Destroying Apple’s Legacy
cheerfulsw.com
cheerfulsw.com
In particular, the new Apple Music app was almost completely undiscoverable for me. It wasn't until I was reading patch notes that I realized that it had a key feature that I had been searching the UI for more than a month. That feature was to show only the music available offline, and it's hidden behind a down arrow next to a heading label. (Rather than the ... that other menus have).
Apple has never been perfect at UIs, but they've always been better than this in my experience. Deciding to hide key information and be as cryptic as possible works great for designers that already know the UI, but it works terribly for users that are still learning it. This type of elementary mistake, all too common by those who are deep in the act of creation, is best corrected by stepping back from the problem and approaching everything with the mind of a beginner. That or giving the device to an outsider and observing them, good old fashioned trials.
That's what UX needs these days, not more fashionistas trying to remove data and UI cues. The industry needs a big wakeup call. Mobile and even the web (like Google Docs) are becoming a churn of bad experience.
All for the sake of cramming in new paid features that I'll never use - "For You", "New", "Radio", and "Connect". Why Apple? You make enough money from iPhone sales already. Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?
They will try to use radio in 2 way:
1. Make it unqiue and hard to copy, to add one more reason for people to use their device.
2. When making content deals, it's hard to get good deals if you come without a large crowd of subscribers.So apple plan to to use your radio subscription as content negotiation tool, and than upsell you a tv service - and there's a lot of money there.
Tangent: I wonder if people who work at Apple browse HN and see these kinds of complaints regularly? It would be weird to work at a big company that gets a lot of press on HN and stealthily get direct user feedback from a tech forum.
I don't work in UI/UX and I'm not an iPhone power user, so perhaps it's just me.
It's just incredible -- stunningly, unbelievably incredible -- that Apple allows this turkey of a Windows application to ship with their name attached.
Even with your cue it took me awhile to find that setting, which is included with the sorting (Under My Music/Library, Arrow is next to the default sort of 'Artists')
I've always thought Metro was terrible, but others seemed to love it for its seizure-inducing animated colors splattered over the whole screen.
Apple's design is bad mainly because it's inconsistent and amateurishly done in its mission to be "flat like the cool kids". Metro is bad on purpose.
Another one is that for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to access the search for app feature until recently. I knew it existed, and I guess it's a downwards pointing tap in the middle of the screen but it took me forever to find it again and then to actually figure out what I had done to trigger it.
Then there's the loading my phone with apps I have no use for such as Music, Playbook, and the Apple Watch app. I understand these have useful features to people but I don't understand why I can't at the very least hide the damn icons and instead have to either create a folder for "Shit I don't use ever" or delegate them to some far off slide screen.
It seems like it goes on and on and while the old iOS's did look a bit clunky, everything was very clear in my opinion in terms of functionality and I'm not exactly sure why there was a move away from it.
And this is all a shame since Apple's hardware software integrated and closed source environment is a terrific way to make a phone in my opinion where I barely have to worry about malware since apps are checked by their App Store team, everything looks standardized and decent because of the components they provide, and things run really fast (at least until your phone is two generations old) because of their language support and hardware integration.
It's frustrating.
It is essential to understand that a feature is worse than worthless to the extent that users are not aware of it.
I cannot tell what kind of repeat is on, or if I hit the target at all. There is no button feedback in Music to indicate my touch actually registered. Hell, it may be my iPhone touch sensors are fucked, but I usually have to hit the play/pause, backward/forward buttons multiple times to register a tap. It feels like the hit boxes are smaller since iOS 7—never had any problems playing/pausing or executing prev/next song actions. Now, it ignores my taps at least 50% of the time. Curiously, the new heart button likes to swallow all my taps meant for the prev/back button.
Music has become the biggest piece of shit since 7 landed. It gets worse every release.
anyways, my opinion is that tacit knowledge trumps nearly any level of design you can come up with. Users never look at the label or the picture of what they're interacting with, they remember it's spacial location in relation to the screen borders. For that reason, a good design should be chosen, and iteratively modified-- occasionally, but things should roughly always be in the same spot as before. This business of rewriting the entire presentation layer every year (Youtube app for example) is very mentally taxing and I have given up trying to learn how to use the new one. I suppose I'll figure it out eventually, but I can more productively spend my energy learning a new language. It is, literally, too hard for me to relearn everything to care about figuring out whatever the hell their UX engineers most recently pulled out of their ass.
