[scintill76]

This is a common refrain, but is it possible that adults have learned valid paradigms that make using the iPhone as it is today, more difficult? If you want to design for 5-year-olds and have them retain that forever, I guess it can work, but maybe it's a design failure if the people who actually buy your product have a harder time using it.

To use another analogy, it's somewhat like saying "Well, people literate in a left-to-right language have no problem using it." Great, but presumably Apple was aiming for a global audience, so pointing out success stories in some subsections of that audience does not mean they succeeded overall.

[marssaxman]

I've certainly noticed that my decades of touch-typing experience make it much more difficult for me to enter text on a buttonless touch keyboard. I'm constantly growling and swearing at the machine and deleting words and typing them over, because I can't shake the habit of watching the text as I type instead of the buttons I'm trying to push. Someone who had never learned to type properly would be unlikely to have this problem.

[iSnow]

Maybe embracing the system and its physical constraints instead of fighting it would help, in that case using something like swype that is both fast and completely different from typing (makes it easier to transition).

At least that worked for me and I am typing without looking at the keys too.

[jakejake]

I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable." Also my 93 year old grandmother took to her iPhone almost instantaneously. As did my technically challenged parents, all of their friends and pretty much any of the hundreds of people who I have ever seen pick up an iPhone. I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post. And on a tech forum no less - what are you even doing here?

Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?

[scintill76]

> I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable."

But Western 5-year-olds have already had 5 years to watch their parents use contemporary technology. I'm not sure there's such thing as a "blank slate" here. And I doubt the average 5-year-old from a rural town in a third-world country is going to pick up an iPhone as easily as an American one. You're picking like 1% of the world population and making them the benchmark for universal design. I suppose the ultimate end to this line of reasoning is that there is no such thing as perfectly universal design, and I'm OK with that.

> I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post.

When did I say that? You might have me confused with the GP poster.

> Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?

Why not? Many 5-year-olds probably could use rotary phones just fine back in the day. Maybe Apple doesn't actually have a monopoly on making it possible for 5-year-olds to use technology.

[91bananas]

+8 here