The iPhone fingernail issue redux: Adapt or resist?

Radio disc jockeys have howled in derision, as have commenters and bloggers, about Erica Watson-Currie's critique that Apple was being unfriendly to women and "misogynistic" by not making its new iPhone 3G easy to use with fingernails, particularly when typing messages.

They said: Cut your nails! No one is making you buy the phone! Yahoo's Tech Diva suggested that we instead discuss the lack of a video camera in the new iPhone.

We were also lambasted for printing the comments of Watson-Currie and others who admitted to having trouble typing because of fingernails or just big fingers. Readers argued that the fingernail complaint was a symbol of something larger wrong in society. "I guess this makes it official: We've arrived at a time when each person expects the world to adapt itself to meet his or her needs," George Kaplan wrote in a comment on our June 12 post. "I'm 6'4" and I don't fit easily into a Porsche. I fully expect Porsche to change its design to allow someone of my height easy access."

In one of the few to come to Watson-Currie's defense, RandyTB wrote: "Asking Apple to be tuned into its potential customers a bit better is completely legit. I love my iPod Touch, but it's not beyond improving."

The reactions got me thinking that the debate touched on the age-old struggle between tech lovers and regular people over how user-friendly gadgets and computers should be -- and who is to blame when things go wrong or a new gadget sits in a corner gathering dust after a few tries. Is it user error? Or user interface error?

I called up ...

... Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster, for his thoughts. No, Apple isn't misogynistic, he said. But he added that it would be interesting to know how many female engineers with long fingernails work at Apple. "Geeks loved the screen phone," he said. "And Apple has taken a geeky idea into the mainstream."

Digital technology carries with it the promise that it will adapt to us, Saffo said, and often it does. He pointed out as examples software that anticipates what you'll type and the way Google search learns from past searches you've done to better tailor results.

And when the technology frustrates us? "The computer industry has done a marvelous job at creating the Stockholm syndrome," Saffo said. "If something goes wrong, I believe it's my fault."

Gavin Lew, managing director of User Centric, has studied consumers and mobile devices, including the iPhone. He sympathizes with the long-nailed folks. If they can't use their fingertips, they are forced to type using more flesh, which then increases inaccuracy. One idea he had for the iPhone -- make a second setting that people can choose in which the touch zones under the letters on the screens are not as precise as the outlines of the keys.

"It's not the user's fault how their fingers interact with the keyboard," he said. "I want to add to the iPhone to make it more accessible."

In the meantime, what should Watson-Currie and other long-nailed users do? Cut the nails or leave them? Adapt or resist? "A product should fit into a person's user experience," Lew said. "You shouldn't have to adapt and change how you groom yourself because of a product."

Saffo at first agreed. "No matter how much of an inconvenience, do not cut your nails just yet," he said. "Someone will come to your rescue with a new product."

Then again, he said, the iPhone itself is the marriage of function and fashion. And to make a fashion  statement comes with tough choices: High-heels or flat shoes? Let the gray hair show or color? Long nails or iPhone typing?

For those who choose their nails over the iPhone, a word of warning: Discussing the unfairness of being forced to choose between the two could invite ridicule.

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo of Erica Watson-Currie trying to type on the iPhone. Credit: Courtesy of Erica Watson-Currie

Comments

[Erica Watson-Currie, MCM, PhD]

Regarding Mr. Kaplan's remarks, a more insightful George (Bernard Shaw) observed, back in 1903: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

As for his attempted comparison, I used to work for a Porsche dealership. For a fee, the folks in Stuttgart are exceedingly willing to customize their product to accommodate users I'd willing to pay more for a stylus (as one does when adding any of the large number of other accessory items Apple does offer): how is this different?

[Mort Blort]

Then, dear Erica, get a different phone. The iPhone's touchscreen is not pressure-sensitive. Instead, it is sensitive to the electrical impulses in human flesh. There are plenty of stylus phones. Buy one of those instead.

[max]

misoginyst? oh no...Iphone will be for a very man like me

[Simone Cavallaro]

Come on guys seriously! You can't expect that everything can be customized to your needs.
In addition, I think that this argument made by long-nails-girls and overweight people is insane. They sound very spoiled to me.
What should a person with real disabilities say in front of this? I think it's just outrageous!

[federico]

Suggesting that a company is "mysoginist" because of the size of touch-screen's letters reveals how much of today's journalism is based on just nothing.
Apparently, political correctness (or, to say it better, a degenerated kind of it) has annihilated intelligence and common sense.
Actually, I hope Steve Jobs and his team will just laugh out loud at such nonsense.

Cheers,
Federico (from Italy)

[Paul]

Why don't they use their feet?

Problem solved!

[Jeff]

It's legitimate for users to ask for products that are easy to use. It's not legitimate to say that a product is "unfair" or "misogynist" if it doesn't work perfectly with one group of users.

First, products can't be unfair or misogynist because..well...they are products not people. Those adjectives only apply to people or systems run by people.

Second, products are developed for a profitable, standard slice of users. For example, I can't wear off the rack trousers in Hong Kong. From this fact, I would be daft to conclude that Hong Kong retailers hate white people.

But that's just the kind of argument Ms. Watson-Currie advances. In general, women have developed a rather intolerable sense of entitlement. Use some common sense, ladies.

We should accept Ms Watson-Curies critique, as a valid product problem. We should reject as crazy her hyperbolic charges of "misogyny." Please, ladies. It's not all about you.

[Michael Delly]

Maybe there's some kind of special conductive nail polish you could use?