The thing that really, really angers me is I used to have a keen perception of how a fluid, clean, efficient UI behaved, but as I've been forced to interact with poor designs I've lost that talent.
It's not just google, other products aren't designed as well as they were when I was younger, either. About half of my suggestions for usability improvements in google apps ('Send Feedback') have been implemented after I suggested them, and several within 2-4 weeks. This makes me cry at night. I had no idea what I had, and lost...
So anyways I basically don't update any apps anymore (they're always removing features or moving them anyways, why would I update if this one works fine?), and if I do and find the new interface too confusing I just track down an older APK online and make a mental note to never update that until I have the time and energy to learn the new layout.
bonus mentally-stimulating material: Windows XP's Explorer (likely back from the NT->2k days, and probably entirely thanks to IBM's role in NT development) had a great feature. You changed cursor focus in Windows Explorer with F6--but there were so many panes, so you would hold down F6 till you hit the one you want. Inevitably you were using List View, your hands were on the keyboard, and you were ready to start typing the name of the folder you wanted. The problem? There were so many panes that you'd always miss what you wanted due to the keyboard repeat rate. IBM's (or some other hero at MS) solution? Focus goes to main folder List View pane, to Link bar (ctrl+F6) above the folder List View, and then back to the List View pane. But why? ...because whoever made that decision knew that you were always going to miss it the first time, so they placed it twice so that you'd always hit it...genius...
As far as I can tell, these people don't exist anymore.
It worked fairly well for a lot of industrial design, but has been a disaster for the built environment and, we are learning, software.
Apple's interfaces were really user-friendly until the movement towards flat design. It was more of a step backwards than forwards.
Apple still publish the HIG. See the iOS version here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...
Contrary to what the article says, it does explain why various UI elements are designed as they are – not just thoughtless promotion of aesthetics over interaction.
I think people often fall back on 'nobody thought about this and it's rubbish' arguments when the reality is often closer to 'they changed this and I don't like it' – the latter is a totally valid complaint, but it's also qualitatively different.
In my personal experience, I've not seen computer-naïve users of iOS struggle to a greater degree with iOS 7+ than with any of the previous versions. YMMV of course, but I think the extent to which it's a problem is overstated.
There are a couple of exceptions, of course – the reminders app has some stupid UI decisions that irritate me. But what software doesn't? How about that floating 'create a new document' button that was in Google Docs/Sheets/etc. until recently? Every single time I opened it, I had to hunt around for the button to create a new document because it wasn't where I expected it to be. But that doesn't mean Material is awful – it just means that it's a complex, long-term challenge to create a consistent UI applicable to a wide variety of applications. And I don't think modern UX is all that bad.
The "switch" icons (or described to me as two circles next to one another) seem to be a source of confusion. Which direction is on? Why?
A switch is symetrical by design. They tried to remove the symetry on ios 7, and with the color it becomes more like "highlighted on/off". Which is better.
Interesting. My experience is exactly the opposite: pretty much all my close relatives --from across the lifespan-- hate iOS7+, and still complain about its (un)usability fairly regularly.
Admittedly there could be sizeable a clustering effect going on, but to me it's been surprising nevertheless how my own family went from loving everything Apple to hating it with a passion.
The difference between Apple and other companies is not that Apple gets it right every time, but that Apple genuinely tries. Some other companies literally do not care how their products look, they just ship whatever the engineering team cobbles together with snippets from from Google Image Search.
Microsoft's making similar efforts lately, so that's encouraging to see, and even Google is making strides in reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications.
Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Button Shapes.
However, I do suspect that not all developers test with Button Shapes enabled. The native Twitter client looked a little "broken" for the longest time with Button Shapes enabled. It took awhile but I think it has been fixed.
The fact that you are talking about "ugly" is the entire problem.
[1] http://alistapart.com/article/indefenseofeyecandy#section7 [2] http://alistapart.com/article/indefenseofeyecandy#section3
But it's important to consider that form and function are not necessarily separate things and that beauty is not only decoration.
