Steve Jobs Wanted the First iPhone To Have a Permanent Back Button Like Android (bgr.com)

anderzole shares a report from BGR: Brian Merchant's new book, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, provides a captivating and intriguing look at how the most revolutionary product of our time was designed and developed. Through a series of interviews with Apple engineers and designers who played an integral role in the iPhone's creation and development, Merchant maps out how the iPhone came to be after more than two years of non-stop work at breakneck speed. One of the more interesting revelations from the book is that the iPhone design Apple unveiled in January of 2007 might have looked vastly different if Steve Jobs had his way. According to Imran Chaudhri, a veteran Apple designer who spent 19 years working on Apple's elite Human Interface Team, Steve Jobs wanted the original iPhone to have a back button in addition to a home button. Believe it or not, the original iPhone could have very well looked like a modern-day Android device. "The touch-based phone, which was originally supposed to be nothing but screen, was going to need at least one button," Merchant writes. "We all know it well today -- the Home button. But Steve Jobs wanted it to have two; he felt they'd need a back button for navigation. Chaudhri argued that it was all about generating trust and predictability. One button that does the same thing every time you press it: it shows you your stuff. 'Again, that came down to a trust issue,' Chaudhri says, 'that people could trust the device to do what they wanted it to do. Part of the problem with other phones was the features were buried in menus, they were too complex.' A back button could complicate matters too, he told Jobs. 'I won that argument,' Chaudhri says."

Comments

Do one thing?

[Vylen]

Except the Home button now does multiple things depending on if you long-press, double or even triple click it?

Re:Do one thing?

[ckatko]

Call me an old fart, but I absolutely hate that about mobile interfaces.

How am I supposed to know that a menu needs to be swiped, then double pressed then held. At least with desktop UI's you can hover the mouse over a button and get a caption.

I had my Samsung S5 for over a year before I realized that the drop down top bar with the wifi/location/etc buttons can actually be HELD and it'll go into a sub-menu for configuration. Whereas just pushing the button turns them on/off.

And, furthermore, the second you utilize TIME in your clicks, you're now forcing time to be a component in their usage. I can press as many radio buttons on my car radio as I want... as fast as I want. I don't have to press one button, and then HOLD IT to have it move radio station. I don't have to watch for the "Context" to change.

If you ask me (and nobody is), user interfaces have gone ass-backwards and keep getting worse. When I had a flip phone, I could send text messages on the FULL KEYBOARD without even looking at the phone. I knew people who could hold conversations AND send text messages like some sort of dual-core human savant. Now, I have to freaking type texts with my fingers pressing ON THE SCREEN that I'm also supposed to be reading from. (Enjoy playing a game where 1/4th to 1/3rd the screen area is your fingers.) Moreover, there's no haptic feedback. So much so that "haptic feedback" is some new age buzzword research field for what we used to already have... a freaking audible/feelable CLICK when you depress a button, and ridges so you can place your fingers in the right place.

Stare at your keyboard right now. Notice the bumps on the F and J keys? They're notches so you can place your hands... the same place... every time. And they work so well you probably never even noticed them.

Meanwhile, how many times have you tried typing manual keys (or god forbid a PASSWORD with special characters) on your phone, and looked down and realized you slightly missed a key and hit a completely different letter as if you're hands are made of fat, unwieldy sausages.

Re:Do one thing?

[Known Nutter]

My hands are are made of fat, unwieldy sausages, you insensitive clod!

Re: Do one thing?

[rmdingler]

Nah. That's like employing a cheat code in a game.

Call me wierd. Been called worse. I like discovering a new function after having a phone for awhile... an easter egg hunt for the big kids.

Re:Do one thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's way more than that.

It now does different things depending on state (whether the phone is locked or not), where you are in the phone, which model of phone it is, and of course how many times you click it. And I think the button on the iPhone 7 is even pressure sensitive, so that's something to look forward to as well.

It's part of the way Apple's lost its way since Jobs died. The iPhone that Steve Jobs made had a Home button that did one thing and only one thing. Here's a small list of things the Home button does today:

1. Single click when unlocked: Bring you to the Home screen
2. Single click when locked: Bring you to the PIN screen
3. Hold but don't click while locked: Unlock but remain on the lock screen. (As I recall this is only really useful if you have notifications set to only display when unlocked and don't want to dismiss them.)
4. Double-click when locked: Brings up Apple Pay.
5. Double-click when unlocked: Brings up the task switcher.
6. Double-tap (that is, do not click the button, just rest your finger on it twice) while unlocked: pushes the screen down to make reaching the top easier (only on 6/7 models). While locked this does nothing.
7. Press and hold: Activate Siri (whether locked or unlocked, certain Siri functions only work if the phone is unlocked)
8. Hold without clicking while an app requests TouchID authentication: authenticate with TouchID
9. Triple-click: activate an accessibility feature, assuming you have it enabled

And those are the ones I'm personally aware of. I can't wait to discover ones I don't know about because I'm pretty sure there are other weird combos of pressing versus touching with clicks and holding variation to activate various features.

