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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

#91

Post by robwormald »

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 love most of my OS X and iOS stuff, and find it easy to use with no major issues. The Apple Music app, however, is the single most frustrating application I have ever used. It is just so, so bad.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#92

Post by kalleboo »

gcr wrote: post #84
MCRed wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Windows has supported users changing the font size since 3.1 with the default API having full support for right-sizing your UI, and software has NEVER properly supported it

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#93

Post by kalleboo »

jakejake wrote: post #36
Sfi81 wrote: 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've put an iPad in front of a 5 year old and she's continually activating weird gestures and swipe-in features by mistake and getting confused

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#94

Post by vacri »

dpkonofa wrote: post #70
marssaxman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any combination of modifier keys excluding the 'menu' key will combine with PrtScn with one hand under Windows - all the modifier keys are available on the same side of the keyboard as PrtScn on a standard keyboard.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#95

Post by Tloewald »

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…

Like you a big Apple fan who is horribly confused by the iOS music app — which, functionally is all I could hope for (the play list manager is something I've wanted forever) but seriously wtf?

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#96

Post by Tloewald »

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!

I think Apple's move to San Francisco actually addresses this issue quite well. The move to ultra thin Helvetica weights was a tad too much.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#98

Post by Tloewald »

jonahx wrote: post #81
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.

In general UX at the expense of usability is an annoying trend that last was a major issue when Flash became popular. I don't think Apple is giving design a bad name, this is what design is usually about. Apple's (usual) focus on usability actually gave design a good name which designers strive to damage with their over-emphasis on aesthetics.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#99

Post by unfamiliar »

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…

Button borders have been replaced by coloured text in iOS, and for the most part I find it pretty easy to use and pretty easy to identify clickable things. The problem is worse on websites which have no such rule regarding whether something is actionable or not (well, they did use to - blue and purple links - but apparently that doesn't look cool enough any more).

Much worse for me is the invention of a bunch of new UI elements which seem to have no known rules about how they work (Apple Music app - the word "songs" is actually a drop down list to change how the list below it is grouped into artist or album? What?!). Or huge numbers of functionality hidden behind a random choice of long press, force touch, context menu, swipe left or right, or double tap. E.g.: Safari on iOS: long press the reload key to load the desktop site, or type a word in the address bar and scroll down to "find in page". How on earth am I supposed to find these things without having read about them online in some frustrated help thread?

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#100

Post by eprom »

"Unfortunately, visually simple appearance does not result in ease of use, as the vast literature in academic journals on human-computer interaction and human factors demonstrates."

This lines up with my own anecdotal experience, but isn't something I've read about. Can anyone suggest further reading on this research?

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