Read this article, in particular this [1] section.
[1] http://alistapart.com/article/indefenseofeyecandy#section3
And here's a nice quote:
“…users judge the relevancy of identical search results from different search engines based on the brand…Participants in the study indicated that the results from Google and Yahoo were superior to identical results found through Windows Live or a generic search engine.”
I believe your bias comes from your position as someone who's work is create functionality. You see that as the complete product and by virtue of your intimacy with it, the most important. But you're missing the entire picture.
Start reading here [1] and I suggest you read the entire article.
[1] http://alistapart.com/article/indefenseofeyecandy#section3
There's nothing to study. What could you even mean by that? I'm sure there's an entire caste of useless "designers" who do all sorts of "research" to make themselves feel important, but in the real world people buy devices to perform tasks.
If that's not what you want it for buy some jewelry instead.
Do you think the Tesla Model S would have been a success had it the same design and form as previous attempts at an EV? The function of the car was far superior, obviously but the form was as well.
Both of these elements matter and if you only have 1 or the other, you lose.
I'm not saying the form has no importance at all. It's just that you don't sacrifice function for form.
What I'm trying to say is you don't say "lets make it work" and think of the form as an afterthought - as a "nice to have". We need to make it work and make it beautiful. Both are important and comprise the essence of what we are trying to build. Otherwise what's the point?
They were also brutally ugly.
When you have to live with something, interact with it constantly, you might want it to look nice.
I disagree regarding Microsoft. While Windows 8 was not well loved at least the 2 halves of its modal interface were internally consistent. Windows 10 looks like it was designed by committee by picking bits of Windows 8 desktop and Windows 8 Metro and stuffing them together. There's no clear direction or goal to it all. In addition there's just plain manifest ugliness like some of the icon choices.
The new: https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374.... The old: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-S...
There was always a "time-wasting dial." The labels were always "styled with more visual impact than the actual data." All four different types of data elements were always "styled the same, with the same visual weight."
The one thing they're good at though is giving information on what's above/below the current option without having to click/tap (unlike a combo box).
Is there a better interaction model for this kind of operation?
Luckily, I don't have to care because I just use Siri to set and manage alarms.
Apple, being a design-oriented company, can't keep fiddling with individual app layouts, which means they can't work within the hyper-restrictive design language of flat.
Microsoft actually does much better with flat, I find, because I think there are less cooks in the "design" kitchen there.
I despair about humanity. Idiots following fashion instead of utility.
http://memecrunch.com/meme/1JCJ5/lighten-up-francis/image.pn...
Discarding flat design as 'abomination' by 'idiots' is rather missing some of the wider design context.
Take a look back as Swiss design from the 50s, for example. Lots of use of minimalism, bold colour, simple typography (Helvetica, even!). It's remarkably similar in some senses; one of the reasons it became popular was because of the perception that design had become fussy and overburdened by ornamental detail.
I think we saw the same process of design evolution with modern flat designs. There was certainly a perception among some designers that it was difficult to build modern interfaces in part due to the cruft which had been accumulated over the years. Look at an iOS 6 device, for example; even though it's been only a few year, it looks utterly baroque to my eyes now. Needless lines, textures, gradients and shadows that obviously served a functional purpose at one point, but with that purpose gradually diluted as the functionality and interaction patterns of software evolved. Building to modern requirements – with things like touch-oriented interfaces and responsive applications – can become much more complex with these constraints.
The thing is, design approaches will evolve over time. Designers, developers and UX folk will continue to tweak and adjust designs to offer a better experience. It's not always going to be right, or even visually appealing, but it's also a field that experiences constant change. Look at Google's Material, for example – it's not simply flat, but involves the use of animation, subtle gradients and shadows.
It's funny, the more time goes by the more I miss iOS 6 and company. Comparing flat UI design to Swiss design from the 50s is missing the obvious difference that minimal Swiss design was about presenting information, not creating an interactive interface.
As the linked article points out, discarding affordances has a very real cost to someone learning the interface - it becomes harder to separate interactive elements from non interactive ones and harder to tell "on" from "off" (I STILL can't tell if iOS's shift is on by looking at it [1]). The desire to present information in a modern/minimalist way is at odds with this.
