Apple Facing Big Challenges With iOS 13

Here is a great read about iOS multitasking weaknesses: What’s Wrong With iOS 11/12 Multitasking — Fraser Speirs. iOS 11 was a great update for the iPad with drag & drop support coupled with “real” multitasking feature. This article, supposedly written a long time ago for iOS 11 is all about one thing: the amount of mental pressure iOS 11 is putting on its users is unbearable. Today, iOS 12 in it’s current form is still facing the same design problems.

From Fraser Speirs:

Ultimately, my big issue with the iOS 11 multitasking model is the demands it places on the user’s mental model. In iOS 11, you have to develop and maintain a mental model of:

The apps in your Dock

The apps not in your Dock

The state of your app pairings

Which apps were in Slide Over in which spaces

…in order to predict what a behavior is going to do to your workspace.

To be honest, just to write this blog post on my iPad, I encountered many of the issues exposed in Mr. Speirs article. I consider myself a power user of the iPad and I still have to think a few seconds before engaging with iOS multitasking. This shouldn’t be like this. And to add more cognitive load on the users, consider how a burden Siri Shortcuts invocation phrases have become.

This coming June, at the WWDC conference, Apple will present iOS 13. This release is rumored to include many updates designed for the iPad. No wonder why Apple pushed them back when they were working on iOS 12. To be honest, I just don’t know how Apple will “fix” this. It seems to be an Herculean job to accomplish.