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Designers Criticize Apple's User Interface For OS X and iOS
Hugh Pickens writes "Austin Carr notes that a number of user interface designers have become increasingly critical of Apple's approach to software user interface design. Much of their censure is directed against a trend called skeuomorphism, a term for when objects retain ornamental elements of the past that are no longer necessary to the current objects' functions, such as calendars with faux leather-stitching, bookshelves with wood veneers, fake glass and paper and brushed chrome. A former senior UI designer at Apple who worked closely with Steve Jobs said, 'It's like the designers are flexing their muscles to show you how good of a visual rendering they can do of a physical object. Who cares?' The issue is two-fold: first, that traditional visual metaphors no longer translate to modern users; and second, that excessive digital imitation of real-world objects creates confusion among users. 'I'm old enough, sure, but some of the guys in my office have never seen a Rolodex in real life,' says Designer Gadi Amit. 'Our culture has changed. We don't need translation of the digital medium in mechanical real-life terms. It's an old-fashioned paradigm.' One beneficiary could be Microsoft, where the design of Windows 8 distances itself from skeuomorphism by emphasizing a flat user interface that's minimalist to the core: no bevel, no 3-D flourishes, no glossiness and no drop shadow."
That's funny, because even though I don't much like Apple, I think that the "number of user interface designers" at Apple seem to have done fucking well at recognising what is easy to use.
Is this like the way people in the GNOME project arbitrarily assign themselves the role of "user interface designers" and fuck things up three ways to Nevada?
http://skeu.it/ has some cracking examples and a good bit of snark to boot.
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
Silence, citizen or Apple will send its flying monkeys to sue you.,
I agree with the point that using faux object representations is cheap, wastes space, and can be lost on people for sure. But to go for Metro as an example of good design? Sorry, I'd take cheap wood and leather graphics with gradient overlays and shadow underlays any day of the week over that.
We all know that self-described UI designers are never wrong when it comes to making things intuitive and easy to use.
*cough* *gnome* *cough*
So many things to criticize about Apple's UI direction (the tabletization of OS X, for example), and they criticize the thing Apple is doing right.
People like old fashioned aesthetics. Nobody had a need to use a sundial these days, but many people still decorate their yards with them. Seeing a wood bookshelf with real books stacked looks pretty and people see it as part of Apple's software polish.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
The Windows 8 UI is too minimalist. The flat squares look dull and amateurish. The Aero interface has just the right amount of little extra spice here and there.
Really? There's so much to criticize about Apple's design, like OSX's big and cluttered dock versus a tradicional taskbar, and they go straight for the superfluous fluff? Who cares about the icons? They are just fucking icons, replace them if you want to! What the hell happened to functionality in this world? It's like no one cares anymore, and "design" only means "making shit look fancy".
Seriously, as a designer myself I can only shake my head when I read stuff like this.
It may be true that "traditional visual metaphors no longer translate to modern users", but what about older users? Should we just dismiss their needs? Are interfaces really encumbered because they feature a wood-textured background?
Also, I challenge you to come up with a symbol for saving files without using a diskette or something like that. These symbols have transpired from metaphors of real objects to metaphors of actions, and people who have never even seen a diskette learn their purpose by context. Granted, this creates a certain standard by convention, and you could argue that any symbol could be used for that. But again, that would dismiss the users who grew up with that symbol. Currently, everybody is happy, why challenge this?
Imho, articles like this and blogs like skeu.it are just cleverly-disguised marketing by Microsoft. Ask any designer, and they'll tell you that well-used skeuomorphisms are not problematic, but even necessary to reach most of your target audience.
Wood veneer IS wood. It's a more efficient use of the wood. FAKE veneer is printed paper. That I don't care for, mostly because it peels. Modern people aren't unused to seeing wood.
And please, brushed chrome? It's timeless - and it's metal. One hundred percent of the people I know are used to seeing chrome.
"One beneficiary could be Microsoft, where the design of Windows 8 distances itself from skeuomorphism by emphasizing a flat user interface that's minimalist to the core: no bevel, no 3-D flourishes, no glossiness and no drop shadow."
