. In fact, I’ve gotten so used to it that when I encounter an app that hasn’t been updated to use the gesture, I find my self swiping right, over and over again, wondering why nothing is happening.—Dan Frakes
What bugs us
Control Center’s tricky target: Although I like the new Control Center, I wish it were easier to summon. Yes, it sounds simple: Just swipe upward from the bottom of the screen. But in my experience, it takes a few swipes before Control Center actually appears. Perhaps I’ll acquire the touch over time, but for now I find it really frustrating (especially, for some reason, on the iPad mini).—Christopher Breen
Wasted space in home-screen folders: In iOS 6, folders on the home screen could display up to 20 apps at a time on the iPad, and 16 at a time on the iPhone 5 and the most recent iPod touch. In iOS 7, you see only nine apps at a time. Granted, you can now put many more items in a folder and then swipe to navigate among multiple folder screens. But the nine-apps-at-a-time limit—which appears to have been implemented solely for aesthetic reasons, so folders can zoom out and in gracefully—feels like it’s wasting a lot of useful space. Worse, it forces you to perform more taps and swipes to access a given app.—Dan Frakes, Armando Rodriguez
Email groups in Mail: While iOS Mail has improved steadily with each major update to iOS, it still doesn’t support sending to email groups. And the iOS Contacts app still doesn’t let you create such groups. You can, of course, create contact groups in OS X’s Contacts app. But those groups don’t function the same way in iOS as they do in OS X. I can’t, for example, send an email to the ‘Macworld Editors’ group on my iPhone—the group doesn’t even show up. And, while I’m at it: When filing email, Mail no longer remembers your last-used position in the mailbox list; you have to scroll from the top each time. And although it’s great that you can now search all mailboxes from within Mail, iOS 7 has eliminated the option to search only, say, message subjects or senders.—Dan Frakes
Less accessible media controls: In iOS 6, you could always bring up the media-control buttons from the lock screen—even if you weren’t currently playing media—by double-pressing the Home button. That made it easy to resume listening to your most recently listened-to track. In iOS 7, if you disable Control Center on the lock screen (which is better for security), you can’t initiate media playback without unlocking your phone and opening whatever music-playing app you usually use; the media controls appear on the lock screen only if you’re already listening to something.—Dan Frakes
That tiny blue new-app indicator: The little blue badge that iOS 7 puts next to new or newly updated apps is really hard to make out, especially if you’re using a lighter-colored background. It isn’t as prominent as the old ‘New’ banner we had in iOS 6, so figuring out if you’ve used an app since you downloaded it is harder.—Armando Rodriguez
Folders versus bookmarks in Safari: In the past, telling the difference between folders and bookmarks in iOS Safari’s bookmarks list was really easy. But now, owing to the “simplification” of iOS 7’s visual language, each of them has a similar blue outline; you have to squinch up your eyes to tell the difference. The problem is particularly annoying on an iPad mini.—Christopher Breen
A less powerful Spotlight: iOS 7 makes Spotlight easier to access, but it also makes the feature less useful. You can now search for files only locally, whereas before you could also use Spotlight to quickly search Google or Wikipedia. I can understand Apple’s wanting us to rely on Siri for quick Web searches, but the virtual assistant is less reliable, and sometimes I don’t feel like dictating everything I’m searching for.—Armando Rodriguez
Data source: via Macworld (By Macworld Staff)
Control Center’s tricky target: Although I like the new Control Center, I wish it were easier to summon. Yes, it sounds simple: Just swipe upward from the bottom of the screen. But in my experience, it takes a few swipes before Control Center actually appears. Perhaps I’ll acquire the touch over time, but for now I find it really frustrating (especially, for some reason, on the iPad mini).—Christopher Breen
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| Folders in the iOS 7 home screen. |
Email groups in Mail: While iOS Mail has improved steadily with each major update to iOS, it still doesn’t support sending to email groups. And the iOS Contacts app still doesn’t let you create such groups. You can, of course, create contact groups in OS X’s Contacts app. But those groups don’t function the same way in iOS as they do in OS X. I can’t, for example, send an email to the ‘Macworld Editors’ group on my iPhone—the group doesn’t even show up. And, while I’m at it: When filing email, Mail no longer remembers your last-used position in the mailbox list; you have to scroll from the top each time. And although it’s great that you can now search all mailboxes from within Mail, iOS 7 has eliminated the option to search only, say, message subjects or senders.—Dan Frakes
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| Media controls in Control Center (from the regular home screen). |
