I am amazed for all the brain power Apple has in its engineering team, they still manage to provide bad user experience in some cases. General consensus in the industry is Apple Hardware and Software just work together and delight the user in ways which we would not imagine.
Not always.
Allow me to elucidate.
Back in 1990’s the biggest frustration I used to have as a gamer was not able to fit the massive games ( > 5MB) into storage media like floppy disks. (I made myself look like a dinosaur, I know!). MS-DOS and Windows had a nasty habit of not letting you know how much space is available before you start a copy process and would miserably fail half way through.
Fast Forward to 2015. I am using iOS 8.1.3, the world’s most advanced operating system ever (I didn’t say it, Cook did). All I did was try to shoot a video of my 6 week old smiling using my 64 GB iPhone. The camera app was recording the video and right when the baby was starting to coo and cackle, I get this nasty error dialog which said my device ran out of storage space and the recording was stopped. (Thank the lord, it did record some of the footage).
I just don’t understand how the world’s most advanced operating system, cannot provide a word or warning when it starts running out of space. It doesn’t have to be an automated nag, but having a visual clue on the camera app which shows how many pictures are possible or how many minutes of video can be recorded with the available space would be a good visual clue.
Go ahead and highlight that in red when you are running out of space to let the user know that they don’t have enough space to record baby video and its time to delete that Angry Birds V1 app which is taking up close to a GB of space.
And while you are at it, why not give some more smart recommendations like the age/usage of apps on the phone? If I haven’t touched an app in months and its taking up valuable storage space, maybe its time to provide some advice to the user to delete that bloat.
What are the other UX annoyances you face with your favorite Device/OS?
PS: If you are frustrated with other OS annoyances, this Quora Thread has a laundry list of things which iOS sucks at.
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-examples-of-poor-Apple-user-interface-design
UPDATE: Just a few minutes after I publish this post, I see this news about Apple working on revamping the stability of their OS – Good news!
Apple’s iOS 9 to have ‘huge’ stability and optimization focus after years of feature additions
Core Dump 