I hate minimalism, it's nothing new, it's nothing attractive, it requires no thought and it's ugly as hell.
All of the above is, of course, my taste. HEY! An idea... allow the user to choose. Oh, yeah... skins. Maybe he hasn't heard of them.
The icon that fucks me off the most is the one for the iOS Maps application. The US interstate route sign in the icon (ie route 280) makes absolutely no sense to anyone young or old outside of the United States. A globe or something similar would make more sense....
Of course once you've gone completely flat and removed all the ornamentation, it makes one wonder where the next generation will go. Perhaps someone will suddenly realize, wow, we can make those tiles look just like a 3D image of a smartphone (and, of course, be promptly sued for rendering them with curved corners).
If OS X and iOS are bad then iTunes is a crime against humanity. And I think that's because the original program came from outside Apple.
... probably until they go under. They'll acquire new ideas along the way with their massive piles of cash but what happens when those visions are at odds with The Great Master who has transcended to Nirvana? That's still a long way off but these rumblings of criticism just show you can make another interface that is completely the opposite of Apple and actually do well.
I feel like Apple's UI can be compared to Disney's take over of animation stylings. Before Disney, you could find a whole variety of animation styles. But the vision of Disney was to make everything round and smooth and beautiful. Every animation cel was to look like a masterpiece portrait -- because that was the general populace's desired art at the time. And that's what Disney was trying to make, animated art. You might have found a sharp edge on a villain like Jafar in Aladdin but the main character would be round and warm. Others tried to mimic the stylings and it became a de facto standard mostly because it sold.
Similarly, Apple has done their UIs to be as beautiful as possible. And they've done it really well and it's expensive (I'd imagine both computationally and price). And both Steve Jobs and Walt Disney appeared to be this monolithic men pushing this new way (in reality it's probably a bunch of artists in a cohesive team) but they've both come and gone. And Apple clings to that vision but the vision never changes.
What happened to Disney was another production house, Nickelodeon, slowly discovered that square and rigid corners were not only acceptable but Spongebob Squarepants became an icon. Gross humor could be applied to shows like Ren & Stimpy and some people enjoyed this more than the safe beauty of Disney. Disney has no grit because Walt Disney wouldn't allow it. Disney got into disagreements with Pixar about Toy Story 2 and I think it is best if they left Pixar separate from Disney despite the acquisition. Similarly in the future Apple will be usurped by someone who is willing to experiment and deviate. Jobs is dead so Apple is committed to his vision
My work here is dung.
I think there's such a thing a 'over-skeumorphing', but I do find it serves a purpose. Those shelves might not be real shelves, but it emphasises that those icons are books, not apps or games or anything else. And by using the same stitched leather across the iPhone, iPad and Mac version of the calendar app, it emphasises that the data you put in is shared between these apps. Same for the Reminders app. And the Notes app.
I also think that having a strong visual identity for an app can make it more fun to look at and use, if that's your thing.
I admire the slickness of Windows Phone, but it just feels a bit too depressing, bland and clinical for my liking. I don't feel like I'm supposed to have fun when I'm using a Windows Phone.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
I find this whole skeuomorphism thing to be tenuous at best. I'm 26 and have never used a rolodex nor a leather calendar book--and my phone hasn't looked like a corded handset since I was seven. But so what? I love the way all that stuff looks. There is a reason people go in for retro styles in the first place. We like that connection to the past. And to say that we are confused, simply because we're young is preposterous. We grew up on television. We've seen it all. Sure, we may laugh every time Jack McCoy picks up his tethered phone and flips through his rolodex to find another lawyer, but we aren't idiots. We know how this stuff works, and frankly I prefer the organic look of real objects to the sterile hospital environment of Google's design team. Just because the thing is digital does not mean it should look like it was designed for a Star Trek shoot.
The thing that I find very strange about Apple's UI peoples' obsession with ultra-tacky stitched leather borders, disgustingly twee fake paper calendars, little 'wooden' shelves for ebooks, and similar rot, is how sharply it differs from their hardware guys...
