Feelin' Fine

Recently, Mark Wadham dumped his iPhone 4 in favour of an Android-based phone, the HTC Desire S and wrote a blog post about his switching experience.

Overall, he really seems to like his new phone, but he also lists a number of shortcomings compared to the iPhone. I noticed that one particular complaint stood out amongst the others, and Mark tried to play it down a little:

While certainly not bad, the UI clearly wasn’t designed by the UX experts at Apple and I spotted a number of irritating inconsistencies and unintuitive aspects of the ui.

It’s hard to gauge just how much of this is simply me being used to iOS, but there is definitely some room for improvement of the user experience. I think if the UX guys at work tried this phone they would find it quite irritating to use.

To disable [haptic keyboard feedback] I had to turn off two settings in completely different parts of the menu…. yeah, people into UX shouldn’t get this phone

It’s not as fun to use as an iPhone, and if you’re a real UX freak you should probably stick with the iPhone at least for now

Despite the lesser UI experience, I actually like Android, mostly because of the freedom.

[The Android phone is] missing the cleanness of the user experience, consistency in the user interface […]

Overlooking the irony that Mark switched to Android because it's more "open" than iOS, he apparently thinks only "UX freaks" would care about the user experience, which couldn't be more wrong. We are all users, which is why we all care about user experience (except maybe for @evilmattgemmell).

Perhaps only a user experience expert can pinpoint what exactly is distracting or imperfect about a device's user experience, but those shortcomings are certainly going to annoy all users. If your device or software (or any other kind of product really) annoys your users, you have utterly failed in designing something worthwhile. A simple "usable" doesn't cut it.