The Opinionated Investor™

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Product Insight – iPhone Dialer

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< 1 min read

Power of positioning in user experience

Lately, I’ve been finding myself muting the phone when I actually wanted to put it on speaker.

Then I realized, a recent upgrade of iOS switched the positioning of two buttons.

Even after acknowledging the switch, I kept muting myself when I meant to put the phone on speaker, and kept putting my phone on speaker when I wanted to mute it.

Imagine yourself getting on a big all hands call at work and hoping to put yourself on mute, you put the phone on speaker!

Aside from the the polar opposite functionality of these two buttons, a few other reasons why I believe Apple should reconsider positioning of these buttons:

1. Consistency – most dialer applications across the world put Speaker on far right and Mute on far left. Why fix it, if it ain’t broken?

2. Usage Frequency – anecdotally, majority of phone calls are 1-1 i.e one person talking to another. So, most people use Speaker function more frequently than Mute unless you are joining a big meeting, which is few and far between if at all.

3. Accessibility – with phone sizes getting bigger, it is often not possible to reach far left button as easily with one hand, so it is difficult to access that button unless you use two hands.

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Aman Kataria

Product Manager | Investor | Airbnb Superhost

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