On the hardware side, Apple's aesthetic is one of a practically brutalist honesty to their materials, and a fairly relentless drive to unify surface and structural elements(ie. aluminum unibodies, rather than ABS-clad magnesium or steel skeleton designs, that sort of thing). It is really quite jarring. Their hardware guys appear to be iterating toward the monolith from 2001, and then you turn the device on and *BAM* punched in the face by '90s shareware UI...
Touching objects on a screen that look visually like what the physical representations of the function being peformed used to look like before we had PDAs and smartphones is ludicrous!
/usr/bin" then "./phoneapp dial -domestic +13125551212" whenever I want to make a phone call and "./phoneapp hangup -log /var/log/calls.today" when I hang up and want to add the details to a log file. That's much easier for me to understand, and should be self-explanatory to anyone if they just read the command. :)
I'd much prefer a CLI so I can type "cd
If that's just too hard for some people, I guess we can have a GUI with red and green icons with antiquated pictures of analog handsets on them, for now. But those should eventually be deprecated in favor of some newer, more modern representation of what a phone looks like.
I'm a visual person. I like a bit of skeuomorphism. I can agree that many apps take it too far, but there are some kinds of apps where it can benefit, and where it can make things more fun to use.
A few top ways skeuomorph apps can do things wrong:
Non-skeuomorph apps have the same kinds of problems in many cases. Fat margins, "iced" or unstretchable dialog box layouts, inability to copy pretty much any visible text to the clipboard, flat coloring that lets different entities to merge.
I haven't found my ideal window manager yet. It seems like 99% of the mouthbreathing userbase likes fully sovereign/maximized applications. This breaks down on massive displays. It seems like a lot of people like magnetic window edges that "help" align things neatly and nicely at all times. I'm the opposite, I like windows to be scattered and different sizes, and if there are just a little too many, to be overlapping such that no borders line up. This is almost a skeuomorph of a desktop where different papers overlap generally but never exactly.
People seem to go on about making flatter colors and simpler framing, but I like the visual cues of shading and shadow, of increasing or decreasing contrast to draw attention. The Metro stuff looks like a wall of sample paint chips you see in Home Depot, or the funny hospital triage menu interface in Idiocracy. No, I don't want to run "Afternoon Eggshell Delight" nor do I want to have to hunt the wall for it.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. That includes examples of skeuomorphism. However, that's not the reason to throw it out.
[
At the top:
Apple's one-menu-to-serve-them-all approach is decidedly unfriendly when you have more than one monitor, as more and more of their machines come out of the box ready to operate with (and a machine like a Mac Pro can trivially be configured to run quite a few monitors.) But even a Mac Mini or a laptop will run two. What happens is that you're off on one monitor, you need a menu operation for the app you're working with, and the menu is 1,2 or perhaps six monitors of mouse-travel away. Menus on application windows make a great deal more sense.
Typists -- by which I mean people who really type a fair bit, like writers or serious programmers -- are not served well by Apple's low profile "chiclet" keyboards. Apple gets the shivers by making their devices thin; but this means that keystroke throw is short, and what we end up with is a mushy keystroke.
In the middle:
Apple's one-app-at-a-time system UI messaging approach means that you can only send keystroke events to the active application. So, for instance, were you to attempt to write program B to automate program A, and the user happens to be using program C, any attempt to control program B from program A will require you to shift the user's focus from program C to program B, which is decidedly unfriendly. Applescript's mechanism for automation requires activation of this app, then that app, which means that the user can't be trying to use the machine when the Applescript is running. Which is kind of a serious faux pas for what is nominally marketed as a multitasking machine.
There's no inter-program messaging paradigm other than the network. No named ports, etc. This also has severe implications for automation.
At the bottom:
UDP messaging is used to send network events in a broadcast manner. Apple's implementation of UDP only allows one program on a machine to bind to a UDP port, meaning that only one program on that machine can catch a broadcast -- which in turn means that if your implementation really needed a broadcast mechanism, you can't use UDP for it.
---
That's just a sampling of UI issues with the OS. Against these rather immediate problems, I find the whole issue of make-it-look-like-[object] to be silly.
Don't know what the [object] is? It's a one-time learning trip down memory (or history) lane, and you're up and running. Operation is easy, even if, lawd forbid, you had to learn something.
