What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.
Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I find this kind of crap all over the place in Android - buttons dancing around or changing function so idiotically that it almost feels like my phone is intentionally trying to trip me up.
The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task - exactly the way you found yourself relying on muscle memory in that razor-focused, high stakes situation.
I'm saying this not only as a lifelong tech nerd, but from lived experience as a First Responder (where we routinely deal with high-stress situations, and aim to train with our equipment until it's too familiar to get wrong). It's unconscionable they'd ship such an inconsistent behavior in a function that is at once critical and rarely-exercised.
The problem wasn't you, it was your shoddily designed tool.
> The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop
Remember that most of the technology industry today is primarily an ad delivery platform - either current one (aka there are ads there already), or a future one (so even areas where there aren’t ads yet aren’t safe).
Designers want you to always be in an act-look loop, because then you’ll either look at the ad which is already there, or at the very least generate more “engagement” which pumps up their analytics numbers (translates to promotions/salary) and ultimately translates to more ads (the company can now pitch this high-engagement screen real estate to the highest bidder).
The era where computers/technology did things as their primary function appears to be just a happy accident. It’s only a matter of time before you get ads for health insurance while you dial 911.
The constant A/B tests in Google apps like the Play Store drives me nuts. Buttons constantly changing around which is equal to being gaslit because you are wondering whether you just misremembered where the button was.
New 21 century UI design: "John, you will work on a new project: change the send button in a recording button depending on context and moon phases. Alice, you will also work on a new project: Round the corners of UI elements and increase the space between them, so they are more visible. But everything must fit on one screen, no scrollbars allowed."
I think touch screen itself limits the possibilities to create UIs usable with minimum attention. You have to look at it to find the right area to press. All those buttons, knobs, sliders, etc., imitate the real thing, but only in 2D. Can't rely on feeling to find the right control, unlike with physical designs.
It's not the only culprit, of course. There's still room to at least design a layout that is predictable, and with buttons that are easily reachable.
Some UIs make me think the designer was an alien invader in a human body. It thinks nobody can tell, but when it designs a UI that can only be called "intuitive" if you have 7 fingers, the 2-nd and 5-th longer than the others, and the 3-rd one a tentacle... I got you, motherfucker!
> I think touch screen itself limits the possibilities to create UIs usable with minimum attention.
It has nothing to do with touchscreens. Windows 3.1 UI is thousand times more usable than the crap that is Android and iOS. The UI "designers" decided that everything must be a label and the only menus allowed are the hamburger ones.
For many years I used the stock Android alarm clock and couldn't believe how it was designed.
When the alarm goes off in the morning, I'm half asleep still, my eyes are blurry, and when I look at the phone to snooze the alarm, it has two tiny, tiny, like 15x15 pixel buttons with random icons, no text, on both sides of the screen - one button disables the alarm and the other snoozes.
There's no way in that tired, near blind, state that I could tell or process what I was looking at and would effectively end up just pressing a random button and hoping I remembered by instinct which one was snooze. It really felt like no one had ever actually used/tested the alarm.
In a recent OS update they changed it so that now it has two, much bigger buttons, which clearly state "SNOOZE" and "STOP", they finally changed it, but for all those years it was just atrocious.
The alarm on / off toggle buttons on the Clock -> Alarm screen also have a tiny hit-zone and if you miss it kindly opens a screen for you to adjust the alarm time. Hit back, try again, miss again...
I just want to turn my alarm off for a lie-in and I have to play button-sniper.
Changing how a normal process works in a rare emergency in order to save a single second, but introducing a potentially dangerous amount of confusion, seems like a terrible design.
It doesn't even need to be a tradeoff. Call immediately, but require a double or triple press to hang up (to account for accidental dialing; a user will naturally tap multiple times until it hangs up).
I think it would be okay if it was a highlighted feature shown to the user during set up or a dismissible notification every month or so instead of a surprise when calling.
I hope you're joking, the last thing I want is pop-ups in my phone app. If the issue being solved is someone "forgetting" to press dial in a panic after entering 911 (which seems unlikely given that this is muscle memory ingrained into everyone), there's probably better ways to do the same thing. You could only auto-dial if someone holds up the phone to the ear. After a few seconds you could vibrate the phone and draw more attention to the dial button. Anything that doesn't break the usual muscle-memory flow.
They could add it to the WiFi calling warning notification that emergency calls are unavailable. It even has a do not show again button that fails to dismiss or prevent the notification.
I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.