Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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Apple is considered top dog for usability because:

* They have a CONSISTENT user interface. I am emphasizing this in caps despite going against style guidelines here because this is such an important thing that has gone out of style outside Apple. Everything in MacOS and iOS look and behave the same. Users worship consistency.

* They know and respect how humans behave. Ever seen those Windows desktops filled to the brim with icons? Well that's how most users use computers, and so that's how iOS presents itself to its users: All the icons on the screen, scrolling probably necessary but they're all on the screen.

* Following on the above, they know and respect that humans abhor complexity. Apple's mice have one/zero buttons because I can't tell you how many users simply do not understand nor care about left- and right-clicks, let alone middle-clicking the scroll wheel. Apple knows and respects that.

TL;DR: Apple is top dog because Apple is the only computing company that knows how to human.

I worked for Apple back in the day (the Sculley/Spindler years). They put a lot of thought into interfaces. The Human Interface Group had hard-to-get-into classes on the psychology behind human thought and behavior, and how to write software that catered to that. It was an eye-opening experience, and I still use some of that knowledge today.

I don't know if they still stress such things today, but based on my own experience as a user over the decades, I suspect that Apple does not stress this as much anymore. Obviously they do, to a certain extent, but I suspect they've lowered the bar on what is acceptable in shipping software.

> … I suspect they've lowered the bar on what is acceptable in shipping software.

They certainly did. Yosemite shocked me.

I'm a former Mac user (1992–2014; AppleSeed programme member 2009–2014). The GUI of OS X 10.10 Yosemite drove me away from Apple. I gradually switched from OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks to PC-BSD. Then TrueOS, then FreeBSD-CURRENT with KDE Plasma.

> They have a CONSISTENT user interface

Using the default clock app, a timer has finished. How do you make it stop? Quick, an alarm has gone off. Which button is snooze and which button is stop?

I know it's minor, but if they can't even get that right, do you seriously think the rest is as consistent as you want it to be?

Considering anyone can pick up a random Apple gadget and immediately know how to use it (assuming some prior Apple experience)? Yeah, it's consistent; the most consistent user interface known to mankind today, even.

You know what really blew me away? When I found MacOS works practically identically to iOS and vice versa. Apple succeeded where Microsoft Fucking Failed and still Fails with three capital Fs. A consistent, single user interface transcending form factors and entirely different use cases that is also intuitive to most people on the planet.

Apple is fucking amazing at human'ing.

If Apple products were so intuitive, I would intuit them.

Instead, anytime I touch any Apple product, the original iPod notwithstanding, I want to throw the Apple product out an adjacent window in under 2 minutes.

They have trained generations of people in their weird ways, just like every other vendor.

How? Well, no one wants to admit they're too stupid to learn the first luxury-branded iProduct they just bought. If they can't use their first iProduct they can't extract status from visibly using it in front of others. So they dedicate themselves to learning their first iProduct. By the second iProduct, they're used to Apple's unintuitive UIs and part of the Apple-is-intuitive cult.

Motivated people can learn anything. Apple's trick is using social status desires to induce initial motivation.

The trick doesn't work on me. Hence me wanting to yeet iProducts out windows whenever I am forced to use them, usually because I have been asked to by a lifelong Apple user who can't figure out something on their allegedly intuitive device.

>> They have trained generations of people in their weird ways, just like every other vendor.

Well I had an Apple laptop provided by my previous employer and in the beginning it was all I had. Hated it deeply, everything in the UI seems to be on purpose set to be "not Microsoft or Linux".

On the other hand this reminds me of my first encounter with a graphical user interface, somewhere in '92 - '93. I was already studying computer science and had access to DOS-based PCs but my old gymnasium had received an Atari ST computer by donation from the "west". I was thoroughly fascinated by the mouse and since I already knew about filesystems from DOS it wasn't hard to figure out to use the "File Explorer" or whatever it was called. I had the contents of a folder displayed graphically, very nice, and when I wanted to "go in" some folder, I'd click on it to select it then obviously, navigate to the text menu of the window and select "open folder".

Every now and then some magic happened. Didn't know what I did or how I did it but the folder would magically open itself without the need to use text menu. This was an obviously very useful feature and after ruling out accident based on statistical occurrence (much like figuring out germ theory in 1850s London), I started to systematically hunt for what was causing it, writing out context, behavior, weather conditions, anything that would happen at the moment marvel occurred.

Eventually I figured it out: I was DOUBLE-CLICKING the mouse. By sheer human randomness and some computer software glitches, sometimes my click wouldn't be interpreted as "single click" as was all I knew but some accidental "multiple click", which on folders would open them.

I has (intentionally written grammatically incorrect for the fun factor effect) independently discovered the DOUBLE CLICK UI INTERFACE.

>Instead, anytime I touch any Apple product, the original iPod notwithstanding, I want to throw the Apple product out an adjacent window in under 2 minutes.

That's me too, but unlike you I understand that the problem is me and not Apple.

I have to fight and undo years if not decades of computing habits most people do not have, meanwhile most people take to Apple like moths to a light source because Apple builds their human interfaces for humans and not computer nerds like you and I.

I hate MacOS and iOS, but I understood and can now appreciate them once I forced myself to pretend I'm just Joe Average and not John Graybeard the 7th, Duke of Kernel.

I would take being Joe Pigkeeper if I could just maximize the goddamn window (desktop) or not only have a maximized window (mobile).

But, yeah, usually my problems are me.

I’m sorry, but this is simply not true. I regularly have to help my parents navigate various Apple UIs, because things aren’t obvious and look & behave differently between even Apple’s own apps, and often also between screens of the same app. Other (younger) relatives also runs into usability problems in macOS as frequent as on Windows.

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