On the other hand, when you need to get at a menu across a bunch of monitors, you're kind of hammered. It's time to go hunt for a third-party fix. If you need to really type, it's time to go buy a keyboard from a third party. If you need broadcast, I hope someone warned you the UDP stuff is broken so you don't waste your time trying to use it. If you're trying to implement IPC, well... [hollow laughter] I bet you'll wish you were working under Amiga OS before you even get seriously started. And no, Applescript won't get you even close because of the above-mentioned application focus issues.
One might argue that both Microsoft (Outlook) and Google's calendar and contacts apps do exactly that, and are both much more widely used than Apple's.
Agreed. The problem is most people don't understand the reason WHY Metro is a horrible UI -- hint: it has to do with context.
When you have a "flat" UI you have no *secondary* _visual_ cues to tell you what you can interact with or not. You see this effect in many iPhone apps where they will have this absolutely beautiful graphics (and backgrounds) and you have no clue what the hell is an actual UI "widget" that you can push, slide, etc.
OSX Mountain Lion is starting to fall for this trap by hiding scroll bars. When I need to scroll, such as dragging the slider up/down, I can't even tell where it unless I first do a dummy scroll. This is retarded.
With a more "traditional" approach with *some* 3D elements such as drop shadows, beveled corners, these widgets "stand out" so we have a more natural intuitive sense to make the *critical* distinction between 2 UI elements:
* what is purely static which conveys information
* what can I interactive with.
UI is *supposed* to be about making it EASIER for users by *helping* them think less and act more by streamlining their judgement process. 3D Buttons are a perfect example of this: Users internally are thinking "Ah, here is a button I can push -- OK, what does it do? Does it do what I think it does? Does it do what I need it to do?"
ALSO note that TOO many 3D elements is a hinderance. 3D Studio, Blender, etc, are HORRIBLE UI's simply because they *overload* the user with too *many* widgets. It is an design art-form to maximize minimalism and minimize functionality. Sadly, too many UIX don't have a freaking clue about the fundamentals.
Without recognizing this deep contradistinction UI designers are completely screwing users over making them play the what-can-I-interact-with-game. This is 5 steps backwards. *sigh* Somebody everyone will realize we need to change the computer to fit US, instead of trying to change humans to fit the computer.
Yea, as a Linux user I never thought I'd be supporting a Microsoft app, but...well, I just started a new job recently that uses Outlook. And I never had much of an opinion on it until reading this...because it's never made me think about it. It's never gotten in my way. Gives me my email and my calendar available in a single glance, everything just works...I've got no complaints.
Well -- actually I do have one complaint: There's no 'minimize to tray' type function (at least not that I've found) so it's always taking up space on my taskbar...but otherwise, no complaints.
My biggest problem with OSX has always been the lack of Alt- sequences -- key-stroke sequences that allow you to access menu items without touching the mouse. As a power-user of at least two productivity applications (Word and Excel), I have forever avoided *unnecessary* mouse usage by memorizing my favorite sequences like Alt-e-s-t (Paste->Special->Formats). My use of these applications is, frankly, bewilderingly fast (pat, pat), in the eyes of users who use drop-down menus to access these same functions. If you have never seen someone use Excel without ever touching the mouse, you should: you will learn something about user experience and interface efficiency.
In *some* previous versions of OSX you could turn on alt-sequences. Others, not -- I bought a used MacBook Pro in 2005 and couldn't figure out how to get these to work after ~10 hours of research, so I resold it a month later. I frankly don't use Macs enough to know whether it's easy to do this now, but from casual use I know that it isn't available as a default, which is silly, whereas it is on Windows. And thus Windows encourages developers to include these sequences, which is a real boon for every app where they work.
Mice are great, but they are slow! Why would you ever want to aim three clicks when you could type four letters? Imagine if you had to type text in Word, Excel, VS or Eclipse by clicking an on-screen keyboard with your mouse... you'd probably just give up and write with pen and paper (or a manual typewriter), and hire some low-wage laborers to do all that slow, boring clicking. That's how I feel when I use Excel on a Mac.