The “it looks like you’ve blah blah” example is terrible, imo. The last thing I’d want to deal with after a hard fall is this chatter.
The correct way to do it is:
(Attention sound)
Did you just fall?
((SOS) swipe for help)
[I’m okay]
The original message doesn’t even mention it’s a swipe. I can imagine a stressed person trying to tap that message or icon without realizing it doesn’t work. Targeting at eldery you must be crystal clear, not subtle-UX-clear.
Your prompt doesn’t take into account what this feature actually does.
Asking whether you did fall is not really the right question in that situation.
For example: I did have a serious fall (that hurt a lot) with my bike that triggered this feature – but I was conscious afterwards and seemed somewhat ok. As such I didn’t want my watch to make an SOS call (dialing emergency services and contacting my emergency contacts). I wanted to give myself time to assess the situation first.
However, I did fall and the Watch correctly detected that fall. So to this yes/no question I would have to technically answer yes.
In that context the “I’m OK” button is actually pretty great. It works both if you didn’t actually fall (a false positive) and also if you did fall but it’s not serious enough to call an ambulance. (If you say I’m OK it actually asks follow up questions to determine whether it was a false positive or whether you did actually fall.)
When the watch detects a fall there is a countdown and noise and vibration and after that the watch will make an SOS call automatically. As such it‘s not so important to make it super clear and easy to make that SOS call manually. In that context it seems like a fine tradeoff to me to prevent accidentally making that SOS call.
I think it‘s exactly right for the watch to put front and center why it’s doing what it‘s doing in those situations, while also making it very clear that there can be false positives.
Strong disagree. “Did you just fall?” is more confusing: in that case, the watch is not directly telling you what it thinks happened; instead, it is asking a leading question.
It’s way less clear. You’re relying on implication to convey the fact that the watch thinks you’ve fallen, rather than just saying it.
If you’ve hit your head and are concussed, that extra level of indirection and confusion that your question introduces could have a significant effect on the outcome of the situation.
But what is it going to do if I answer yes? If I did fall but don't need medical attention, is answering "yes" going call emergency services anyway? I don't want that. But if I lie and answer "no", is it going to somehow modify its detection criteria and not work the next time I fall and really do need help? I don't know, I have no idea what it will do.
Besides, it's all a moot point because it's the wrong question to ask. It doesn't really matter if you actually fell or not. It detected what it "thinks" was likely a fall and the real question to ask is: do you need help?
If you turn the corner and see someone laying on the ground, do you ask them if they they just fell, or do you ask them if they need help?
It’s entirely unclear to me what the consequences of the yes/no choice would be.
Furthermore, falling is not binary, so there’s the question about where the boundary is. In an emergency situation, I don’t want to have to deal with any of this. It’s terrible UX.
I wrote a Fall Detector app for Android, ten years ago.
When a fall was detected the sample played: "A fall has been detected"
When the caretaker was alerted: "The caretaker has been alerted"
When the caretaker acknowledged: "The caretaker is on their way"
..
I dunno why its so hard. Talk to the user, re-assure them that the app is doing its job.
Again "fall detected" is quite un-human and mechanical. Is this a technical term? Who/what fell? Are you talking about the season? I think the existing Apple language is good and has clearly been through a lot of discussion!
Given the consensus understanding of physics and gravity, it did. It just so happened that it was attached to a larger thing that also fell, and the larger thing likely either knows it and can comprehend this message trivially, or does not and summoning help is the proper action to take.
Reminder that the screen is a false positive protection mechanism and will only ever be seen in a specific context.
> the larger thing likely either knows [about the fall] and can comprehend this message trivially, or does not and summoning help is the proper action to take.
You did say "likely" but to provide an example: skiers who know they fell cannot comprehend the message trivially (not having noticed it's existence) and summoning help is often not the proper action to take. Call centers serving ski towns are swamped with false positives due to this issue.
Sorry, but that's just a pedantic take when we're discussing what is the best UI /UX for wearers to know how to instinctively react in a possibly stressful moment.
You have to solve for the lowest common denominator, not the hacker's technically correct preference.
This ain't about the watch falling, it's about someone possibly needing to call emergency services and contacts when they're hurt. "I'm OK" is a great prompt in that context, even if it's not an explicitly accurate response to whether the watch or wearer fell (which in turn is why the focus is not on the fall but on their need for help).
