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How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

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Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#51

Post by marssaxman »

scintill76 wrote: post #43
jakejake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put an iPhone in any 5-year olds hand they seem to have no trouble figuring it out.

This is a common refrain, but is it possible that adults have learned valid paradigms that make using the iPhone as it is today, more difficult? If you want to design for 5-year-olds and have them retain that forever, I guess it can work, but maybe it's a design failure if the people who actually buy your product have a harder time using it. To use another analogy, it's somewhat like saying "Well, people literate in…

I've certainly noticed that my decades of touch-typing experience make it much more difficult for me to enter text on a buttonless touch keyboard. I'm constantly growling and swearing at the machine and deleting words and typing them over, because I can't shake the habit of watching the text as I type instead of the buttons I'm trying to push. Someone who had never learned to type properly would be unlikely to have this problem.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#52

Post by robbyking »

mikepalmer wrote: post #32

"Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people do…

> I am always cursing after swiping in some direction by mistake.

Spotify is the same way. If you swipe the wrong way when trying to queue a song it removes the song from your library without the (shake) option to undo. It's infuriating.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#53

Post by MCRed »

It's sad to see Norman and Tognazinni-- men whose books I've read-- giving themselves a bad name. The bashing Apple bandwagon has been going on for 35 years now, and while being able to put up a headline like that guarantees publication, the quality of the articles below them has not improved.

Clearly this is an article written by guys who have not been regularly using other products to see the competition- the lack of design principles in a windows or linux gui, the frustration that is android (and alas, Windows Phone).

Ironically, when they get to specifics they refer in vague terms to things like "discoverability", but don't actually get to specifics about how apple products are not discoverable. I recently bought an Apple watch. I have not read one thing about how to use it, not online or in the manual. I just put it on and I'm discovering things. There is some challenge because this limited form factor means there are only a few ui points and two buttons... but I'm discovering. I didn't even watch the videos helpfully included in the Apple Watch App on my phone (Which were suggested to me when I setup the watch, which also I did without having to do any research.)

> "Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read"

This is straight up BS. And a low blow. An embarrassing blow for them to make. I have lower than normal vision. I have trouble seeing. I have no trouble reading my watch- which has probably the smallest text I experience (I have text size set larger on my phone and on my computer.)

Further, they made a new font that is readable at all sizes AND an OS that lets you dynamically change the size of the fonts in your settings and have it work across applications. Nobody else can do that, let alone has done it. (And no, android does not do this. What you're thinking of is something else.)

Basically, the only thing I can get out of this article is insecurity by norman and tognazzini... maybe the neilson norman group isn't doing so well.

But they might as well be telling kids to get off their lawn.

I expect this from people without credibility, like that douche from Novell who became Googles' CEO.

Not from you guys.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#54

Post by MCRed »

puranjay wrote: post #48
nostrademons wrote: post #20

Much of this may be a reaction to the technology market maturing, with many more people being intimately familiar with how to use technology and new features spreading faster by word of mouth. When the Mac came out, you had to teach people how to use a computer through the interface. Few people had prior experience with them, and it was unlikely that they'd be able to sit down with you and explain it. Now, it is a fa…

I've been helping my 64 year old mom use her smartphone. She has never used any computing device before and it's eye opening watching her work. Things we take for granted are a confusing mess for her. And the author is absolutely spot on: thin fonts and low contrast are a terrible choice as far as user experience goes. My mom can't read her screen without her glasses and holding her phone close.

In accessibility, you can set the size of the font thruout the entire OS. On iOS that is. But then, if your mom was using iOS I don't thin you would have a problem with contrast (I can't think of a single situation Apple's presented me with that was low contrast in the past 20 years.)

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#55

Post by marssaxman »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #25
jlg23 wrote: post #4

The article describes the issues I had with discoverability very well: As a European I always refused to pay the insane prices for apple products there. When I finally needed a mp3-player to survive daily commutes in public transport, I got an ipod touch. Without any printed documentation, I had to ask experienced apple users how to perform certain actions.

As a new Macbook user this year one of my favorite examples of this is screenshots. On Windows I've always had a prt scrn keyboard button, Macbooks forego that. As of windows 7 I think, there was a program to screenshot a portion of the screen or a specific window, Apple don't have one of those. All the screenshot commands (screen, window, portion) are behind a 3 key keyboard shortcut that I have to look up all the t…

Wow. Context is everything. It's been the same 3-key shortcut since 1984, so I never have to think about it. The command-shift-number pattern was used for a good handful of common system-wide functions on the classic Mac OS, so it was just a matter of remembering which digit corresponded to which action. They were basically function keys, since the original keyboards didn't have physical function keys.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#56

Post by quadrangle »

braythwayt wrote: post #6

JM2C, “The plural of anecdote is not data," &c. Most of these things annoy me, but nevertheless iOS devices continue to be “good enough,” and with the exception of Surface, I have been given no incentive to go through the agony of switching. I would hazard that Apple is giving competition an opening, but it won’t be easy to overcome the kind of inertia they have. Most people fear switching costs. The easiest way to b…

> The plural of anecdote

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata

> When do I get a ring…

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#57

Post by pvg »

It's odd that these titans of design gloss over one UI tenet - direct manipulation. This seems to somehow make up for a great deal inconsistency and violations of the design principles they pioneered. Nobody said 'my four year old and/or my mother-in-law just took to the Mac' as often as they say it about an iPad.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#58

Post by jakejake »

scintill76 wrote: post #43
jakejake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put an iPhone in any 5-year olds hand they seem to have no trouble figuring it out.

This is a common refrain, but is it possible that adults have learned valid paradigms that make using the iPhone as it is today, more difficult? If you want to design for 5-year-olds and have them retain that forever, I guess it can work, but maybe it's a design failure if the people who actually buy your product have a harder time using it. To use another analogy, it's somewhat like saying "Well, people literate in…

I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable." Also my 93 year old grandmother took to her iPhone almost instantaneously. As did my technically challenged parents, all of their friends and pretty much any of the hundreds of people who I have ever seen pick up an iPhone. I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post. And on a tech forum no less - what are you even doing here?

Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#59

Post by microcolonel »

MCRed wrote: post #54
puranjay wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been helping my 64 year old mom use her smartphone. She has never used any computing device before and it's eye opening watching her work. Things we take for granted are a confusing mess for her. And the author is absolutely spot on: thin fonts and low contrast are a terrible choice as far as user experience goes. My mom can't read her screen without her glasses and holding her phone close.

In accessibility, you can set the size of the font thruout the entire OS. On iOS that is. But then, if your mom was using iOS I don't thin you would have a problem with contrast (I can't think of a single situation Apple's presented me with that was low contrast in the past 20 years.)

Good old red text on aero glass, the pinnacle of legibility.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#60

Post by katbyte »

scintill76 wrote: post #39
sorenjan wrote: post #9

I've long found it strange that the same company that didn't want a second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus now hide so much functionality behind gestures with a varying amount of fingers. This started while Jobs where still at Apple, so it can't be blamed entirely on his successors.

I remember discovering the iOS calculator has a lot more features when you rotate the device into landscape orientation: http://osxdaily.com/2011/12/29/iphone-scientific-calculator/ I haven't tried recent iOS versions so I don't know if it's changed. According to the comments there, everyone and their dog knew this from birth, but I think it should count as "hidden" functionality, and rotating to landscape is kind of…

Well I didn't know this until now so I would agree its somewhat hidden.
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