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How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

fastcodesign.com

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Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#81

Post by jonahx »

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…

A good article with data from facebook and others on the value of discovery over cleanliness:

http://deep.design/the-hamburger-menu/

It contradicts current trends and the preferences of many designers.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#82

Post by nommm-nommm »

ThomPete wrote: post #47
Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strangest thing for me is that my 17 month old seem to pick the interaction with an iPad or Apple TV way more naturally than I could. She's not afraid of experimenting, and she's not overthinking what's happening or not — and since other children (same age or older) seem to "get it" as fast, I would say they're on something. I'm more weary of the ergonomics of their products : what's good for a toddler (the Apple…

No only that it's also your parent's who know don't have to work through layers of abstraction to understand how to manipulate something. Meet my mom: http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-com...

My mom once called me up with a computer problem.

"My fox fire[sic] isn't working."

Turns out her problem was Windows wasn't booting. All she knew was she wanted to get to a website and she couldn't.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#83

Post by [deleted] »

Decade wrote: post #69
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#84

Post by gcr »

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.)

Yesterday, Facebook announced (via an in-app notification) that their native finally respects font size changes.

This was yesterday. It took this many years for a large app developer to take accessibility seriously. The developers of the other apps on my phone either don't bother respecting my font settings (and thus setting everything in that standard terrible 9pt(?) type), or forgetting to take extra measures so the larger text gets ellipsized when shown on screen.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#85

Post by mreiland »

[deleted] wrote: post #83
Decade wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

I don't know about you, but no post-it placement is as strong as the first post-it placement. It's reversible a couple of times only.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#86

Post by scholia »

gnicholas wrote: post #77
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 agree that Apple's fonts are too thin and low-contrast, but it's pretty ironic for this to be called out by a publication whose standards are no better (and probably a tad worse). Talk about the pot calling the kettle gray!

... though obviously you can't blame the authors for the website's design. Maybe you could have a go at http://www.nngroup.com/

Talking of which, Alertbox never had that problem. I rather miss it ;-)

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#87

Post by stretchwithme »

Are features less discoverable? Or has how you discover features changed from discovering through menus to discovering through swiping and tapping?

I'm going to be using a feature in much the same way I discover it. Menus are harder to read and use on a small device. This is not a desktop.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#88

Post by marssaxman »

MCRed wrote: post #53

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…

Maybe it's just that I never got on the iphone bandwagon, but I've never found anything about the Android UI confusing or frustrating, other than the inherent frustration that comes with the limitations of a tiny touchscreen-based interface. What exactly do you have in mind?

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#89

Post by johansch »

MCRed wrote: post #53

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…

Is that you, Gruber?

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#90

Post by bhanu423 »

I have tried to use a Mac on several occasions but I see so much to adapt to. The apps still crash, some applications still feel slow, gestures/click pattern using 1-2-3-4 fingers, window system is not really obvious. It can obviously be learned but I find linux to be more much obvious and user friendly than Mac specially GNOME which is my current favorite. In any case windows has come a long way from windows xp to windows 10 to complicate things and hide features in crappy manner and still busy fixing things that are not broken.
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