Just as you can roughly categorize people as dog people or cat people, there is also a division between Android people and Apple people. Just as with pets, it’s not a sharp line, but the trends are there. Me, I’m in the apple camp. Apple products generally tend to behave, and expect me to behave, in ways that I can understand. It makes the tech experience less stressful and more enjoyable. So when an Apple UX experience fails, it can be especially grating. Today’s peeve is with the iPhone implementation of Messages.
Just as there are dog people and cat people, and Apple people and Android people, there are also those who carefully clear those little unread badges and those who revel in seeing how large an unread count they can accumulate. I’m not entirely consistent about it, but I tend to be in the clear the badges camp, especially when it comes to messing apps.
Let us consider a normal interaction. I notice that I have received a new message. It’s probably spam, but you never know. I open the Messages app and I can tell by the sender and the first line of the message that it’s not urgent and I’m not interested in responding or even taking the time to open it up. I don’t want to mute or block the sender because every now and then they send something I really am interested in, but I just want to mark this message as read so that it clears that stupid flag and I can stop thinking about it. My immediate reaction is to assume that the Messages app will work like the Apple Mail app; swipe right and you can quickly mark the item as read. It’s quick and easy and I use it all the time. But when I do that in the Messages app, instead of marking the item as read, it pins it to the top. Seriously? This is nearly the opposite of what I was expecting! And the action is so ingrained that I find myself accidentally pinning messages all the time, with a guarantee that they are the messages I am most unlikely to want pinned.
Yes, it’s a minor frustration. Yes, I did figure out how to mark as message as read without opening it. It still bothers me.
Sam Herdman 