That tiny blue new-app indicator: The little blue badge that iOS 7 puts next to new or newly updated apps is really hard to make out, especially if you’re using a lighter-colored background. It isn’t as prominent as the old ‘New’ banner we had in iOS 6, so figuring out if you’ve used an app since you downloaded it is harder.—Armando Rodriguez
Folders versus bookmarks in Safari: In the past, telling the difference between folders and bookmarks in iOS Safari’s bookmarks list was really easy. But now, owing to the “simplification” of iOS 7’s visual language, each of them has a similar blue outline; you have to squinch up your eyes to tell the difference. The problem is particularly annoying on an iPad mini.—Christopher Breen
A less powerful Spotlight: iOS 7 makes Spotlight easier to access, but it also makes the feature less useful. You can now search for files only locally, whereas before you could also use Spotlight to quickly search Google or Wikipedia. I can understand Apple’s wanting us to rely on Siri for quick Web searches, but the virtual assistant is less reliable, and sometimes I don’t feel like dictating everything I’m searching for.—Armando Rodriguez
Data source: via Macworld (By Macworld Staff)
Saturday, March 28, 2015
How Little Changes Can Have Big Impacts on Apps and Services
Sometimes, something as simple as the design of an Order Now button can drastically affect the success of your big idea. Should you trust your intuition and hope for the best, or carry out test after test to figure out what the customers want? At a Nasscom panel to discuss customisation and integration - moderated by NDTV Gadgets Editorial Head Kunal Dua - we discussed this and more with various industry experts.
According to R Chandrashekhar, President, Nasscom, intuition is what you use when you run out of data, and that good business requires both data and intuition. "Intuition will tell you what the options are, while data can tell you which one works best," says Chandrashekhar.
Tanuj Mendiratta, Co-Founder and CEO, Appiterate, provides an example that underlines Chandrashekhars point. Appiterate is a company that allows developers to do A/B testing of design on live apps, with India-based taxi company Olacabs as one of its clients.
"Olacabs wanted to turn usage into referrals," says Mendiratta. "They had been trying to make sense of data to increase their footprint on mobile, so they partnered with us in order to strengthen their data science and leverage it to improve user acquisition."
One of the options that the company tested involved a small change is the design of the invite button that resulted in a 55 percent increase in invitations being sent out, and a 33 percent increase in user acquisition, Mendiratta claims.
Emphasising the importance of design in success - or failure - of products, Muki Regunathan, Founder and CEO, Pepper Square, described how the same experience that Olacabs had, is equally true on the Web.
"We used an analysis backed approach, and on one of the projects that we were working on, all we did was change the shape of the call to action button. This one small change led to an increase of 250,000 tickets."
Testing design and content features is a well-established field, and there are several companies that work in this area now. Appiterate - which received VC funding earlier this year - is just one of them, but the Gurgaon-based company already has an impressive client roster, including Spice Labs, Ibibo, Reviews42, Taxi for Sure, and of course Ola.
The company claims to be the only A/B testing product that has a simple drag and drop interface that any business can use to easily test its apps. These changes can be made to live apps, so that the testing is done in real market conditions, and real user behaviour can be studied to gain data.
However, real change to the user experience will only come once this data is shared between different apps, leading to a greater degree of personalisation, instead of customisation, says Ravi Gururaj, Chariman, Nasscom Product Council, and Chairman and Co-Founder, Frictionless Ventures, a funding and incubation company with a focus on cloud, mobile and big data software product ventures.
"The new customisation is going to be personalisation," says Gururaj, "And what will happen is that you will get app-like experiences inside apps. Youll have containers, that bring together a lot of different functionality instead of needing lots of disparate apps."
One roadblock in India towards this end is the slow uptake of API use by developers. Chandrashekhar also points out that as long as companies try to control linkages, developing new ideas will remain a challenge.
"Real growth will come through organic partnerships," he says, "with people who you have never even heard of."
"People are not open to opening up," says Gururaj. "But integration is the norm. No one can make an end to end product now. Even the phones you use, they come from so many different vendors. Then there is the app ecosystem, which is in turn supported by more ecosystems. [People need to] learn to grab and deliver value to the ecosystem."
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