iPhone and iPod Touch apps need to consider real people

Remember the Nintendo Game Boy? It was a hand-held gaming device that was released about 20 years ago, but was popular up until quite recently. It was a great device that sold over 100 million units during its life and at the time it was state-of-the-art. That doesn't mean it was perfect though and one of its limitations was that it had a small screen. It was only about two and a half inches and it was difficult to see. This led to a thriving market for clip-on magnifying glasses. They were plastic gadgets that clipped onto the Game Boy and magnified the screen so you could actually see what was on it. I need one for the iPhone! Developers either have the eyes of a hawk or they don't test the apps on a real iPhone/iPod Touch with real people. Some of the text is so small I struggle to read it. I've even resorted to holding the phone in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other! You try using an app like that!

iPhone and iPod Touch developers need to consider real people when they develop their apps. Not everyone has perfect eyesight and incredibly small text can be hard and sometimes impossible to read. My eyesight is fine for reading and I can read any newspaper, magazine, book, computer screen and so on, but some apps on my iPhone are beyond the resolution of my retinas. Just because the iPhone 4 has a super high resolution 'retina' screen it doesn't mean it's OK for developers to make text even smaller. There comes a point where you start to lose people.

Small text is just one irritation with some (not all) apps. How often have you run a new app and jabbed a finger at random all over the screen just to see what happens? It's sometimes not obvious what to do in an app, what hotspots their are, how to navigate from one part of the app to another, and so on. Desktop applications have buttons and menus, but iPhone/iPod Touch apps aren't so clear and sometimes I'm reduced to random poking to see what happens.

This could be solved by having instructions or help with an app that actually told you how to use it. Many do, of course, but a lot don't. At one time a printed manual used to be supplied with software, then that was dropped and a help file or on-screen manual was supplied. Too often with apps on the iPhone/iPod Touch there's nothing at all. You're on your own and you have to guess how to use an app.

There are lots of good apps in the iTunes store of course, but there's still room for improvement.