I watched the keynote, and as someone who does almost all his purchasing online, found myself in Best Buy the other day. So we wandered over to the phones and checked out a Windows phone and an HTC which were right next to each other.
The windows phone was pretty interesting. It took my partner a couple tries to figure out how to use it (I'd seen demos online so I was more prepared for the UI) but they eventually got it. Still, the UI was broken in some very weird ways-- for instance, going to the datebook app, you could easily scroll from day to day, but what if you wanted to go a year into the future or the past? (The phone was set for last year)... eventually we were able to figure out how to bring up a calendar view that showed months at a time, but tapping on a particular month or day didn't bring you to that particular month or day's agenda! Never did figure that out.
I give Microsoft credit here for trying to come up with something new. I think in a couple years, they will have something very usable, and it certainly is very different and potentially innovative. (Didn't get to use the device long enough to see if it was different for difference sake, or if there was a fundamental UI insight behind the way it worked.)
Then we picked up the HTC. It was pretty eye opening. I did like the animated background, that's cool. The icons are fugly, though. Its like someone who didn't know what they were doing tried to copy an iPhone. The device was really cheap plastic. The touch screen wasn't very reliable, and the apps were ... poor at best. I was surprised at how fiddly everything was... you couldn't just launch an app and immediately know how to use it. On the iPhone (and windows phone it seemed) there are standard controls and paradigms, like the tab bar and swiping left-right. I'm sure android has these features as well, but they aren't really supposed to be features... they're the common commands that Apps should share so that the user spends time comprehending your app and what it means, not trying to figure out how to get to the next page, or whatever.
I don't know, or care, whether this was the "latest" android phone. In fact, replacing an iPhone every 2 years is a much better experience than having to keep up with a marketplace of phones that changes every three months... and given that Apple always delivers a superlative experience, while the android hardware market is competing more on headline features, there's a huge incentive for android makers to put in some feature (like LTE, or a power hungry processor) that undermines a more important, but less exciting capability, like battery life. Trying to keep on top of all that, making sure I'm not getting screwed is more effort than I want to spend when shopping for a phone.... especially when I can just buy the latest iPhone and get the best experience, and know I'm not going to regret my purchase.
Please detail which phone you use and which apps were unintuitive.
I hear complaints like this a lot, then try to replicate them on hardware I have to hand, and shockingly I am unable to do so! It's almost as if these stories are massively embellished versions of real interactions.
For example. Have you actually seen how complex the home button on an iPhone is?
That's part of the problem. There is diversity in the Android ecosystem. Android hardware and software differ among models and versions. There isn't necessarily a common way of doing things.
Some might argue that the iOS' "one-way-to-do-things" design guidelines are constraining and limit innovation, but in practice they are very well thought out.
Just playing devils advocate here... how complex is the home button? Clicking it does one thing: takes you to the first page of the home screen. If you're already there, it takes you to Spotlight.
And if you were in a folder before launching your app, it takes you back to the open folder. I never understood that part and it throws me off every time even with 1+ year of experience with it...
You can just hit the home button again. I always think of open folders as just another state of the home screen, just like any of the apps maintains a state.
As far as I can tell, they made double click launch the multitasker, and the mystery swipe left and right in it (without even any indicators this is possible), just to hide that stuff from novice users.
I'm not sure if you meant "hide" it so that they'd never use it or hide it so they wouldn't see it before they were ready. I think the intention on Apple's part was the latter.
It isn't that hard to accidentally double-click the home button and get to the other running Apps. This is a natural effect that good UI depends on. Rather than filling the screen with a control for every possible option, you get this "hidden" functionality that users discover by mistake.
Once there, swiping left and right is an obvious thing to do, but even if you don't think about it, you again can do it by mistake.
I found the voice command functionality by mistake when I held the home button down while thinking about what I wanted to do next (And have occasionally accidentally invoked it in this way since.)
And you click and hold to get Voice command. I've gotten that a couple times by mistake. So, I guess I've experienced the usability downside of this "complexity".
Still, one of the things I experienced in best buy was that the buttons at the bottom of the screen were pretty confusing.
The home button is really intuitive in comparison.
The windows phone was pretty interesting. It took my partner a couple tries to figure out how to use it (I'd seen demos online so I was more prepared for the UI) but they eventually got it. Still, the UI was broken in some very weird ways-- for instance, going to the datebook app, you could easily scroll from day to day, but what if you wanted to go a year into the future or the past? (The phone was set for last year)... eventually we were able to figure out how to bring up a calendar view that showed months at a time, but tapping on a particular month or day didn't bring you to that particular month or day's agenda! Never did figure that out.
I give Microsoft credit here for trying to come up with something new. I think in a couple years, they will have something very usable, and it certainly is very different and potentially innovative. (Didn't get to use the device long enough to see if it was different for difference sake, or if there was a fundamental UI insight behind the way it worked.)
Then we picked up the HTC. It was pretty eye opening. I did like the animated background, that's cool. The icons are fugly, though. Its like someone who didn't know what they were doing tried to copy an iPhone. The device was really cheap plastic. The touch screen wasn't very reliable, and the apps were ... poor at best. I was surprised at how fiddly everything was... you couldn't just launch an app and immediately know how to use it. On the iPhone (and windows phone it seemed) there are standard controls and paradigms, like the tab bar and swiping left-right. I'm sure android has these features as well, but they aren't really supposed to be features... they're the common commands that Apps should share so that the user spends time comprehending your app and what it means, not trying to figure out how to get to the next page, or whatever.
I don't know, or care, whether this was the "latest" android phone. In fact, replacing an iPhone every 2 years is a much better experience than having to keep up with a marketplace of phones that changes every three months... and given that Apple always delivers a superlative experience, while the android hardware market is competing more on headline features, there's a huge incentive for android makers to put in some feature (like LTE, or a power hungry processor) that undermines a more important, but less exciting capability, like battery life. Trying to keep on top of all that, making sure I'm not getting screwed is more effort than I want to spend when shopping for a phone.... especially when I can just buy the latest iPhone and get the best experience, and know I'm not going to regret my purchase.