Apple Doesn't Design For Yesterday

HughPickens.com writes Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was "This got hit by the ugly stick." But Karjaluoto says that Apple's decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.

Microsoft's approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations — as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." But Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.

Comments

I don't follow

[dos1]

So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?

Re:I don't follow

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a standard "apologist" tactic. Sort of like an appeal to authority, but one that assumes the authority knows more than you do.

In the future, impeding legibility, requiring more screen space, and making the GUI look fuzzy are just as bad as they are today. However, this author is indicating that eventually such things will become less needed, and we'll learn to live without them, and they fit the same pattern as Apple's abandoment of hardware that was really showing its age.

Except that this is not hardware. Fonts are just as functional as they were two hundred years ago. They haven't outlived their usefulness.

Perhaps high density pixel screens will fix the fuzziness, but it won't fix the footprint (unless Apple's font management is totally pixel based, which would be stupid, and I don't think Apple is stupid). But even then, if Apple released a poorly legible desktop on a high res display, it still would be poorly legible.

So you come back to the main point of this article. "Apple knew better back then"; ahem.... actually everyone knew better back then, floppies were used by about 8% of all the computer users when Apple finally ditched them. "and so Apple will know better now"; ahem... if only we were sure that past performance was a reliable indicator of future performance. "And we should trust Apple because they know more than us"; ahem... ok, so we've gotten to the real argument here.

Re:I don't follow

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a mac with retina. To me, the font change was like 'ohh, the font looks different'. Its not worse, or better - just different. I can still program fine. And I prefer the new font now.

Seems like adults are so much like children now, they complain about everything. We don't have real problems anymore so so have to invent them.

Re: I don't follow

[BronsCon]

So, why not use Helvetica at higher resolutions and keep Lucida at lower resolutions? Then, everybody wins. Right now, even in Apple's own lineup, there's only one product with a screen that might benefit from this change, while it's a hinderance everywhere else.

Re: I don't follow

[lgw]

Not to disagree in principle, but don't confuse "readable" (ability to read for hours without strain) and "legible" (ability to make out each letter at all).

Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on. Serif fonts are perhaps over-used in blogs, from a desire to look more like a newspaper, I suspect, for text too small for the screen resolution to really make it work, but for eReaders and such that devote all possible space to the text, allowing for larger fonts, it's the obvious choice.

Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text (to make the big text easier to read from across the room, and the small print unappealing to read) unless the advertiser's style trumps other font choice concerns. Sans-serif was the only practical choice in the early days of computing, and so some people still see them as "technology fonts" - ooh, it's high tech, it should be sans-serif. Sigh.

Helvetica is a particularly demanding san-serif font. It's sort of the worst of both worlds for screens - it demands high DPI, but it's still less readable than a proper serif font. In a totally Apple move, choosing style over practicality, they pick the font that's famous for being the most stylish (at least among hipsters) over practical concerns (e.g., one-button mice, you're holding it wrong, bendy-phone - all style over practicality).

Re: I don't follow

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's general knowledge in typography that Helvetica is the most legible typeface.

That is very much convention wisdom, yes.

It really isn't. Helvetica is actually a relatively awkward typeface to work with, particularly for body text. Its default tracking/kerning are tight for extended reading, its glyphs have quite inconsistent width fittings, and it has various problems with similar-looking glyphs that are easily mistaken for one another, which also makes it a less than ideal choice for user interfaces. Don't mistake popularity or endurance for quality.

Re: I don't follow

[AthanasiusKircher]

One quick clarification to my second point:

(2) bigger fonts make reading easier

Bigger fonts are more legible, but they generally make reading slower because it takes more time for our eyes to move across them. So, text that's too big can be annoying for reading, but it's easier to recognize and distinguish the characters.

Once again, even in this case, overall design and use is more important than simply choosing the font or the size.

Apple's take on Windows 8

[BenJeremy]

Ugh... when Microsoft throws out the old to make with the new, however stupid and ill-advised it really is, they justifiably get lambasted for it.

When Apple does it, they are "designing for tomorrow"

Um, ok, sure. Whatever. Ignoring good user interface design is still bad.

Re:They are all going down the toilet

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll score: 0/10.

"The Right Choice"?

[QuietLagoon]

... Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice....

The opinion of whether or not it was the right choice is severely clouded by the fact that in the Apple environment, there is No Choice. The user Has To go along with what Apple decides is The Future.

.
Apple has built the walls so high around its empire, that few dare leave. Therefore, they must rationalize that whatever Apple decides for the future is The Right Choice.

wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this post really just an ad for apple?

Hockey puck mouse

[Rick Zeman]

Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.

He must have never tried to use the hockey puck USB mouse. Truly a case of form over function....

