Abstract
Human-computer interaction is about the connection between systems and the people that use them concerning their place of use. This paper seeks to look into a system that has been introduced into society but failed due to a bad implementation of the human-computer interaction process. As a case for this paper, it will dwell much on iPhone 4, its introduction, and the matters that have led to the much criticism it has fetched about the human-computer interaction systems.
Problem background
Any system is always led by huge expectations before its introduction into the market. This is an issue that results from various advertisements and other marketing strategies (Card, 1983). The iphone4 was long anticipated to be a hit in the market though it came up with much negative feedback from its users who categorized it as a flop. The main reason for this negative outlook was the design factors that made the phone users encounter some problems in usage and handling, calling call dropping, branded features among other factors as they will be discussed in the paper.
HCI vs. iphone4
Human-computer interaction falls into various categories which can be classified as technological and cognitive features, in the technology part, the design of the software and the hardware are some of the crucial factors to be considered. At the same time, it has the cognitive function which is more on how knowledge is passed by the machine to the user. In this field, the focus is on how people and machines interact and in the end, the person gets what he required from the machine. As the person is interacting with the gadgets or the computers, he should be favored by the design in that the system should be in such a way that it supports human usability.
It should also be clear that the system should be in such a way that the person using it should have easy access to information. This means that the computer system or the gadget under discussion should be designed in such a way that it should aid the person in the access of information (Moggridge, 2007). This can be through normal information retrieval procedures like browsing the internet.
Iphone4, upon its release, got a lot of criticism in various fields. In such a short while after acquiring the phone, many people started complaining of the poor reception that the phone had and that it dropped calls. In many common phone designs today, the reception of the network depends upon the placement of the antenna. In this particular phone, the antenna had been dedicated to one part thus was always blocked once a person tried to make or receive a call which resulted in interrupted reception. This has also been seen to have the extra risk of increasing the closeness of radiation to the body as the phone tries to communicate with the network masts.
This is a very serious flaw in the design of the phone which does not take care of the security of the user. The user context is one of the core HCI components and thus the design failure was a poor consideration of the HCI design.
The name of the phone, the iphone4, implies that it is a 4th generation phone while in an actual sense, it is a 3rd generation gadget (3G). This means that it cannot use wireless standards which use 4G. In the HCI components core structure, the particular computer system comes in. while buying this phone, people would have been duped into believing that it was a 4th generation gadget that they were buying whilst they were buying a gadget that would only operate on 3rd generation networks. This is a serious design and software flaw that again goes against the HCI considerations.
The phone was meant to be designed in such a way that the stainless steel band around it would improve wifi. This proved not to be the case since during the testing of the product; the wifi connection was not working very well. For a person to get a good connection, it is almost a requirement that there is a wireless router nearby otherwise the connection will be bad. Looking again at the core components of good HCI design is a consideration of the environment in which the computer system is to be used. The environment has to be favorable to the user particularly for the intentions that the system was made for (Saffer, 2006).
A mobile phone has features that enable any particular user to use the gadget irrespective of his or her location including while in transit. The iPhone was integrated with the wifi feature as part of the whole system but not on conditions that some other devices were to be nearby. It hence follows that the understated performance of the wifi is a gross inconsistency with the considerations of a good HCI system. The main deterrent of a proper HCI conducive environment was the questionable environment question (Dawes, 2007).
The design of the phone was aimed at making it a slim product that was easy to handle. The thin nature of the phone has a shape that makes it so easy to slip out a user’s hand. Looking at the essence of slimness, there is a stylish behavior that comes with it. The nature of the phone to easily slip out of the hands and fall and the other factor in design where the phone is made of glass makes people worry much.
The glass cover on the phone was designed to be three times stronger than plastic but on testing, it cracked almost entirely on being dropped four times. This then makes the phone users buy an extra protective case to make sure that it gets protection upon slipping. Looking at both cases, the design of the phone beats the slimness logic as the users cannot use it in that condition comfortably. The HCI component of the computer system at hand is then surpassed and also the component of usability.
Lastly on the design issues, the phone designers did not consider the information age of the users. Most of the users of the phone buy it considering the internet connectivity and searching of the required material over the net. Considering this matter, the phone was integrated with the Bing search engine whilst most of the users are conversant with Google. This was an outright in consideration of the users of the phone beating the components of good HCI design
Principals of good HCI design left out
In Human-Computer Interaction, there is a basic goal of improving the interactions between human beings and computer systems. In the long run, the field aims at reducing the barriers that do exist between human beings and machines. Professionals in this field have had a gross consideration of the effects in both the user interfaces in graphics and also the web. When a system has been designed such that this is not put into consideration or even after being put into consideration is somehow not fulfilled, then this system will have failed in the implementation of the HCI techniques (Jones & Marsden, 2006).
The analysis of Apple’s iphone4 has shown that most of the key components of HCI were closely related to the huge public outcry of the phone buyers in a negative way. This is clear evidence that the failure of the gadget to hit the market as was calculated was due to the failure in the implementation of the HCI design components.
Conclusion
The case of the launch of the iphone4 into the market is a good indicator of a system that has failed to a bad design of the human-computer interaction. The four core functionalities which were the major causes are the user, the task, context, and the particular system (Myers, 1998). The user was the iPhone buyer who did not get the product that he was eyeing. The task is using the phone through calling, web browsing, and other tasks which had failures in most cases. The environmental context was affected through the probability of breakage through falling and environmental cases. The particular system was the phone itself which has been seen to have quite a lot of problems.
References
Card, S. (1983) The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Erlbaum, Hillsdale.
Dawes, B. (2007) “Analog in, digital out: Brendan Dawes on interaction design” Behaviour & Information Technology 3: 25-76.
Jones, M. & Marsden, G. (2006). “Mobile Interaction” Design International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 7(1): 123-135.
Moggridge, B (2007) “Designing Interactions” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction3 (2): 78-98.
Myers, B (1998) “A brief history of human-computer interaction technology”. Interactions 5(2):44–54.
Saffer, D. (2006) “Designing for Interaction” Human-Computer Interaction 23-65.