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How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name (theverge.com)
ColdWetDog writes: Co.Design has an article by two early Apple designers on how the company has lost its way, and quite frankly, lost its marbles when it comes to user interface design. In the search for a minimalist, clean design, it has forgotten time honored UI principles and made it harder for people to use Apple products. As someone who has followed computer UI evolution since the command line and who has used various Apple products for a number of years, the designers' concerns really hit home for me.
Of course, Apple isn't the only company out there who makes UI mistakes. And it is notable that the article has totally annoying, unstoppable GIFs that do nothing to improve understanding. User Interfaces are hard, but it would be nice to have everybody take a few steps back from the precipice.
Of course, Apple isn't the only company out there who makes UI mistakes. And it is notable that the article has totally annoying, unstoppable GIFs that do nothing to improve understanding. User Interfaces are hard, but it would be nice to have everybody take a few steps back from the precipice.
The Apple Music player app on IOS used to be at least usable. Now I have to google to figure out how to turn shuffle on and off. Everything is obscure and hidden where it used to be at least semi obvious. Controls are tiny when they used to be big enough for even my sausage fingers on a small screen,
Not sure who originated it, perhaps it was Apple, but the entire minimalist "flat" design paradigm is a UI shipwreck. Yet, everyone is jumping onto the badwagon, regardless of how awful it is. Apple, Android, Windows 10, even Gnome and to a lesser extent KDE are leaning in that direction.
It's pure shit. There's no definition or contrast. Where once you had hierarchical menus you now have hidden widgets, triple dots and hamburgers. Hamburgers? WTF? You have to swipe with two, three, four fingers? There's no control object, not even a visual clue of any kind? It's very much like the command line, but you have to touch/click it.
When Microsoft came out with the ribbon, I thought, this is bad. But, when the flat minimalist shit started, it was SO much worse. I look forward to the return of the discoverable and logical UI.
Disk activity leds. I want them back.
It is good to see others who have also noticed that Apple may have lost its way regarding user-centric design.
TFA misses the point. Apple hasn't "lost its way" -- most of the design changes are clearly on purpose. It follows the classic cult paradigm of keeping esoteric knowledge for the "in-crowd."
I admire Apple, and I use many of its products, so don't dismiss me as a "hater." Hear me out. First, Apple made inroads into certain cultural groups and convinced them that "Mac" was superior to clunky Windows. Then those cultural trendsetters came to be "believers" in all things Apple. A few really good products (e.g., the early iPod designs) helped cement this.
Next step: make your interfaces LESS discoverable, and more dependent on "in-crowd knowledge." This reinforces the cult mindset, creating even more of a feeling that Mac/Apple product users are "in the know" -- knowledge about how to use things is passed between people directly by demonstration, rather than discoverable on your own or with a manual. (No manuals shipped with products anymore either, so unless you specifically go online and try to download one, you're forced to network with other Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad/etc. users to figure out how to do anything.)
This is the creation of a sort of what cultural historians and sociologists sometimes call an "Imaginary Community" of like-minded folks. You divide up the world into "Mac users" and everyone else.
But non-discoverable interfaces also have the side effect of creating patentable UI structures (like icon sets, or special gesture interfaces), which other non-Apple companies will have to license, if they hope to be compatible with Mac users' expectations. That's the logic likely behind all of the big companies pushing obscure graphical icons ("What the heck does that weird trapezoid with a swirly do?") -- the MS Office Ribbon, Gmail getting rid of text on buttons, and Apple are all trying to win at the same game: they want users to get "locked in" and used to their particular interface, which is only understandable with practice, deliberately NOT discoverable. Discoverable interfaces allow people to switch companies/software/products -- the big tech companies want you to be so stuck with their product that you won't even know how to use another's product.
That's the reason behind TFA's main complaint -- UI design is no longer about ease of use. It is only about that when a company wants to become established. After that, these companies want to force customers to stay, which means creating custom "parts" which are not interchangeable with anyone else's. In the old days, those parts were literal physical things; now they are stuff like icon sets and specific learned (and hopefully patentable!) non-discoverable gestures and UI tricks.
IBM lost the war back in the 80s when it tried to be an open standard for everyone, which just led other companies to pull ahead after all of IBM's hard work in setting the standard. All tech companies learned that lesson.
So, TFA completely misses the point. As TFA notes, Apple products strive to be beautiful -- that's part of the "wow" factor that makes you want to join the cult. Then you join and learn all the esoteric gestures (used to be secret handshakes, now it's how you swipe with three fingers and click or whatever), which you pass along to your fellow cult members. You also learn to decode the secret symbols of the cult by clicking on weird ambiguous pictures rather than self-explanatory words.
Apple knows exactly what it's doing. Too bad the author of TFA hasn't figured it out.
Seems like the whole industry, not just Apple, has succumbed to the same ethos in UI design. Gone are borders and shading. Can't have more than one obvious hamburger menu icon. It is all white on white other than lots of rectangles filled with imagery, probably updating the imagery frequently. Past that controls are hidden swipes, slides, presses and all guesses.
When Apple started making PowerBooks, the logo on the top cover was oriented so that it's upside down when the laptop is open. Why did they do something dumb like that? Because user testing showed that people naturally tended to orient the logo so it looked right-side-up to them before trying to open the laptop. In other words, it worked better for the user to orient it that way.
Unfortunately, that meant that someone looking at a PowerBook user saw the logo upside-down. How awkward! How unflattering! How inelegant! This simply won't do! So, the change was decreed: logos must be oriented to look nice to the audience, and users just need to train themselves to deal with it.
Old vs. new. Optimized for use vs. optimized for appearance and impression.
Mobile changed a lot about how UI should work.
As a UI designer I can unequivocally say, No, no it did not. Mobile devices created a few caveats but did not change a lot about how UI should work. I am sick of these new UI/UX people that seem to think that all the lessons learned about good UI over the previous 30 years is somehow obsolete, meanwhile they keep making UI/UX mistakes that were made 20 years ago! The research and lessons learned from the 1980s and 1990s still apply to UI design today on mobile devices as they do on desktops and laptops. One major caveat being the input device and the corresponding minimum "click" area difference between a mouse pointer and a finger. There are others, but most are subtle variations on established best practices with only a few exceptions for things like gyroscope or accelerometer interactions.
We did flat interfaces well, and long before we tried faux 3D interfaces. So that argument also falls flat. We didn't replace long established iconography for things like shuffle and repeat settings with textual representations. Why? Because text takes longer for the brain to process! Good UI depends on established graphical standards and commonly used iconography to be successful, building on successes of the past. Now, everyone seems to think they can reinvent the wheel and are failing miserably.
I am all for innovation and new things, but not at the expense of efficiency and usability when applied to UI/UX design. Ive and these other UI/UX idiots need to be slapped and sent back to design school for UI/UX or just stick to hardware!