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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

#61
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.

Funnily enough, it resulted in the functionality being even more hidden, because the context menus were harder to summon: requiring both the keyboard and the mouse to be depressed in a dance.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#62
post #54

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.)

OS X Finder favourites used to be coloured. Now the are grey on a blue background. Low contrast for me and an very dubious design choice. Before I didn't have to look at the shape of the icon, the colour was enough clue as to which icon was what. Now they removed that and made it low contrast.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#63
post #11
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.

This issue has been getting worse in OS X, too. I find myself continuously finding hidden functionality by holding in the option or command button while clicking or dragging. Frankly, and this may just be cynicism, I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform. If someone spends a few years learning all the idiosyncrasies of OS X and iOS, they may be too intim…

I've been using Mac OS since it was System 6, and I feel like power user features have been commonly hidden behind things like "hold option" for about that long. The difference now seems to be that it's not always power user features.

Example of a good feature to hide behind "hold option": removing the "..." from "Sleep...", "Shut Down...", etc. in the apple menu, meaning that selecting them won't prompt you before executing the command.

Example of a bad feature to hide behind "hold option": clicking the green window button to maximize instead of going to full screen.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#64
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 disagree a bit with this assessment of Apple's intentions. It wasn't that they didn't want a second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality because you could always hold down the Control key and click to access those functions, even on a single button mouse. The issue (and where I think the design is really thoughtful) is that it's never required to use that second mouse button (or Control) but that it's there for people who are comfortable using it.

Apple is and has always been about a tiered learning curve for their devices and I think your point about the mouse is a great example. If you put 2 buttons on a mouse, it complicates every interface element by two-fold. Every item that can be clicked can now also be clicked with a 2nd button. For a brand new user, keeping 1 button basically forces them to look at what's on the screen and assess what they're doing rather than needlessly right click everywhere searching for a context menu. People who tend to right click on things (when they understand what a right click does and intentionally perform the action know what they expect to be behind that right click.

I feel like iOS is the same way, and intentionally so. A novice user can get by doing all of the basic commands with swipes, pinches, and taps. A more advanced user can do rotations, shakes, and multi-touch swipes. An expert user can access every feature of every application.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#65
post #11
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.

This issue has been getting worse in OS X, too. I find myself continuously finding hidden functionality by holding in the option or command button while clicking or dragging. Frankly, and this may just be cynicism, I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform. If someone spends a few years learning all the idiosyncrasies of OS X and iOS, they may be too intim…

I don't think so. The functionality is hidden on purpose to keep from distracting novice users. Every program's basic functionality is accessible without any modifier keys. If you're "finding" new features, it simply means that you're past the stage of a novice user. Most of these hidden commands are variations too, so they even make sense logically. I'm curious if there's a specific "hidden" function that you're referring to that doesn't logically make sense as a modification of an existing function.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#66
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue has been getting worse in OS X, too. I find myself continuously finding hidden functionality by holding in the option or command button while clicking or dragging. Frankly, and this may just be cynicism, I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform. If someone spends a few years learning all the idiosyncrasies of OS X and iOS, they may be too intim…

I've been using Mac OS since it was System 6, and I feel like power user features have been commonly hidden behind things like "hold option" for about that long. The difference now seems to be that it's not always power user features. Example of a good feature to hide behind "hold option": removing the "..." from "Sleep...", "Shut Down...", etc. in the apple menu, meaning that selecting them won't prompt you before e…

Why is that a bad feature? It seems pretty logical to me that clicking "Option" would give you a variation (another Option) of the chosen operation. In that case, clicking the green "full screen" button gives you a "full screen" on the current desktop instead of creating a new one.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#67
post #3

Agree with much of the article. I personally find Apple iOS devices completely unusable because I have to constantly try to guess what kind of action or gesture will achieve what I want to do rather than being obvious. The same for several apps which appear to have become successful first on iOS before being ported to Android. I find remembering these gestures and actions an unnecessary cognitive load.

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

I have to wonder which iPhone era you're thinking of. Back in the early days, maybe. Nowadays? The iPhone is a puzzle box. I imagine a 5 year old would have a great time playing with it and seeing all the surprising things that happen in response to various actions, but if you want to actually use it for anything it's not nearly as pleasant an experience.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#68
post #29
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Undo, one of google's common features across several of it's products is the use of undo instead of confirmation, I absolutely LOVE this. If I archive an email in gmail (app or browser) it doesnt't ask me if I am sure I want to do that, but it does give me the option to immediately undo that action. This little feature is so wonderful when you think about it. It allows you to complete an intended action i…

Apple does this too. Except they hide the undo command behind a completely insane "shake the device" gesture, and half the time it fails to retrieve the email.

This is the biggest failure of Apple's design on iOS and the article nails it perfectly. It's not just that you have to shake the device, it's that you have to shake it and answer a modal and that all apps don't treat it the same way. You could be sitting there shaking your phone for 5 minutes wondering if you're just shaking it wrong or if the app doesn't offer an undo feature and there's not really any way of knowing which is the right answer.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#69

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…

No, no, emphatically no.

It’s not just about being familiar with computers. These fashionable user interfaces are just objectively, measurably worse. They did scientific studies, with video recordings and stopwatches and stuff.

I don’t know why Norman and Tog focus so much on back and undo. Undo is inherently challenging in a world with mutable state. A knife has no undo.

For me, the emblem of bad design is: Buttons without borders. We had that back in the early 1980s. Because we had only like 320×240 pixel monochrome screens. Even Palm had visual indicators on their 160×160 screens. I have 720p on my cheap phone. There’s no excuse for getting rid of hints about where you can click and where you cannot click. This is much worse on Google’s Material Design than Apple’s flat design.

There’s also predictability. How many people have not sent a text message mangled by auto-correct? And there’s readability. These days, Apple’s advertising images have spindly white text on a busy background, sometimes going all the way to white. I feel similarly about spindly bright red text on a white background. A decent amount of contrast should be the default, not a special “accessibility” setting that inevitably gets left out by developers.

We now have decades of research and common sense about what makes user interfaces work, and the influential companies are simultaneously throwing it all away. I don’t understand this madness.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm in the same boat. I've used both Macs and PCs for years and I find the Mac's shortcuts to be easier to remember and, overall, more useful than the PC's. PrintScreen to capture the whole desktop is nice and easy, but anything outside of that is a pain in the ass. I love that Cmd+Shift+4 lets me select an area of the screen with 1 hand. I'd be hard-pressed to remember, much less find, if Windows has suddenly added that capability and, even if it did, you'd have to use 1 hand for modifiers and one hand for PrintScreen. Macs have always had it so it's muscle memory now. If Windows added it, it was recent and requires 2 hands.
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