Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs was against hiding features in modes, which is why the iOS lacked any kind of context menu until version 3, and Apple mice lacked right click for a long time. Speaking of Apple's mice, they are some of the worst offenders in "looks good but don't try using it". There's the infamous hockey puck, and currently the Magic Mouse. I use one when I'm desperate, but usually give up when it magically gives me hand…
I thought I was the only one that gets wrist pains after using the Magic Mouse. There's something really wrong with how that piece of hardware is designed it seems :/
How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#22Moved from Windows to OSX a couple of years ago after hearing for so long how much better the Mac experience and usability was. Some examples of why this was wrong: 1. Cmd-Tab lets me select a hidden window but it won't show it! 2. Many frequently used click targets are too small. For example, the close, minimise and maximise buttons. 3. The close minimise and maximise buttons reveal their functions only when the mou…
Cut can be done with CMD+C and then I think it's CMD+Alt+V for paste and remove original.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#23Moved from Windows to OSX a couple of years ago after hearing for so long how much better the Mac experience and usability was. Some examples of why this was wrong: 1. Cmd-Tab lets me select a hidden window but it won't show it! 2. Many frequently used click targets are too small. For example, the close, minimise and maximise buttons. 3. The close minimise and maximise buttons reveal their functions only when the mou…
MacOS was much less good, with the only keyboard support being explicit accelerator keys. A Mac with no mouse was unusable.
How does OSX fare?
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#24I think Android has surpassed iOS in terms of design and usability. I upgraded to a Android 5.0 recently (lightly modded by One Plus), and the design is really stunning. The icons have been redesigned to appear as though they they are made of actual flat material adding almost a hybrid 3d flat design that looks great. The colors are vibrant without being overwhelming. Messenger and Contacts applies a new color to you…
> The production of beautiful objects is only one > small component of modern design… As the authors say, and as Steve Jobs and Jony Ive have reiterated in almost every Apple product launch, how something looks is only a small part of the design Apple focuses on. Historically, the priority is how things _work_. This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of Apple products. A screenshot of software XYZ may look jus…
I really wish that they would apply this to iTunes and with their power/USB cables.
They've done a good job with OSX - F3, F4 and the multi-window support all work really well. Multi-windowing is an especially big improvement over windows.
But there are easily 10 x as many iTunes users as OSX users so they should really do something about it.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#25Its a good article. Force touch is a good example of this. Adding a new action without any signifier for its availability or its purpose when we already have a baffling mix of durations and gestures. Madness. An innovation by a platform would be to invent a new way to aid discovery / learnability of a UI not just add a new input. For example gestures - there should be a system standard way to be told about the availa…
In general I do everything I can to avoid using gestures. A lot of apps with heavy use of gestures use a one-time tutorial that explains gestures to a new user but that just admits that there's a UX failure to me. I like the idea of having a standard way to check all of the available gestures at any given time. Maybe there is even a way to convey that with simple font, style or color usage but getting everyone to get on board to that level of detail seems impossible. Without such a system, every gesture should be ultra obvious. Even something as simple as having a thumbnail partially cut off to signify that there are more thumbnails viewable upon a swipe gets the job done.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that even a tutorial mode doesn't get back all the usability, because you need to explicitly look for the tutorial. In a desktop GUI, you have buttons, and they are obviously buttons. You can figure out what they do by clicking on them. You can usually find the keyboard shortcut by hovering over the button. Even with a tutorial, there is no smooth transition in a touch interface. Nothing to indicate that…
Yeah, I miss hover mode on touch devices. Ironically, I see hover as the computer equivalent of touching a physical object to help work out how something might work without initiating any operation. With current touch devices, we only have "do" we don't have "feel".
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#27I remember the first time I used an iMac: I spent about half an hour trying to figure out how to eject a CD. A context menu might not look very elegant but it's insanely useful and powerful and very easy to get the hang of. In the end I had to be told/taught that the way to eject the CD on a mac was to move the CD icon on the desktop to the trash (in the days of CD-RW drives, you'd think this would erase the CD).
That, to me, is the sheer definition of an un-discoverable feature.
The iPhone's lack of back button (and the fact that apps are very inconsistent in their back button placements) has brought me similar pains in getting simple things done.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#28I think Android has surpassed iOS in terms of design and usability. I upgraded to a Android 5.0 recently (lightly modded by One Plus), and the design is really stunning. The icons have been redesigned to appear as though they they are made of actual flat material adding almost a hybrid 3d flat design that looks great. The colors are vibrant without being overwhelming. Messenger and Contacts applies a new color to you…
It's definitely just subjective tastes. Personally I find the colour schema of Material Design to be too saturated and garish. Case in point. YouTube on iOS: http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/05/youtube-for-ios-ge...
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#29I think Android has surpassed iOS in terms of design and usability. I upgraded to a Android 5.0 recently (lightly modded by One Plus), and the design is really stunning. The icons have been redesigned to appear as though they they are made of actual flat material adding almost a hybrid 3d flat design that looks great. The colors are vibrant without being overwhelming. Messenger and Contacts applies a new color to you…
- Because the way I hold the phone, most of the time my thumb is covering it and I don't see it.
- Because it is supposed to be the "main" action, it makes all other actions move around. Example: on Google Photos, the FAB is search. on Gmail the FAB is "create" and search is at the top.
- It is still the last place I look on the screen to perform an action. I look at the top first, then I look in the hamburger menu and only then I realize it was beneath my thumb. Fuck
I'm not convinced. I don't think google is convinced either because they keep shuffling it around from update to update, from app to app like they don't know what to do with it.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#30Where it fell flat for me:
* The post was much too long. I was intently reading but soon realized that it was all over the place and started having to skip through to try to dig out the main points.
* They admitted that they weren't even working at Apple during the time when it was designing successful products.
* They admitted that iOS 9 solved many of the problems quickly at the end without saying which ones or how they failed and while introducing new problems (memory?) that only served to confuse the reader.
* The authors' argument was incoherent. It seems to be building up reasons why Apple's design was bad, but they are all over the place. "It's just bad" is not an argument. Lay the groundwork. Provide evidence for each point and evidence against arguments against those points. Tie it all up.
Some of the information in here would make great articles on their own, e.g. I'd like to read a full criticism of Apple's new font, how the Human Interface Guidelines list changes over the years and how it could be better, and the whole Dieter Rams piece would have made an excellent article even outside of the context of Apple's failures.
I think few that have been using iOS and OS X over the years would dispute that Apple has dropped the ball since Jobs' death. While much of Apple's design still trumps others', others have blindly followed Apple and done an ever worse job. (I'm looking at you, Windows 8, which was a reaction to both iOS's use in the iPad and the terrible AppStore trend introduced in OS X.) Hopefully, Microsoft, Google, and others have realized by now that leading and innovating doesn't mean copying or reacting out of fear to Apple's direction- it means hiring extremely creative people that understand user-centric design.
But, even though there are problems at Apple and with design worldwide thanks to Apple's mistakes, the authors of this post haven't made it much clearer why they dropped the ball or how we can all understand how to avoid those problems.