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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,
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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.
Those asinine, time-burglar eye candy transitions that occur for nearly every navigation you performed within iOS. Some of the most egregious ones can be "disabled" the 'Reduce Motion' option but rather than disable nausea-inducing animations like zoom it simply switches it to a dissolve, which executes just as slowly. And there is still no way to disable the most common animations like the sweep in an iOS Navigation Controller. I almost want to start a petition to all iOS developers to universally set the 'animate' parameter to False for all internal iOs methods that get passed the parameter.
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?
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)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
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.
Drag all icons off the launcher bar. Drag command prompt to launcher bar. Open up as many command windows as will fit on your screen. Boom. Done. Well, you could also optionally set your bash profile to start emacs in the command window, depending on your UI preferences.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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."
Here's a tip: if ever you are unsure about whether to use "who" or "whom", use "who".
There is, and has been since the lauded CLI "GUIs" (e.g. turbo pascal), a simple solution to this problem. Unfortunately many people simply don't understand the solution, and don't care to learn. In two steps:
1. Use an infinite progress bar (with or without a counter / percentage) rather than one based on time, when time is unknown or highly variable.
2. 'Step' the progress bar in code, don't use some automatically animated thing.
This provides positive user feedback that the operation will take an indeterminate amount of time, and also informs the user that the operation has not hung or stuck because it's still moving.
The MS file copy dialog failed because it didn't have a large enough sample window to make a guess about disk throughput or iops. Nearly all modern infinite progress indicators (computer, web, or mobile) fail because they use things like animated gifs or a separate thread to keep the indicator animation running, even when the task it's supposed to represent is stopped or slow.
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.
For somebody who claims to have "read a lot of anti-systemd rants on here and other boards", you must have a very hard time remembering what you have read! Or maybe you can't read in the first place?
Regardless, the fact of the matter is that any time systemd does come up here, there are lots of people who describe, in detail, very real problems that they've had with it. I found all of the comments below after about 30 seconds of searching.
Remember, those are just Slashdot comments, too! Go search the Debian mailing list archives for a whole lot of other people describing very serious problems with systemd. Or check the Debian bug tracker. Then go do the same for Arch, Mageia, openSUSE, Fedora, and the other Linux distros that use systemd. You'll find no shortage of people describing extraordinarily serious problems with systemd.
As I mentioned earlier, here are just a handful of Slashdot comments that I found very quickly that prove you to be totally wrong:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5904953&cid=48278477:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8258597&cid=50840653:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4608939&cid=45813431:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4792711&cid=46248835:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4792711&cid=46251405:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4792711&cid=46255615:
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.
Look again, please. systemd breaks stable network configurations by unnecessarily replacing dhcp, it breaks daemon-startup debugging, it breaks decades of log analysis tools designed to work with text based rather than proprietezed binary logging format, it's repeatedly broken kernel startups, it's broken the stable model of attached storage being mounted under /media, and the attempts to replace all of "/etc" with a "stateless Linux" model is breaking tools that never volunteered to have anything to do with systemd. It's also breaking cross-platform compatibility of daemon initialization configurations.
A "light Linux user" may not see these issues becuase you wouldn't necessarily be debugging failed daemons, writing cross-platform tools, or trying to integrate stable business software with this latest fad for configurations.
It's all these moron programmers out there. Really a UI interface to get to a function is you SHAKE the phone. What the fuck is that?
I really want to blame the horrible professors at the universities, but I know it's these stupid under 30 programmers that are doing shit that they think makes sense and ignoring real UI design rules. but ohhh it looks pretty!
Dear mobile app programmers, pray I don't win a lotto because I will be making a sack of doorknobs and looking for each and every one of you that code with the stupidest UI ideas. It will be at night when you least expect it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't think Apple is new to poor user interface design. I installed iTunes (because there was no other easy way to put music on the dumb thing) and tried to copy some music files to the iPod. What a nightmare. That was a few years ago. I remember wondering what all the fuss about the "Apple user experience" was about. It seemed like the worst thing since Windows to me.
Previously, I had used SanDisk Sansa mp3 players. They couldn't have been simpler or easier to use. Apple could have learned a lot from them, if they cared about anything but trying to extract as much cash out of you as possible.
Disclaimer: I own Apple stock (which has been very good to me) but no Apple products. Please keep buying Apple products...I'm sure the usability will improve.
Bad.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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!
When I said many of the same things you and TFA are saying, several years ago, people on /. mostly tried to tell me I was F.O.S.
Nice to have some confirmation for a change.
Then what cues are "kids that don't have the preconceptions we have" using to distinguish an inactive label from an active control?