Apple Don't Design for Yestserday, but for Fanboys

[peppepz]

This has to be the biggest piece of Apple adulation that I've ever seen. A practice of flattery over everything Apple do is always superabundant in most of the output of the American tech press: we're used, for instance, to the reviewers' pirouettes when they first dismiss some bad choice by Apple as irrelevant, and then they have to praise the reversal of that choice as the best thing after sliced bread in some later version of an Apple product.

But in this case, well, Apple does something wrong (not even remotely comparable to the trainwreck that Microsoft did with Metro, I'll concede) that devalues the largest part of its already expensive product line, with the exception of the most expensive products, and without adding any value to those either, but Apple fan are happy nonetheless because... it's good to be shown how Apple does not care about who doesn't spend the most?

What is this, an exercise of asceticism in the path of the true Apple worship?

Headline Tweak

[ancarett]

Apple Changes System Font, Degrading Onscreen Readability

There, fixed that wonky headline for you. I suspect you were posting with the new OS X Yosemite and just couldn't read what you were typing?

Never mind the new font, the new font looks fine

[Jeremi]

What really causes my eyes to bleed is the new "flat" buttons that don't really look like buttons; they look like text labels. The top of every window now looks like someone gave a junior high student a screenshot of a Mavericks window and told him to reproduce it using construction paper, scissors and glue.

And the frosted-glass semi-transparency effects are just a pointless and unnecessary in Yosemite as they were in Windows. I get the feeling that the Apple UI team has run out of useful work to do, and now they are just changing things because they're bored. The next OS/X release will no doubt change them back, and then add in some other dubious changes that be reverted in the release after that.

Bauhaus

[sphealey]

Highly accomplished designers tend to fall in love with and become obsessed by Bauhaus style in its various cyclical incarnations. The remaining 99.999% of the human race finds Bauhaus objects and systems very pretty to look and impossible to use for more than a few days, as documented by Jane Jacobs, William White, Tom Wolf, and many others. The designers believe the rest of the critics are blind and the human race is just using their wonderful Bauhaus stuff wrong.

sPh

Or not

[fyngyrz]

Well, if you have a Mac you'll use and like Helvetica.

Or, you'll stick with buggy-ass 10.6/Mountain Lion if your machine is one of those left unsupported by Apple in its most recent "fuck you" to its customers, or, you simply still require that your PPC apps work.

Or, if you can run it, you'll stick with 10.9/Mavericks. And benefit from (finally) a decently stable OS that hasn't yet been hit with the flat stick, uses the nicer fonts, and generally try to hang on for a while until hopefully, Apple gets rid of that blind, tasteless cluetard Ives, followed by a return to design principles that don't make their products look like a generic pack of cigarettes.

I mean seriously -- have you folks yet *looked* at Yosemite? Minimalism taken beyond ugly, well into "what the hell" ("buttons" that are nothing but text... who was the dimwit that thought that was an "advance", I wonder? Browser with no title-bar, information-poor pseudo URLs... it'd be funny if it weren't so sad. These functional downgrades were *not* done with usability in mind. For anyone. This isn't design. This is flailing at random change with no one around who can tell you "dude, that's... stupid" to your face.) I'm half surprised they didn't take the ability to nest folders away. But hey! Maybe next time, eh?

Future *purchases*

[msobkow]

Apple does not design "for the future". They design for future purchases.

They drop support for older hardware to force you to upgrade, not because there is a technical problem mandating it.

I'm running Debian on a 12 year old box. It's had a CPU upgrade (to a whopping 3.8 GHz single core) and some extra RAM installed (4G total.) It's perfectly usable, and fully patched.

Had I bought a Mac, I'd have an unsupported paperweight years ago.

Oh yeah. :)

[fyngyrz]

Most clickable things on the web don't have boxes to make them look like physical buttons.

Those are hyperlinks. That's the generally accepted, even traditional, look for a hyperlink. You do know what a hyperlink is, do you not? When I click a hyperlink, I expect to arrive on a web page forthwith. That's what they mean. But that's not what these mean. These mean... random stuff. Normal words... are words. Underlined and/or blue-colored words are hyperlinks. Buttons, despite Ive's insane, drooling jihad against skeuomorphism, should look like you are expected to reach over and press them. This leverages the user's familiarity with the real world (something I admit I don't think I can assume you have) and creates a natural understanding of an implied action just by existing. An action, I might add, that is not hyperlinking. Because we use, you know, highlighted words for that. How would you react to a stereo that had no buttons, just words on its face? Is that intuitive? Of bloody course it isn't. You press a button, it depresses, it looks different, it clicks, you know to expect the action to occur. If it's a toggled state, the button stays in. Natural. Normal. Expected. But a word? Where's the premise for touching a word? Where indeed? Hyperlinks, you say? YES! BLOODY HYPERLINKS!

