What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.
Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I find this kind of crap all over the place in Android - buttons dancing around or changing function so idiotically that it almost feels like my phone is intentionally trying to trip me up.
The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task - exactly the way you found yourself relying on muscle memory in that razor-focused, high stakes situation.
I'm saying this not only as a lifelong tech nerd, but from lived experience as a First Responder (where we routinely deal with high-stress situations, and aim to train with our equipment until it's too familiar to get wrong). It's unconscionable they'd ship such an inconsistent behavior in a function that is at once critical and rarely-exercised.
The problem wasn't you, it was your shoddily designed tool.
For many years I used the stock Android alarm clock and couldn't believe how it was designed.
When the alarm goes off in the morning, I'm half asleep still, my eyes are blurry, and when I look at the phone to snooze the alarm, it has two tiny, tiny, like 15x15 pixel buttons with random icons, no text, on both sides of the screen - one button disables the alarm and the other snoozes.
There's no way in that tired, near blind, state that I could tell or process what I was looking at and would effectively end up just pressing a random button and hoping I remembered by instinct which one was snooze. It really felt like no one had ever actually used/tested the alarm.
In a recent OS update they changed it so that now it has two, much bigger buttons, which clearly state "SNOOZE" and "STOP", they finally changed it, but for all those years it was just atrocious.
Changing how a normal process works in a rare emergency in order to save a single second, but introducing a potentially dangerous amount of confusion, seems like a terrible design.
It doesn't even need to be a tradeoff. Call immediately, but require a double or triple press to hang up (to account for accidental dialing; a user will naturally tap multiple times until it hangs up).
I think it would be okay if it was a highlighted feature shown to the user during set up or a dismissible notification every month or so instead of a surprise when calling.
I hope you're joking, the last thing I want is pop-ups in my phone app. If the issue being solved is someone "forgetting" to press dial in a panic after entering 911 (which seems unlikely given that this is muscle memory ingrained into everyone), there's probably better ways to do the same thing. You could only auto-dial if someone holds up the phone to the ear. After a few seconds you could vibrate the phone and draw more attention to the dial button. Anything that doesn't break the usual muscle-memory flow.
They could add it to the WiFi calling warning notification that emergency calls are unavailable. It even has a do not show again button that fails to dismiss or prevent the notification.
This keeps happening.
2022: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-3-update-emergen...
> There have been reports from iPhone or Samsung users facing a similar problem, and that's despite their significantly higher user base.
Is there a "no" missing?
What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.
Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.
I find this kind of crap all over the place in Android - buttons dancing around or changing function so idiotically that it almost feels like my phone is intentionally trying to trip me up.
The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task - exactly the way you found yourself relying on muscle memory in that razor-focused, high stakes situation.
I'm saying this not only as a lifelong tech nerd, but from lived experience as a First Responder (where we routinely deal with high-stress situations, and aim to train with our equipment until it's too familiar to get wrong). It's unconscionable they'd ship such an inconsistent behavior in a function that is at once critical and rarely-exercised.
The problem wasn't you, it was your shoddily designed tool.
I know it sounds counterintuitive, but I regularly get the feeling that Google doesn't dogfood its products.
For many years I used the stock Android alarm clock and couldn't believe how it was designed.
When the alarm goes off in the morning, I'm half asleep still, my eyes are blurry, and when I look at the phone to snooze the alarm, it has two tiny, tiny, like 15x15 pixel buttons with random icons, no text, on both sides of the screen - one button disables the alarm and the other snoozes.
There's no way in that tired, near blind, state that I could tell or process what I was looking at and would effectively end up just pressing a random button and hoping I remembered by instinct which one was snooze. It really felt like no one had ever actually used/tested the alarm.
In a recent OS update they changed it so that now it has two, much bigger buttons, which clearly state "SNOOZE" and "STOP", they finally changed it, but for all those years it was just atrocious.
Changing how a normal process works in a rare emergency in order to save a single second, but introducing a potentially dangerous amount of confusion, seems like a terrible design.
It doesn't even need to be a tradeoff. Call immediately, but require a double or triple press to hang up (to account for accidental dialing; a user will naturally tap multiple times until it hangs up).
I think it would be okay if it was a highlighted feature shown to the user during set up or a dismissible notification every month or so instead of a surprise when calling.
I hope you're joking, the last thing I want is pop-ups in my phone app. If the issue being solved is someone "forgetting" to press dial in a panic after entering 911 (which seems unlikely given that this is muscle memory ingrained into everyone), there's probably better ways to do the same thing. You could only auto-dial if someone holds up the phone to the ear. After a few seconds you could vibrate the phone and draw more attention to the dial button. Anything that doesn't break the usual muscle-memory flow.
They could add it to the WiFi calling warning notification that emergency calls are unavailable. It even has a do not show again button that fails to dismiss or prevent the notification.
"the idiots are taking over" - NOFX
not-a-bug: Saves more lives in the long run
Those silly humans really should separate the police from their emergency services