Post-Jobs iOS is an amazing mess of features that are impossible to discover on your own. It's a great example of how one of the things Jobs was good at was saying "no" to ensure that the user experience remained as easy as possible.

Re:Do one thing?

[MangoCats]

This, from the company that brought you the one button mouse, that you can click three ways.

Re:Do one thing?

[darkain]

These problems exist on MacOS too. I was recently handed a MacBook for compatibility testing of a web site with Safari. Only problem? How the FUCK do I launch Safari? It wasnt in the launch bar at the bottom. Literally had to go to another machine just to Google how to do it, because there is apparently no way to just have a simply listing of all available installed applications to launch from the main OS UI. It is inside of Finder apparently, under some Applications menu inside of there. This honestly reminded me of all the bullshit in Windows 3.1 that was needed to get simple things done.

Re:Do one thing?

[arglebargle_xiv]

Wow, looks like Apple have taken the design features of the GNXT text editor and turned it into a phone UI.

Re:Do one thing?

[gl4ss]

What menu operates like that?

well. a couple. take current s6 firmware for example. draw down from the top and you see quicklink options that you can long press or quick press. if you want to see more of them you can drag down on any of them and you'll see more icons. do a long press on the wifi icon and you're taken to wifi actions. inside which you can do long presses to get more.

in the notifications area under those before mentioned icons if you drag a notification left or right and you can set settings for that kind of notification(there is no visual identification to do this). if you drag further it clears that notification. no indication about it either.

ios isn't as bad but it sure is drag from every corner does different thing too. and the sw way of telling app developers to add a back button at left up corner kind of sucks. hard to reach.

and I really would like the home and back buttons to be just fucking real buttons instead of capacitive areas.

Re:Do one thing?

[TheRaven64]

How the FUCK do I launch Safari?

Option 1: Go to the Finder, hit the 'Applications' icon in the side bar, double-click on Safari (this is how you've launched applications on every Mac since 1984 - how many other operating systems can say that for any GUI?).

Option 2: Use spotlight by either hitting the shortcut keys (command-space) or by clicking on the search icon at the top right of the screen. Type 'Safari' (it will probably autocomplete after 'Sa'). Hit enter. This mechanism is relatively new and has only been the same for about 10 years.

Re: Do one thing?

[TheFakeTimCook]

It used to be. But recent versions of OSX have gotten pretty bad. I think 10.5 was when most of that happened.

Apple changed when Steve got cancer and started worrying about his legacy. Up until recent times the Mac UI was usually better.

Well except for those stupid one button mouses.

The "stupid" one-button mice went away long before OS X. So, time to put that meme to rest, shall we?

Well, there you go

[reboot246]

Apple users just can't handle more than one button. Hell, even an Apple mouse has only one button. Two buttons would leave Apple users curled up on the floor crying their eyes out. "Decisions! Decisions! I just can't deal with decisions right now!"

Re:Well, there you go

[fustakrakich]

Jobs hated context menus because they hid functionality in unpredictable ways

Yeah, like Ctrl-Click...

Re:I always cursed Jobs for this too..

[saccade.com]

+1. In every iPhone app, you have to hunt around for the "Done" or "Cancel" or "Close" or whatever. Best of all, Android's "back" works across apps; so if an app launches the browser to show you something, tapping Back returns you to the original app. Sorry Chaudhri, Steve Jobs was correct.

Re:I always cursed Jobs for this too..

[darkain]

Coming from an Android world, this honestly confused the shit out of me on iOS when I needed to beta test an app. It had an option to launch Apple Maps from within it for navigation, and I've yet to figure out how the fuck to get back to the app I was in without going all the way back to the home screen an re-launching it. How the hell is that supposed to be a "good" user experience!?

Re:Our time?

[markdavis]

90% of the world uses non-iPhone phones, 87% in the USA. I would hardly call an iPhone a supercomputer, and all smartphones have "the internet". And then you throw curse words at me? Brilliant.

Re:Yes, and then they improved

[jez9999]

The iPhobd at first was going to have a keyboard also, and probably lots of other useless crap.

Yeah, I can't see one reason why you'd want a physical keyboard!

Re:I always cursed Jobs for this too..

[TheRaven64]

If it launched the other app correctly, then there will be a back thing, including the name of the app that you'll go back to, at the top left of the screen.