Are you imagining someone who, having just fallen while wearing their Apple Watch, wondering whether they or their watch fell when their watch says, “fall detected” While they lay on the floor?
I'm imagining a scenario in which someone who, having just fallen while wearing their Apple Watch, concludes the watch is talking about itself when it says "fall detected" and they will have to have it repaired
But the watch didn't detect a fall. The watch saw signals and data points and thinks it could be a fall. Saying "Fall detected" is too confident and not a reflection of the feature.
I mostly agree with you on this one. But regarding “swipe for help”: typically I avoid UI labels that reference the action to be taken (“tap”, “swipe”, etc).
Good UI design should render the action obvious - a button should look tappable, a slider slidable and so on. That way the label can use its minimal estate to focus on describing the action instead.
“Swipe for help” might also be suitably ambiguous that some users think it means “get help” in the sense of an info page, or assistance.
I’d go with something like “(SOS) Make emergency call” or regional equivalent. Combined with a more obviously swipable UI design.
Ideally then usability test on 50 people to seen if it works!
The original iPhone UI had “slide to unlock” written on the lock screen slider, because it’s not obvious until you learn it. On the emergency/power-off screen, there’s still “slide to power off” written on the slider. Recently I tried to explain to my father remotely how to restart his iPad. However, in his local language, there is only the equivalent of “power off” written on the slider (possibly due to space constraints, as the language is more verbose than English), and so he was at a loss of what to do, since he didn’t recognize that it was a slider.
Looking at the screenshot of the SOS slider, I would have a hard time recognizing it as a slider myself, when seeing it for the first time.
> Good UI design should render the action obvious - a button should look tappable, a slider slidable and so on
That's basically what every designer says. What these people usually forget is that these intuitive Interfaces are only intuitive for people that think like them.
Nothing about that screenshot indicates that I'd have to swipe to take action. There is a very high chance I'd be unable to figure it out in a stressful situation while hurting... Unless I've already encountered the same interface in a less stressful environment.
The SOS could just be a button with the label to the right.
That swipeable element is standard in the Apple Watch UI vocabulary. It only needs to be intuitive for Apple Watch users.
It’s not a button to avoid an accidental press, because the false positive means emergency services are dispatched… and with enough false positives, the service stops being useful (wolf crying).
On a related note, I wish there was a swipeable element in the flow to prevent a Watch™ falsely entering PINs in your pocket until it locks permanently and needs to be completely reset. It can happen in minutes.
It's pretty crazy that people might be depending* on an Ultra model doing some extreme outdoors activity, and it turns itself into a little brick because it's tapping against something slightly conductive.
A button would mean I'd answer endless calls by accident, in my pocket. No, sensors don't prevent this. Yes, my leg, through my pocket fabric, can push buttons.
Did you test all of this, before deciding a button is better?
Anyway, I've never said to use a button, I said "swiping is a terrible gesture"
My parents have enormous issues swiping to answer phone calls. So they answer by accident to a lot more calls than they did when the phone had buttons, because they answer while trying to hung up. It's not clear at all that they could not do anything and the call will automatically end after a while. It's not clear at all that they could silence that phone call, without silencing all phone calls.
It's even worse than that: most of the times they call me back because they could not swipe "the right way" and were unable to answer.
But they are not stupid, they've gone through life pretty well, they worked with precision instruments in health care, where people lives were at stake, it's the interface design that is stupid!
There was a time when things were designed to be used by people leveraging human natural abilities, not forced onto people because they look cool in ADS.
> Yes, my leg, through my pocket fabric, can push buttons
on
Don't keep your phone in you front pocket then!
Anyway, I don't know how big you are, but the pockets of my jeans can't handle more than half a smartphone.
And previous generations of phone never activated on their own while in my pockets (yes, they could fit, because they were sized to be handhelds not small tablets)
But, more importantly, you're not considering more ergonomic gestures than swiping, like a long press.
You are assuming that your habits are the best possible implementation.
EDIT: there's also this: swiping can reveal physical characteristics of the user which could be considered not exactly a good thing, in this era of data harvesting and targetization.
