Bad UX: Apple's "Close All Tabs" feature, and LDS Tools' Sync feature

Close All Tabs on iPhone Safari 

I don't think I've ever thought "yes, I want to close every single tab on my iPhone, all at the same time. That is exactly what I feel like doing right now." And yet, I've accidentally done it at least 3 or 4 times. 

This is in contrast to my PC and Macbook. I close all my tabs on both of them every night, but that's because I have easily accessible and organized BOOKMARKS! And because I like to clear the RAM every night with a full shutdown (seriously, people who complain to me about having slow computers either a) have way too much crap installed on them, or b) never turn them off, and it's usually the latter). Mobile devices are great for on-the-fly browsing, spur-of-the-moment Google researching, and random TV Tropes rabbit holes. As a result, I don't like having all my different tabs closed on me, at the same time. 

I was driving back from Target this evening, and was pleasantly surprised to hear "Are You Dead Yet?" by Children of Bodom on KBER 101. Naturally, I cranked up the volume and was having a grand old time. I have never heard a death metal song on mainstream radio before so I was shocked, in a good way (I thought that only happens in Scandinavia). I was also pretty sure that I didn't have the song on any of my music streaming sites' libraries either, which was lame. So when I parked, I sat in my parking spot, quickly trying to Google the song so I could remember to add it to my Musi playlist. 

As I did, the iPhone popped up with its whiny little warning of "You have too many tabs, like 500 or something. Please close a tab." Anyway, I was so hell-bent on Googling the song that I didn't actually consciously process what the notification was telling me, despite having seen it before in the past. As a result, my thumb just slid to the first piece of red text that it saw. Subconsciously, I think my brain thought that I was clicking "Cancel". What I was really clicking on was "Close all 500 Tabs". 

And thus -- with no are you sure you want to do this confirmation -- months' worth of data and random research topics was axed in an instant. 

"But wait, Alex," you will say. "You can just hold down the + button and it will show you all your recently closed tabs!" Yeah sure, it does do that. And I'm not going to spend the time to click 500 times in order to reopen all of them. At that point, what's lost is lost. The fact that Safari for iOS doesn't have an auto-restore button like Chrome for desktop does is ridiculous. 

Incidentally, I would argue that this feature violates both the gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation. 

Gulf of execution: Because the Close All Tabs thing is poorly placed, and multiple of the options display red text, my limbic monkey brain isn't instantaneously sure of what to click on. But because said limbic monkey brain wants dopamine and instant gratification, limbic monkey brain is apparently going to automatically click on the center (??) button, which is going to close all 500 of his tabs. This is going to make limbic monkey brain very, very angry. He is not sure how to execute the cancel button, and he clicks on the wrong one instead. And now limbic monkey writes a stupid little Blogspot article that nobody is going to read. 

Similarly, the gulf of execution of how to restore all the lost tabs simultaneously is wider than the distance between the Sun and the Kuiper belt, because that feature doesn't even exist in the first place. 

Gulf of evaluation: This one is a bit more of a stretch, and honestly, this might be more of an execution thing, but whatever. I cannot reproduce this error without manually opening 500 tabs and trying to see the menu item again. Therefore, I cannot reproduce the error in order to ascertain that I will not repeat it. 

Thus, if the system does not "present itself" in a way that lets the user derive which sequence of actions will lead to the intended goal or system state, or derive whether previous actions have moved the user closer to her goal, there is a large gulf of evaluation. [source]

 Yeah...It didn't do that. I don't remember which sequence of actions I took that made me get to that Close All 500 Tabs option, so I am probably going to accidentally do it again at some point. I thought that I would probably make the mistake again the last time I did it, when I was browsing Safari while taking a walk at the park on a particularly sunny day, and hit the wrong button due to sunlight glare. And I was correct. This is bad UX. 

LDS Tools' Sync Feature

This one is less obvious. First off, they just call it "Tools" now, instead of "LDS Tools", and while in principle I get why they did it, it is still annoying to search for because there is nothing particularly specific about the word "Tools". 

Also I haven't done ministering since February of 2020, because everything shut down and I lost my job and my companion moved out of the ward (I was never assigned a new one, and no I am not doing ministering by myself). Anyway, I should probably at least think about doing my ministering, because we're supposed to lift each other up and all that jazz. So, out of a random and short-lived burst of motivation, I thought I would check to see if I have a new companion yet. But then LDS Tools insists on doing a manual sync periodically, and you have to just sit there and wait for it to finish. It also might randomly decide to update, as it did this evening. Well, now I am not doing it. 

Can someone please tell me why this isn't a background process? Other apps have no problem syncing your information every time you log in. Automatically. You'll never even know that it's happening, or if you do, it will be a quiet little sync icon and then you can just, yanno, keep using the app. 

~

Let us all strive for better UX design this spring. Mine certainly isn't perfect. But you'd think that with entire teams dedicated to this stuff...maybe these companies would be a little bit better at it. :P Anyway, it's time to listen to Children of Bodom, preferably without accidentally closing 500 tabs.