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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.
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Apple's reputation in design has been touted far and wide, so I though the design flaws in iTunes were my perception and/or due to my odd usage of iTunes.
It is good to see others who have also noticed that Apple may have lost its way regarding user-centric design.
Back in the old days before graphical user interfaces, test UIs were generally usable because the design elements were much more limited. No graphics, no fancy fonts, no dark green on almost dark green links (like the ones that appear in the story titles of slashdot).
Tools like MC (midnight commander on linux) have an ease of use and simplicity that is hard to beat. Same with Borland's non-gui IDEs for BASIC, C/C++, Pascal, and dBASE.
HTML, which was supposed to separate content from presentation, no longer does, thanks to "advances" that have strayed too far from first principles. We have seen the enemy, and it's not just those who write the code, but also the marketers who demand more bling over functionality, and the customers who respond to bling because BLING.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
My biggest gripe with Apple and Microsoft right now is the lack of progress bars throughout the OS. For example, when Windows 10 boots the first time it goes through all this "Let's get started..." "Just setting up a few things..." etc. But you literally have no idea how long it is going to be before you use the computer, and on a tablet device it can be quite some time. I feel like this is a huge UI miss. One step forward, two steps back.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Why can I never figure out where a link is going? Read back over that. There are two hyperlinks in the summary. One is "an article by two early Apple designers" the other is "lost its marbles when it comes to user interface design."
So which one of those goes to the article that the summary is about? It's the second! That's so counter-intuitive! Seriously! Why do I have to click through your links to figure out what you're linking to?
This. I hate the new music player with a passion. What used to take one or two clearly intuitive clicks is now so incredibly confusing that it borders on unusable. Now everything is behind generic "hotdog", "hamburger", and barely noticeable arrow icons and it's impossible to remember what's supposed to happen when you click any of them. I spend so much time cursing at it because I often choose the wrong icon and then have to figure out how to get back to where I was and what I was trying to do in the first place. It took me 20 minutes of fiddling around to figure out how to bring up the album for the currently playing song. I guess they want you to ask Siri to do everything for you, but that's just exchanging one frustrating interface for another.
With the latest version of Safari, Apple removed from the right mouse click* contextual menu the ability to create a new tab. So instead of "right click, select the top item on the menu, left click" the only way now to create a tab is to either use the file menu or keyboard options. The contextual menu option of creating tabs has been like that for years and years and was not broken and I knew of no complaints about it. Removing it would have been a deliberate action that as far as I can see serves no purpose as the right click contextual menu still exists. And to add insult to injury the item that is now on the top of that list is "close tab", so every time my muscle memory kicks in I end up closing a tab I was viewing rather than opening a new tab.
* Yes, you can use non-apple mice with apple computers, and yes the right mouse button does work. And in general I dislike using Apple's mice and only use 3rd party mice (And Microsoft makes good mice and keyboards that I like and use as does Kensington)
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tl;dr Criticizing design is easy. Any grad student that's taken a human interface class could write this article (and many do) illustrating how a certain design violates the criteria they just learned. But despite their background I would only start to take these guys seriously when they propose a touch interface designed for phones which has all the properties they espouse and retains all the utility of a modern smartphone. Sure it would be great if every single feature was immediately visually discoverable. But how do you do that when you have so little screen space? Do you sacrifice content for UI? Let's see their great alternative.
To respond to their points in detail:
You know how they say lead with your strongest point? Right off the bat the first thing they claim is that Apple's fonts are impossible for many people with normal vision to read. Nevermind many, show me a single person with normal vision that CANNOT read Apple fonts and I will save their life, because clearly they have a brain tumour and need treatment immediately.
Why would anyone take this article seriously when it leads with provably false claims? Anyway let's move on..
Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.
This is why those interfaces work. Let's take a scrolling view for example. The traditional approach is to put a scrollbar in, and that's what most everyone was doing before the iPhone came along. The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.
Same with other gestures in the iPhone.
Deleting a row in a table. You can put a button on every row to make that discoverable at the cost of high risk of accidental deletion and visual noise, or you can make rows swipe left to expose the delete function. The swipe once learned in 5 seconds is vastly superior for the rest of your lifetime using it.
Accessing the notification centre by swiping down from the top. You could put a button on every single screen, or you could save the space and use a swipe. Clearly the swipe is far preferable to using up screen space on a 4-5" screen.
So a person with a visual impairment used accessibility options to correct for it? This is a problem how? Later they confuse font weight with font size. Both are adjustable in iOS, of course if you really need very large fonts you will run into some sizing issues in some apps.
