The Third User (2013)

This resonates with me. I just bought a Pixel 3a and you can tell they spent a lot of time and energy working on all the little sounds and chirps and lights and buzzes that the thing makes whenever it powers on or does anything. It really was amazing the way it did all those little effects in coordination.

And the first thing I did after finishing setup was to find the screen where I could turn all that crap off because really, why would I want my phone to buzz at me ever single time I pressed a key on the keyboard. I mean yeah, it’s delightful and all. But it’s also terrible.

It’s like the “torch mode” that TVs have so that they’re extra bright and colourful in the shop. The one that’s off by default on the one in the box because the tv you bring home needs to be able to display tv shows without burning out your retinas.

I can’t help but think that Apple was eventually right. Using gestures or scroll wheels to scroll feels superior to dragging a bar with your mouse, and 3D Touch for fine cursor placement on iPhones that support it is better than arrow keys could have been. (Admittedly, I guess this was not a solution when the post came out.)

Disclosure, was once an Apple intern though not on these teams.

Edit: going deeper, I think the reason why you wouldn’t want scroll bars and arrow keys is because they’re designed for the wrong modality. They were necessary when a mouse and keyboard were the only ways to interact with stuff, but they don’t really make sense on touchpads and touchscreens and have their own limitations that can be overcome with gestures (like accurately scrolling large distances at once, for example.) Imagine if today’s high-precision touch sensors were ubiquitous before the mouse. Would it make sense in that world to ask for a scroll bar to be constantly beside the window or for arrow keys in your phone? I don’t think so.

This is ranty and subjective. Reduction of visual clutter isn't just for people in a store; as someone who uses a Mac professionally, I don't cease to appreciate it.

I was reluctant when I had to enable persistent scroll bars because they affected the layout of the applications I was building, and our users were not all on OSes with that feature. Even on my PC I virtually never drag a scroll bar manually, opting instead for the mouse wheel. With momentum scrolling it's even easier to get straight to where I want to be. And, funnily enough, I only find myself wondering how long a document is at the same time that I'm already scrolling down a bit.

Mobile touch keyboards have very limited real-estate, and arrow keys would be hilariously wasteful of it. Instead iOS lets you drag across the whole keyboard, moving the cursor like a trackpad. I believe this feature didn't exist in 2013, although I also think there was an earlier version confined to the space bar which did. I could be wrong.

The hiding of redundant UX elements isn't an affront to expert users. Expert users appreciate having more space for content that matters and less mental clutter; just ask someone who uses Vi or Emacs. It just happens that Apple has figured out a couple of UX features that are obvious enough to hide even for regular users.

The author shares my frustrations with Apple's scroll bar gimmicks. Honestly, I'm surprised that Sublime-style minimaps haven't been adopted by web browsers, word processors, and other mainstream software.

For example, the linked blog post only occupies half of the vertical space on the webpage. The rest is showing comments. So, while reading the article, it's impossible for me to assess how much is actually left... without laboriously scrolling down, hunting for the end of the post, glancing at the scroll bar, and setting a mental checkpoint near the midpoint.

Scroll bars are practically meaningless because they reflect a property of the webpage (instead of the real content therein). This problem is even worse on websites with "infinite scroll" UIs that cause the scroll bar to abruptly change size/location without user input.

It's an excellent read.

The same thing that Apple does is also happening in the Linux desktop "department". Just compare GNOME2 and GNOME3. Back in the days I spent hours on configuring GNOME, and that was a lot of fun. Now I have GNOME3. I have to actually modify/hack its config files or even source code in the ugliest ways just to bring back something familiar.

I understand that GNOME3 was an (successful) attempt to attract more users which were intimidated by the more "tractor" or "steam engine" like designs of Linux desktops back then (edit) and they were right! You could break something with a Linux desktop tweak! "Yast!" was a common exclamation for me! It could break the whole OS and prevent it from booting.

I feel like Apple's approach to UI/UX is one half care and consideration for the current user and the rest is "training" for whatever they intend next.

The design world at large gave them shit for excessive Skeuomorphism but it really did train a huge group of people young and old how to use a touch screen.

A related discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887519.

Okay, before tech-savvy vim-using HNers complain about Apple not making proper computers, touchbar is an unpredictable/unfixable mess, worst UX ever, please think about what kind of tools you’re using with your computer. For a person who regularly uses Emacs for coding, Photoshop and Illustrator for graphic design, Xcode sometimes, and casual apps like Safari, Finder, Powerpoint, etc... the touch bar is an innovation. It allows using context-aware menus without moving my hands from the keyboard to my trackpad or mouse; and it is much more discoverable since the touch bar items are shown at a glance. Isn’t one of the biggest reasons of using vim/emacs is that one doesn’t have to move one’s hand from the keyboard? Why complain about the touch bar when the editor you’re using is failing to show context-sensitive menus...? I’ve once wrote a super hacky script I made by copy-pasting some plugin codes and some shell script, pandoc, some elisp and some AppleScript, hooked the script up with a touchbar item to scrape the DOM, convert into org/md and open a new buffer in emacs with the appropriate mode on. I’ve used it very effectively until I formatted my computer by accident and my code disappeared. Don’t complain with the touchbar; complain to your tools. To get the most out of your computer, use tools or make one that is designed for your computer.

BTW, I’m not saying everything is right; I think that hapic feedback should be given when the touchbar is pressed; some touchbar default layouts aren’t consistent between apps; etc... I’m saying that it’s not right to call the touchbar as shit when you’re not using the appropriate tools.

I don't think anyone buys computer because they looked at it in the store and the display looked clean. Tech savvy users have very specific requirements. Tech unsavvy users typically just want to buy something that's familiar.

This article claims that the UX community doesn't like Apple. I always thought that Apple was considered to be the epicenter of good, functional design.

Apple already does this: Garage Band, Logic and then Logic with enabled additional features is exactly the progression author describes. (I assume that iMovie and Final Cut are similar).

If only they did it with the OS as well.

I don’t know. For me, these are some rules of thumb for a successful UI design:

1) If you don’t need some UI element or feature right now, it doesn’t stay in your way;

2) Still, it remains easily discoverable.

Auto-hiding scrollbars are a perfect examples of successful application of this rule. I like them. Apple are the experts along these lines: nearly everybody else either exposes all knobs and controls as the authors of this article advocate (it creates visual clutter), or keeps power features undiscoverable, relying on documentation and keyboard shortcuts (as UI minimalists advocate).

The truth is in the middle.

The key to understanding Apple is that they could do somewhere between 1-3 things company-wide really well, when Steve Jobs was there to focus on them. Now that he’s gone, as in the 90s, it’s just a question of how long they can run on fumes.

Excellent read.

I would like to point out that the scroll bars can actually be made to show "always" in the Preferences.

I'm super intrigued by the question of which approach leads to the best products:

Engineering (technical) vs industrial design (arts)

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Tesla, PayPal, SpaceX, Facebook, Amazon were all born out of the technical discipline. The founders were engineers. They also did the UX.

Then there's Apple. Who was Steve Jobs? To what extent was he an engineer? Did he approach product design from an engineering discipline or an industrial design (arts) discipline? Is industrial design the secret key to Apple's success or was it primarily the result of an excellent hardware/software engineering approach?