Ives is probably the worlds foremost product designer

Ah. Ah ha. Ha. Ha Ha Ha. Oh, that is priceless. Just priceless. Ive's work is at best, a mixed bag, and he surely isn't the world's foremost designer. I can think of any number of designers that make him look like the pretentious hack he is. Starting with any number of supercar designers, wandering off into audio equipment and musical instrument design, heck, there are even refrigerators that are designed better than Ive's work product. Also, Scott Forstall's ideas were far better in terms of design than Ives. He just wasn't minimalist -- but minimalist is not a synonym for "good", and in fact, very seldom is that the case.

Also, look at the new Mac Pro. What a dysfunctional failure-storm. Can't install drives in it, doesn't fit in with other equipment well, requires desk warts to be even reasonably functional... expansion is a plug-addled nightmare... even the plugs themselves can be pulled right out, no security (physical or data) whatsoever. Oh yeah, Ives. I wouldn't let that guy "design" my kitchen. He'd probably take out all the plugs, knobs and buttons, color everything silver, and not allow silverware dividers in the drawers or pots on the stove. But you'd get a microwave with only one setting, and son, you'd be expected to like it. And you... well, you probably would. Lacking any kind of taste as you do. ;)

You're one of these people that will always be a reactionary against change.

Yes, absolutely, that's why I praise Mavericks so highly after years of buggy OS's left unfixed. That's why I thought "awesome" when the fully expandable Mac Pro came out, and why I bought right in. That's why I changed from Windows to the Mac. That's why I generally have the latest in home theater gear. That's why I have a Tesla on order. That's why I cohabit instead of marry. That's why I'm atheist and not theist. That's why I just took in a severely injured kitten. That's why I get such a kick out of messing with a Raspberry Pi, cobbling up little RPi projects we can use around the house. That's why my favorite literary genre is hard science fiction. That's why I have moved to SDRs, away from conventional radios. In fact, that's why I write SDR software.

Yeah, I'm just terrified of change, you bet. You crack me up. Any other "insights" you might care to share while you're making things up out of the clear blue? I think Fox News is holding a place for you, better get right over there.

Let me at

Re:Oh yeah. :)

[kaladorn]

My most recent Blu-Ray player has gone to the annoying habit of making its buttons hard to distinguish. You either have to run your finger along it to find the braille or else you have to jab around until you finally find one (thus lighting them up) and hope the one you hit was the one you wanted.

What in the heck ever happened to having clearly identifiable buttons in favour of these mostly concealed soft-button things?

Warning: I am about to use some bad language. Stop now if that offends you. ....

Ah yes, I know what it was. Pardon my french: ****ing INTERFACE DESIGNERS.

I actually had a Skype proponent (who seemed to be speaking for the design team) argued for aesthetics over function when I pointed out that on my laptop, the contact list font (not changeable on the version I have and accessibility settings don't change font size) was on the order of 2 mm. When one of the other users pointed out he headed an Academic department that was finding recent releases unusable on many modern monitors with 40+ aged staff, he got the same scornful 'it's all about design and aesthetics'.

Well here's a notion for the UI designers: F*** AESTHETICS WITH A CHAINSAW.

Aesthetics are okay if usability is high and complete. If not, and they are the reason why not, they are not just failure but brain-addled failure.

If your user base is saying 'hey, we'd like your software to have readable font sizes for modern monitors' and those who seem to be fanbois or speaking for the product say 'our aesthetic is more important', then they will find their customers say 'have fun in the bankruptcy court, Fail Co.'

I stopped paying Skype monthly fees because of this crap. It used to be something I recommended and bought add on apps for. Now its on my 'hope to find a replacement' list.

I heard later someone indicating some of Skype may have come from a prior code base (an AIM product?) and that the original code which may have included UI code was an arcane mess and that the new engineers probably had no idea (or no budget) to fix the screwed up and unusable UI. I could understand that. It was the defense of the poor usability as intentional design that burnt my britches. I'd fire anyone that thought that on my development team.

Ultimately, MS has made a habit of retraining users every time they switch OS by shuffling around where you can find common administrative operations (at least common for power users). This has been a PITA for IT people and others since Win 3.1. Yes, once in a while part of the re-org made some logical sense of regrouping functions or or hierarchically arranging them. Mostly, none that I could observe.

Don't bother to retrain me unless there's a darn good reason. It's about one of the most off-putting part of software updates (including those on Android). The Ribbon Bar on latter day MS windows is an example. More efficient for the 10% hardcore users yes, a retraining time wasting PITA for the other 90%, HELL YES.

Try to get it right the first time. Try hard. If you make a mistake, make changes careful, limited, an gradual for UI items. Explain the logic of the new UI functional bits. And don't make any unnecessary changes or force senseless and time wasting retraining on your users.

Then again, I suppose UI designers are artists not engineers and always want to explore new things or see a way it can be done better. George Lucas had that when he made the newer versions of Eps 1-3 without the models, with awkward scenes formerly cut, and with Greedo shooting first. He thought we wanted to see the movies HE wanted to make. We actually wanted to see the movies WE HAD SEEN when we were younger which he ****ed up. (Not as bad as what came after with Ep 1 and product placement insanity....)