Apple’s Bluetooth Design Flaws
I’m invested in Apple’s success as many other technologists are. I’m probably more critical when they make mistakes then other companies because they are so important. They have an immense amount of power in limiting or enabling opportunities for creativity and growth for the rest of the technology space. If they go downhill and they make terrible design decisions, then we all suffer. The initial capital for any company to even remotely be able to compete with them is so large and so difficult that I don’t really have much hope in that happening, outside of some extreme technological breakthrough. In addition no decisions by Microsoft or Google recently have given me any reason to hope for some better competition from them.
That being said Apple in my opinion is struggling with something as simple as their bluetooth and wifi button design. I use Bluetooth to connect to my headphones and bluetooth to connect to speakers on a daily basis and the process usually requires some effort. Siri isn’t anything to call home about and it has been around forever, I have no meaningful improvement in my experience with Siri since her inception in the 4S. I desperately want them to just actually create something that works really fucking well, if they put as much effort into Siri and Bluetooth as they did into Animoji’s our day to day lives would be a lot more seamless and stressless. The annoyance of dealing with bluetooth problems is surely a technological problem we should have solved by now, more over it is a DESIGN problem we should have solved by now. If you look at every problem as a technical engineering solution then you are bound to have issues. The best product creators understand that Design and Engineering are inseparable, they are yin and yang, form and function. Often times developers are looking to solve problems by writing better code to solve the problem but It is too often overlooked that we could be solving many of our problems with design alone and no greater complexity in engineering.
Here are my criticisms and improvements for the logic they’ve incorporated into the bluetooth button, most of these issues can be applied to the wifi button as well which has a similar logical layout.
As it stands the bluetooth button in the control center should be a quick and easy way to turn bluetooth off permanently without having to navigate into settings. However it is not, it will only turn the bluetooth off for 24hrs and not even reliably. It will not always disconnect and frequently when I turn bluetooth off from the control center it won’t actually turn off and I have to go into settings to do so. Besides the annoyance of this, there is nothing about the bluetooth button that would logically indicate a difference in function in either location, they do provide a small prompt after you press the bluetooth button in the control center but it is too subtle and the best design would be to use imagery by giving the icon some type of unique accent to at least indicate a difference in feature. I understand that they are doing this probably as a way to avoid people having issues because their wifi and bluetooth are off but the logical inconsistency is just poor design, and there are always other solutions.
I will talk on the phone with friends and it is a consistent hurdle when they are getting in and out of cars with bluetooth speakers, the phone will often connect and disconnect without their consent and cause issues to the phone call. In my opinion the best design choice to solving this issue would be to have a prompt on your phone giving you full control of your bluetooth connection before things start connecting randomly. It would be simple to implement and you could even do it from the control center. If something is trying to connect to bluetooth, before it starts messing with your audio you should be prompted to choose to connect to a device, giving you direct control.
