Design is about making choices
The user told the iPhone to make noise by either scheduling an alarm or initiating an obviously noise-playing feature in an app.
The user also told the iPhone to be silent with the switch on the side.
The user has issued conflicting commands, and the iPhone can’t obey both.
It’s a typical design problem: it can’t be heavy and light and big and small. Neither decision will satisfy everyone all the time or cover every edge case: if Apple implemented Mute in Ihnatko’s preferred way, millions of people would be just as irritated when their scheduled alarms didn’t wake them up.
When implementing the Mute switch, Apple had to decide which of a user’s conflicting commands to obey, and they chose the behavior that they believed would make sense to the most people in the most situations.
That’s good design.
Yes, this is good design. But it’s also just plain old design.
Design is about making decisions, making compromises, making choices. Sometimes the choices are hard. Rarely are they perfect. But foisting all the decisions (and all the blame for poor decisions) onto the user isn’t design, it’s laziness.
Yes, Apple shines here. They make hard choices. People hate them for it. But people also love them for it. All those “fanboys” out there are irrational, and even if they can’t put it into words why they love the iPhone, I’d wager it’s exactly because of this. Apple has made hard decisions, decisions which make the phone easier (and generally better) to use.
Anyone designing a product of any sorts should be thinking of design along these lines. Not “making it pretty” but “making it great”. Most people don’t think like this (hell, many designers don’t even think like this), and that’s why there is just so much crap out there.
By having standards, making the hard choices, and designing with the user first and foremost, you’ll probably end up with a decent product. A great product requires even more of this, plus magic. But you’ll never hit great without starting with decent first.