A vision impairment is a disability. A minor and common one, but still one. By the way, the common way to correct this disability is with glasses. I have poor vision, but never had an issue with reading Apple fonts because I've corrected my vision by wearing glasses. The author's implication that someone with a disability should be asha
It originated from Jonathan Ive, Apple's lead hardware designer who now have purview over the software's aesthetics as well. Ive hated the skeuomorphism elements of iOS and IMO went completely overboard with the horrible flat UX that is now iOS. For example changing buttons to a text label without even a border? WTF? One of the most basic elements of UX since the dawn of GUIs.
Not sure who originated it, perhaps it was Apple, but the entire minimalist "flat" design paradigm is a UI shipwreck.
It wasn't too bad before the whole skeuomorphism reversal. I think Apple overreacted when they dumped that design philosophy and they went too far in the other direction. (but skeuomorphism was something that was really starting to annoy me) For example, buttons in iOS used to have nice "button-y" like visual appearances. Now they are simply a line of text that you are supposed to guess is actually a button.
When Microsoft came out with the ribbon, I thought, this is bad.
To be fair to Microsoft, I have used programs where the ribbon actually made sense and improved the work flow. But they were graphical designs programs that present objects on the ribbon that you could easily select and drag onto the design surface. On the other hand both Word and Excel regularly piss me off when I have to find something on the ribbon.
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I read the article, expecting a typical no-thought blog rant, but this post is actually quite good (although it's rambling and too long). They discuss the principles of Dieter Rams, and show how Apple is horribly failing to follow them. They track the changes in Apple's interface guidelines over time. So there is actually some useful information in this post (unusual). Here are their main two complaints, things that Apple is missing:
1) Discoverability: The iPhone has plenty of gestures that don't have visual cues....it's often unknown whether clicking on text will perform an action, the latest iOS has "25 secret features." They shouldn't be secret, they should be discoverable to the users.
2) Consistency: Sometimes the back button is there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes gestures do things, sometimes they don't. The "mighty mouse" gestures work differently than the trackpad gestures, etc (more examples in article).
This chart really captures the changes at Apple, showing the changes in their UI guidelines over time. They've lost an entire section called "managing complexity in your software." Maybe Apple thinks software is no longer complex?
Form follows function, that is, you have to make your product work first, and then make it beautiful. If you have a beautiful product that doesn't work, then you have a "gold-plated brick."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When we look at the facts, we can come to only one conclusion: Hipsters (or Millennials, or whatever you want to call them) just cannot design a usable UI of any sort.
Although the software industry is a relatively new one, we've already had several generations of people work to develop it. From the earliest work in the 1930s through to the mid-2000s, we saw actual progress. UIs were getting consistently better year after year, release after release, generation after generation. We saw real improvement happening.
Then we hit 2005. This is when the first of the Hipsters/Millennials started really getting involved in software UI and UX. As soon as the torch had been passed to them, things started going downhill fast. They've ruined every existing UI that they've touched, and they haven't been able to produce a usable new UI.
Hipsters have ruined the UIs of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows (as of version 8 and later), Mozilla Firefox (as of version 4 and later), and all of GNOME 3. Hipsters are also responsible for the UI disasters that are Google Chrome, Slashdot Beta, the current Slashdot site, and modern web sites in general.
The worst part of it is that they aren't willing to accept that their designs are complete shit! That's probably why we haven't seen any improvement since they took over in 2005, and in fact have seen things get so much worse. Their egos and sense of entitlement prevent them from even considering the idea that their work may not be good. After all, they think they know what you need better than you do, even when it's clear that they don't!
Hipsters/Millennials are the worst thing to have ever happened to software UIs and UX. Every generation before them managed to improve the status quo, even the Baby Boomers (who are well known for screwing things up). Yet the Hipsters/Millennials have just made UIs so much worse.
My only hope is that the generation that comes after them will learn from their mistakes, and return to creating UIs that work for the user. I do have faith in our youth not to make the same mistakes that the Hipsters/Millennials have made. If the generation that comes after the Hipsters/Millennials wants to use my yard to fix the many software UI and UX disasters that the Hipsters/Millennials have caused, then they're welcome to use it!
I'd say that Mac OS 9 has the best GUI so far.
I listen to powernoise, industrial, and witchhouse that use unpronouncable characters in both the artist and track fields you insensitive clod!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
the person who created the itunes interface for windows is a nice example of sucking at your job. The only good think about that half ass product is the installer. Everything else goes against any logic and works 180 degrees differently than any product in windows. I am sure they did the same on linux. Forcing their stupid design ui logic on operating systems which work differently. I would fire that guy faster than it takes Oprah to eat an apple cake.