Side note, while I don’t know the trends in Ibiza, in the USA pants marketed to men usually have pockets that can hold a smartphone (and often wallet too, though mine gets a separate pocket).
It’s not really a matter of personal size so the unsubtle body-shaming “I don’t know how big you are, but” is an irrelevant ad-hominem here, which weakens your comment. There’s no need to bring yourself so low in an internet conversation about buttons and sliders.
Thanks for the clarification but I meant big as in a big person (think about Shaquille O'Neal), not a fat person.
I'm not a native English speaker, sorry, big for me means big as per dictionary definition, not large or fat or "you should be ashamed of your body".
Anyway, a search for "jeans pockets smartphone" produces the following results, which is exactly what I meant, pants here have the same pocket size you can see in the following pictures.
No offense at the 'big' thing here, I'm 190cm. But amusingly, I have grey hair, which means I am, by the laws of the universe, no longer allowed to wear jeans.
I think looser pants are why ginormous phones fit, although I am sure upthread's comment about many pants being tailored differently now, is probably true too.
My own usage case is, as with anyone, unique. The real problem is, singular thought in design.
Look at chrome, and how google removed pinch zoom and reflow, to "force" websites to update for mobile.
Thanks google, clearly you could care less about older eyes. About older websites.
> No offense at the 'big' thing here, I'm 190cm. But amusingly, I have grey hair, which means I am, by the laws of the universe, no longer allowed to wear jeans.
ehehe I have grey hair and grey beard too.
I still wear jeans when nobody watches, but in all honesty when I wear classic suit pants to go to the office, the pockets are even smaller than the jeans ones, so my phone stays in the pocket of my (suit) jacket.
My issue with swiping is that when phones fitted entirely in one hand, for example the Samsung Galaxy SII or the iPhone 4, swiping made sense, everything was close enough and you never lost grip.
Now that they are so big, there's a lot of lateral movement to cover and it's becoming to be nonsensical. I usually drop my phone 2/3 times a day because of needing to swipe, it never happened so often before.
I have also started to suffer from joint pain on my right thumb due to phone gestures.
I've watched my parents trying to do it with both hands - with one hand they keep the phone, with the other hand they try to swipe-up to answer using their index finger - and the movement 90% of the time falls too short and the swipe fails.
It's painful to watch, I think we should rethink gestures or phones' dimensions.
Actually, the emergency services are called automatically after a timer countdown. Purpose of the dialog is to check if you are okay and NOT call the emergency services. The slider skips the countdown and calls immediately.
All my fingers work fine on a touch screen. If your thumb was injured and you needed emergency assistance, would you really give up instead of trying to use your index finger? Really? You would just lay there and die because you can't or won't use your index finger instead of your thumb to call for help? Really?!?
I hope this isn't true and you've merely lost track of the context of this discussion.
Cars are already removing them because they are a distraction and don't work!
Mazda to remove touch screens from all new cars - June 2021
Top Stellantis Designer Wants to Remove All Touch Screens - June 2022
Shocker! Test Shows Physical Buttons Are Less Time-Consuming in Cars Than Touchscreens - Aug 2022
Are Car Touch Screens Getting Out of Control? - Feb 2023
You know ironically what the real reasoning behind it also is?
Touch screens are cheap, why should I buy a luxury car to watch a black piece of glass in my car when it's turned off? It doesn't feel luxury, it feels identical to the cheap car of everybody else, it looks identical to induction burners. And why is the manufacturer saving on costs if the car costed me a premium price, because it's nominally a top brand?
Would you buy a Prada bag made of cheap plastic in China?
So you're going to give up and die because you have a broken finger. Got it. If I believed you I'd call you pathetic, but I know you're almost certainly bullshitting because you lost the context of the conversation, made a stupid argument, and are now trying to save face by doubling down.
Nobody rolls over and dies because of a broken finger. People regularly walk around with broken limbs after accidents, oblivious to their injuries because adrenaline has that effect to keep people alive. But you're here arguing that a broken thumb will render you unable or unwilling to call for help? As if you don't have two hands. As if you don't have 9 other fingers. As if you couldn't use your broken thumb to lightly touch a touchscreen if your life depended on it. Give me a break dude! If you die because of a broken thumb, your will to live must be completely nonexistent and you should go talk to a therapist because there is a real risk that you might starve to death after neglecting to eat out of apathy.