My personal opinion is that what you call "wider design context" is pure fashion. Yes, flat is fashionable, but it's just not as good at the job of communicating the nature of UI elements to the user.
[1] Edit: Just to add, Apple's difficulty with making the state of the shift key obvious is a microcosm of this overall problem. The expressive power of flat design language is so limited that indicating the state of a single element is problematic despite several attempts. iOS 9 finally solves this by changing the case of every letter on the keyboard to make it obvious.
Yes – they're different. Obviously so – there's 60 years between here and there. The point is to compare the minimalist approach, and point out that there is precedent for it. There is no absolute, guaranteed, 100% 'ideal' user interface, and it's something that we are still working on – iterating on design is how we do that.
it becomes harder to separate interactive elements from non interactive ones and harder to tell "on" from "off" (I STILL can't tell if iOS's shift is on by looking at it). The desire to present information in a modern/minimalist way is at odds with this.
The iOS shift key is a good example of where this had failed (and I do hope it is fixed). But here's an alternative take – presenting information in a minimal fashion can help to draw attention to interactivity, rather than distract from it, thanks to the elimination of visual noise. The point is, it's far from clear what the best approach is.
My personal opinion is that what you call "wider design context" is pure fashion. Yes, flat is fashionable, but it's just not as good at the job of communicating the nature of UI elements to the user.
I don't think that's a case, or that such design can be called a 'fad'. Design is still an evolving field – devices and the way we use them is changing, and design is no different. I won't deny that there's an element of fashion, in the sense that the popularity of design styles can influence other designers. But isn't that equally explainable as a desire to avoid completely 'off the wall' interfaces that will be unfamiliar to users?
FWIW, I don't find flat interfaces to be an issue. Metro, for example, was simple and elegant, while allowing for useful approaches to clearly displaying and exploring information. And the iOS approach, though it has inconsistencies, actually makes a lot of sense, with the 'content is king' and 'depth through translucency' approaches. Most of the problems with the latter appear to be to do with the expression of state.
I think that's the key difference. The 'content is king' approach is great for consuming visual content but less good for applications that are not about content consumption but about interaction. If I'm reading a website, I want the UI chrome to get out of the way and not distract me visually - on the other hand if I'm trying to reschedule something in my calendar I want the options and interaction points available to me to be obvious so that I can make the change quickly and accurately.
What about Microsoft, one of the first companies to bring flat design to phones? Their motto for Windows Phone 7 was "Content before chrome".
One interesting nuance here is that "content" actually refers to visual content. I think maybe that's why so many here are expressing their frustration with the Music app. The content in question is NOT visual, but the UI is still designed with the same UX philosophy that tries to emphasize visual content instead of favouring richer interaction.
Modern UI design has pushed past this stage of minimalism into something that's user hostile. Like those shelf doors where you have to push one side or the other to make the door pop out a bit and become actually grabbable - and it's not clear which side of the door needs to be pushed.
[1] https://d2lsod3xpjaepj.cloudfront.net/files/assets/1000/219/...
Those people were designing tangible objects, not computer programs.
At some point it's going to occur to someone that software is a different kind of thing that requires different kinds of controls. But it hasn't happened yet. We're still debating which archaic school of design we should be slavishly adhering to.
Maybe a button that doesn't look that much like a button doesn't entice us as much as one that does.
Other people feel differently, and they consider Android superior, so clearly there is a difference in taste.
The conundrum is that nobody seems to be able to clearly articulate why this is, and this article doesn't really help. For example, it says the timepicker is "awkward, time-wasting, inaccurate". Compared to what? Has anyone been able to measure how much time it wastes and how innaccurate it is?
In the end, this article takes a thousand words to say little more than "This doesn't feel quite right to me", and doesn't reveal any root causes. Do people prefer different UIs because of differences in finger size, manual dexerity, visual attention? Does Apple's UI cater to a specific minority of users? Do biological differences make it impossible to satisfy everyone?
In practice, flat designs have less detail, so convey less information. This leads to uncertainty/doubt/cognitive load where there was none before.
Compare flat to skeumorphic designs:
* What gestures can I perform on this UI element?
