The Confusatory

[Ed: apologies for linking to TechCrunch. We try to avoid it.]

There’s an excellent article written by Cluster about prompting users for location services, photo album access, and receiving push notifications.

iOS’s dialog box-based permission granting system for photos, location, etc. has been widely accepted as “Works Well (Enough)”. However, if a user selects “Don’t Allow” in a dialog, and wishes to change it later, they have to exit the application and go through several steps to change it.

From the application’s perspective, this is difficult to guide users through successfully (and even harder to make sure they make it back to your app).

Cluster implements several alternate approaches, which I believe are better both for the application and for the user:

• They show a native iOS dialog asking if the user wants to grant access, and only if the user says “yes” do they show the actual iOS dialog for accessing photos (or location, etc).
• They implement UI that makes it clear what the advantages are to granting access.
• They educate and inform the user about the dialog that’s about to come, what it’s for, and why it’s appearing.

I like these approaches a lot. They contextualize and inform the user about the permissions and data access they’re granting. They allow a user to judge the requested access on merit and the value it will yield, rather than being faced with a hostile “the app wants your location right now yes or no?!” dialog at launch (or a barrage of several in a row).