> wall of text of other irrelevant bullshit
What even was your point in posting that? I don't like touchscreens in cars either but that has nothing to do with this conversation and you know it. Stop bullshitting.
>Nothing about that screenshot indicates that I'd have to swipe to take action.
Users are not interacting with a screenshot. If you try to tap the slider it will slide a little to the right and fall back to indicate it’s a slider. There are also other actions on the watch that use this kind of interaction. And if you fail to either call ems or confirm you’re OK, it will call them for you.
Yes, they are. You seem want a distressed user to aimlessly wonder though the UI trying to learn how every object behaves. That's not only unreasonable, on this case it's mean.
That's why Jobs-era iPhone always visually AND verbally instructed "[→] slide to unlock", where nowadays it's just a ───── at the bottom that are supposed to be extremely discoverable and immediately obvious and magnificently intuitive.
> What these people usually forget is that these intuitive Interfaces are only intuitive for people that think like them.
Which is why a successful interface designer understands who will be using the interface. There's nothing natural about any touch interface. It's all learned. When designers say "a button should look tappable", that's a design requirement, not a design solution. What solution achieves that requirement will depend on the audience the interface is intended for.
When the user is wearing the device (dedicated Android phone), a 'chain' of protection is rendered (3D) which indicates the state of the Fall Detection algorithm. When the algorithm detects a fall, the chain is broken.
During the fall, the app indicates whats happening with audio prompts - caretaker alerted, acknolwedged, etc. - and then in order for the app to be changed from "Alert all caretaker" state back to 'ring of safety' mode, the user has to swipe the alert icon. The purpose for this is to ensure that in the case of fall, the app persists until the caretaker acks the app, physically.
This proved to be quite workable and fit with multiple users - the 3D "chains" were easy for the frail user to see, while wearing the device - then in case of falls, audio and vibration was used to let the user know help is on its way - and then, to acknowledge, the alert caretaker gets a separate UI that makes accidental de-activation (during an actual fall) impossible.
I'm guessing that a great deal of this warning is false positive. Thus, using "Did you fall?" when a false positive occurs doesn't provide enough context for the alert.
Remember that the Apple Watch is just guessing. Hence, using "It looks like" is more appropriate. Otherwise, a tech illiterate senior might not understand why the Apple is suddenly asking if he/she fell so directly when there is a false positive.
"I think you fell". --> The Watch is an "I" now? Creepy.
"Fall detected" --> which is not technically correct. The watch didn't detect a fall. The watch is only seeing signals that suggest you might have fallen.
"Sudden motion - Injury suspected". --> There are probably many data points fed into an algorithm that detects falling so saying one of those factors, "sudden motion" is not accurate. "Injury suspected" is vague. Who did the Watch suspected had an injury? And not every fall results in an injury. The watch shouldn't be suspecting an injury unless it uses its sensors to detect an injury.
I still think Apple's version is the best out of any of the alternatives suggested here. I guess that's why most people here are developers - not HCI/UX people.
No first person language please. My iDevice shouldn't be saying "I think..." about anything. This is both a personal preference and, I suspect, better "design"/language.
A yes or no question doesn’t make much sense when there isn’t a way to respond to that question. And even if there was, perhaps to help train Apple’s detection algorithm, that really shouldn’t be the main call to action. The point of the feature isn’t to impress you with how accurately it detected falls. It’s to get you help if you need it.
I agree that the “It looks like you’ve…” informal-chatty style is terrible. It’s hilarious that they describe it as “straightforward and direct”. It should rather be something short and matter-of-fact like “Hard fall detected.”
The tone of "Hard fall detected" is good if you're developing a product where precision and accuracy matters most such as in the military or in some high stake business situations. But the Apple Watch is a consumer product.
Also, the watch did not detect a hard fall. It merely saw signals that suggests it could be a fall.
So "It looks like you've" is more accurate and friendly to consumers..
The correct way to do it is:
The original message doesn’t even mention it’s a swipe. I can imagine a stressed person trying to tap that message or icon without realizing it doesn’t work. Targeting at eldery you must be crystal clear, not subtle-UX-clear.