* Where is the button/what can I click on?
-or better yet-
* What state is the iOS keyboard's shift key in (activated, deactivated, capslocked)?
Apple isn't the only culprit, Android/Material design is similarly flat and less usable.
> Minimalism in software is achieved by simplifying feature sets,
> not stripping away pixels.
Simplifying feature sets should not mean reducing functionality. That is the lazy way. Simplicity should remove the extraneous, redundant, and inefficient; functionality is not that. Functionality with simplicity requires things generality, orthogonality, composability....
Good software engineers eventually learn to be able to do this for the code they produce (whether the business case allows it is a separate question). It should be possible for good UI designers to do likewise.
</rant>
Edit: I am not disagreeing with the article author here:
> It’s not minimalism to rip away the very things your users need.They also did not have an invisible clipboard. COPY meant what today would be copy+paste, and MOVE, cut+paste. If you wanted a 'clipboard' document it would be manifest and direct like everything else, and you would COPY or MOVE things to and from it.
Nope, it can be used for general data. On OS X (since that's what I'm most familiar with) you can put any data you want on the clipboard, and even list the types that you can provide it in, so when it gets pasted, the target can specify which format they want it in.
For instance, copying and pasting files to duplicate them is a common operation on many operating systems.
The only thing in the design world that I find more infuriating than the current trends, and the accompanying blandness and usability issues, is when people try to justify those trends as being somehow superior to what we had before using the worst kind of retro-fitted mumbo jumbo. At least let's be honest that most places have adopted flat design because it's cheap, easy, and quick.
At the bottom end of the market, making UIs a commodity is in itself no bad thing. For web applications, you can implement flat design in pure CSS, cutting down the bandwidth required for images. More generally, typical flat design elements are nicely scalable and Retina-ready, because everything is all done with such trivial vector graphics that no real effort or creativity is needed. You can adapt the simple layouts more easily to small screens as well. In fact, why develop anything original or even hire anyone with design skills at all, when you can just slap Bootstrap on it and charge the client an extra 200% for making the site responsive?
Unfortunately, for anything above the bottom end of the market, and particularly for promoting UIs that offer better usability and/or more distinctive styles, the current trends are awful for all the reasons this article sets out.
As an example, coming from the angle of an individual who'd never approached a smartphone in his life, the function of the iOS 6 picker/spinner was immediately obvious. The shading and glassy highlights made it look like a real spinner and practically begged the user to interact with it. Distinct section separators made it perfectly clear that each section can be spun separately.
Compare this to the picker in iOS 7 and up. Not only is there no shading or highlights to suggest how to interact with it, but now there are no separators — even if one presumes that it can be spun, it looks like the whole thing would spin. To make things worse, oddly skeumorphic 3D perspective has been added into the mix, presumably to try to suggest spinnability, but without partner cues it's just confusing. With this design, so much is left unknown until the user attempts interaction.
Reference screenshot: http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-o...
I personally feel that Apple struck a nice balance between design modesty, usability, and aesthetics with Mavericks desktop, but that's gone with Yosemite. Interestingly though, El Capitan adds in subtle hints of shading and depth in a few places. I wonder if we'll see things start to tilt back in the other direction with OS X 10.12 and iOS 10.
Also, coming from all the print media, human brains are conditioned to detect and separate important/immediate from un-important/less immediate content by looking at overall page structure and relative weights. Deciding against bold or large fonts for the looks takes that away too.
Finally there is a ton of research pointing to the fact that fonts with a healthy amount of thickness is more easy to read than thin fonts. The debate is still on about serifed fonts I guess but using Light Helvetica for kind of everything quite certainly is a step in the wrong direction.
Abandoning choices like "button means clickable" and "colored and underlined means link" isn't just a move to flat design, it's an attempt to retrain users on software conventions that have transcended their physical origins.
But other design language, like buttons and underlined links, communicate based on the necessity for some sort of language. Changing this language to something else should not occur unless there's some tangible benefit to the change.
