Apple's UX mess: what I finally realized

I had the mis/fortune of having sinus surgery recently which took me out of (at least going into) work for a couple of days. I used this as an opportunity to leverage the iPad work had gotten me to evaluate iPad apps and monetization. I looked at it both from an entertainment perspective and work productivity figuring that all I was really trying to do was keep up with email and some web browsing. Bed side use for these purposes seemed one of the few use-cases the iPad actually might be purposed for.

I'm famously anti-Apple as most of my friends know. Not for any other reason than that I've been banging the drum of their anti-competitive, proprietary, draconian measures for 15 years. I saw them as a pretty brand brainwashing people into thinking what they did was best without anything substantive from a product or UX perspective to back it. In short, their products are pretty but didn't really work that well. Now I'm no lover of Microsoft products but after ump-teen tries they have gotten a windowing metaphor and environment working decently and their tablet support since Vista (even though the OS is terrible) finally let me go paperless. But as a good UX design friend of mine recently put it "when something doesn't work on Windows I say 'what's wrong with f-ing Microsoft' but when something doesn't work on a Mac I say 'what's wrong with me'". That's a very apt statement in the Apple cult of personality.

OK, back to my experience. I famously haven't bought nor have owned an Apple product since 1994. However, the company I've been working for since last August is pretty much an Apple-only shop: macs on the desktop, iPhones in hand. I was able to avoid the iPhone for Android and T-Mobile but not the Mac. I've been struggling with it since as woefully inadequate for a business user. I estimated that my productivity took a 25% hit being on a Mac...and this is after I got up to speed on the nuances of Snow Leopard. I've gotten a bit better as I've now replaced all Apple software (save for OS and utilities) on my Mac. Yes, Chrome (easily better than crappy Safari) is my browser, Thunderbird for email, MS Office for docs and various other small utilities for other comm needs. They might not be as "pretty" as Apple software but they actually are usable, extensible, and customizable (and in some cases more stable). Remember Steve, technology in almost all cases is function over form.

I've been a big tablet enthusiast with my Lenovo/IBM X60 with Vista allowing me to finally go paperless. The hardware has its quirks and Vista's issues are well documented. However, the tablet interface is actually very good. Thus, I'm excited about the renewed focus on the category. The iPad, at spec, didn't add up to me. It seemed to miss several major tablet use-cases: pen/drawing input (or any decent input for that matter), business class app support, multi-tasking (really key for tablets), and gestures (critical on a tablet).

However, given it was there and part of my job to understand it, I dove in...and hey, it has a pretty screen. I'll cut to the chase and what my realization was about the iPad which generally translates to the iPhone (basically the same interaction model) and also to Mac OS: its an incredibly inefficient UX and also requires to the user to think/remember during workflow breaking their context. The easiest way this manifests: I'm reading email, someone sends me a web link, I click and go to Safari, I read and then I'm done with it. There is no way to take a single action to get back to where I was in email (and this is the web era). On top of that, I now have to think about what I was just doing in what app and then how to get back there totally killing what I was thinking about before. The most efficient way is to click the home button and then re-launch the app. That's two clicks and a context switch. Repeat it the 1,000 times in a given day and its expensive. Mac OS X has similar problems which manifest in a different way in the terrible windowing system (Apple, ever heard of the concept single clicking to get to a specific window?). Safari on the Mac and lack of Flash support also made at least 25% of the websites I went to unusable (not just lack of Flash but Safari not handling layout/auth properly). I eventually switched back to my small screen Android phone primarily because it has the back button innovation with apps running in the background (fix the damn threaded email UX Google).

Anyway, folks, you should start realizing that the problems you have in usability on Apple products aren't actually you. You've been duped by glossy wrappers and advertising into thinking the machine can do no wrong. It does little but.