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Apple Piles On the Features, and Users Say, 'Enough!' (nytimes.com)
In a few hours, Apple will kickstart its annual developer conference. At the event, the company is expected to announce new MacBook laptops, the next major updates for iOS and MacOS, new features of Siri, and a home-speaker. Ahead of the conference, The New York Times has run a story that talks some of the headline announcements that Apple announced last year: one of which was, the ability to order food, scribble doodles and send funny images known as stickers in chats on its Messages app. Speaking with users, engineers and industry insiders, the Times reports that many of its existing features -- including expansion of Messages -- are too complicated for many users to figure out (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: The idea was to make Messages, one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, into an all-purpose tool like China's WeChat. But the process of finding and installing other apps in Messages is so tricky that most users have no idea they can even do it, developers and analysts say.
Seems a case of "it just bloats" from now on.
In a few hours, Apple will kickstart its annual developer conference.
I find this really surprising. I was sure Apple had plenty of capital.
Users say: Enough!
Jobs uniquely understood how important choosing things not to do was. Engineers and designers do brilliant work every day, but the vast majority of that achievement gets lost in the clutter and quickly forgotten.
Better to leave consumers wanting more than to leave them confused. Best of all, you can sell them that something more next year. That way you don't have to hit it out of the park every single time. It's more like loading the bases and then getting to first, time and time again.
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I've been a longtime Apple Support Specialist and I've never, ever, seen it hit such a low level of usability and simplicity. It's as if the current Apple has a UI team staffed by the people who designed Windows 3.1. Even basic applications like Messages (on the Mac) are now so difficult to use (AND buggy) that many users have simply given up.
Apple needs to fire or re-assign every single person that worked on the UI designs post Snow Leopard and post IOS 6 and do a complete "Microsoft Windows 8 doh! moment reversal." They need to go back to where they were then, when everything worked exactly as it should and made freaking sense.
There is nothing worse than trying to teach people how to use current Apple software: "Why is this this way?" (Because Steve Jobs died and the people now in charge at Apple are morons.) "This doesn't make any sense." (No, it doesn't, it's complete nonsense and you just have to memorize it.) It's a fracking nightmare.