Language changes all the time, but normal language change happens in the course of two-way communication between people. UI language is more one-way, it's like a speech that's delivered to an audience. If a speaker delivers a speak using an entirely new language that the audience doesn't understand, there had better be 1) some benefit to the change of language, and 2) clear communication to the audience about what the new language is.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft have failed on both points 1) and 2) in too many cases, IMHO. Languages are fashion, to some degree, but they are also functional. Flat UI has in too many cases placed the emphasis on looking cool and pushing "forward" over the primary point of a UI, which is to communicate to the user.
Originally it was because of the requirement to use the first-party keyboard software, but now it's because they've changed the design language in a way that conflicts with everything but iOS - and as a result, the UI feels remarkably unintuitive and confusing, even if it makes sense internally.
Is there any evidence that removing them does?
> The HIG wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about interaction.
> It was based on research, not trends.
It's not about interaction now? It's not about research now? In which ways isn't it?
I believe skeumorphism is just about aesthetics and trends. Well, actually I don't, I'm not sure what I should think I'm not aware of any research and can't make a good argument either way. Unlike the author I don't pretend I can though.
There might be a problem, it might just be a figment of the authors imagination. In either case articles like this one certainly are a problem.
Like the completely non-ergonomic, design-over-function, keyboards?
I've even bought extras for work just so I don't need to use any of the crazy things they have here. Long travel keyboards annoy me, I vastly prefer the chiclet style keyboards.
That aside, Apple's keyboards aren't bad IMO. I'm pretty happy with them generally – they have decent durability, enough key travel, and are relatively quiet. Certainly better than the keyboards provided as standard by any other major computer manufacturer.
What?! Every OEM makes "inoffensive", reasonable keyboards just like Apple. They only differ in visual design.
> My pet conspiracy theory is that Apple is trying to kill desktops
“This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate.” — Steve Jobs on the Apple Extended Keyboard.
Microsoft, Apple and Google are all pursuing variations of what can be called flat design.
There are many variations in flat design though. In the small details, Google and Apple have as many similarities as differences.
One of the differences is that Material relies heavily on shadows (one of the very few good design ideas from the first versions of Android). The most important buttons are usually elevated.
Color is also used to inform the user. The accent color of the app is used to color clickable elements.
I am currently in the process of implementing material design in a large scale mobile android app. So far it is going extremely well, the new design direction respond to many of our gripes with Holo and is good enough in order to be able to make a strong point with the product team in order to implement it instead of making a frankenmonster between iOS design & Holo like we did in the past. Time will tell how well it performs with our users.
The moment you let graphic designers in who care about making things look good, flat design falls apart because they want to change it up.
Flat works if you let the designers construct the design language and then never let them near the actual individual UIs and get tempted to deviate from their original language.
New Google app: http://imgur.com/HWZDjXK
Youtube redesign on an Android tablet: http://imgur.com/a/ciqgD
Youtube on a phone makes you realize why they're pushing 5.5"+ phones: https://i.imgur.com/2d0Neg2.png (yes, that whole large card is an ad, while top 25% of the screen is static)
Landscape is even worse: https://i.imgur.com/kEYoHyM.png
Seriously, I don't know why but every time I use the Google Youtube App it's hard for me to focus on what I'm doing. I'm not sure if it's all the empty space or the lack of any explicit separator between items (videos and what not). But it's just harder to use the app than to just open the web browser and get the video that way. :/
You can always change software later. Hardware stays in the consumer's hands for years. Bad decisions there will go uncorrected, even if you take the extraordinary step of issuing a recall, not everyone will bring in their kit.
This dynamic means that every company that has limited means, that is to say, every company, is going to have shitty software. Because hardware is more important, so it gets all the design attention. But software is harder. And if you're not doing hardware, like Microsoft, then your software is still going to be shitty because you don't understand hardware.
It's why your VCR was famously hard to program, it's why the entertainment system in your car is horrible, it's why the old stuff that doesn't have any software at all is way more reliable than the new stuff that does.
The answer here is not to criticize Apple, but to help them out by engineering better software. I used to hate texting on an iDevice because I loved using Swype and iOS didn't have it. Apple responded to the market with Smart Keyboards, they're not perfect but it beats the old way. Now they have an ad blocking API for browsers.
Apple is the tech world's quality champion. No other company in the world can pump out quality like Apple. But again, software is really fucking hard. So let's work together here, folks. Show the world a new way.