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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

#121

Post by jp_storvick »

pedalpete wrote: post #109
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.

The company that didn't want the second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus always hid the functionality behind a keypress-mouseclick. How this was ever better for the end user is beyond me. My theory has always been that Apple liked the design aesthetic of a single mouse button and and aesthetic won out over actually good design. From my experience this is the Apple way. I ca…

> …always hid the functionality behind a keypress-mouseclick.

No it didn't: There was no control-click until after System 7.

> My theory has always been that…

No it hasn't. That's boilerplate to make your BS opinion sound slightly better thought-out.

> I came to this conclusion after buying my first Mac about 10 years ago.

No you didn't. You just made that up to sound like you know something about design. You don't, this didn't happen.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#122

Post by 91bananas »

enraged_camel wrote: post #26
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.

"Completely unusable"? Don't you think that's a bit over the top? I don't know any advanced features but I can use all apps just fine. Pinch-to-zoom and a few swipe types are sufficient for most use cases. Edit: why the downvotes? I didn't say anything controversial. If you disagree, write a reply.

I'm right with you, the grandparent is insane. Flat out.

I love reading quotes like that that are backed with, you guessed it, absolutely nothing.

Pinch to zoom is a great example. It may not be your first guess but it's the type of thing that you do a couple times then look back thinking, Wow! that's a great way of representing zoom on a device capable of listening to multiple inputs at a time. And subsequently will never forget how to do it, and it becomes your first tool when you want to zoom.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#123

Post by 91bananas »

jakejake wrote: post #58
scintill76 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

+8 here

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#124

Post by kps »

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.

There has always been a degree of promotional fiction to the ‘nothing hidden’ story. The Macintosh brought us the now-ubiquitous Cut/Copy/Paste paradigm using an fragile invisible clipboard. (Fragile because Undo has never restored clipboard data lost to an accidental Cut or Copy.) The Xerox Star didn't do it that way; it had Move and Copy to an explicit destination, with no hidden state.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#125

Post by jp_storvick »

binaryapparatus wrote: post #33

As a side effect, result from all the tiny 'improvements' since Snow Leopard, I have moved everything from stock apps and services. Ecosystem is simply not something I would rely on. Mutt/offlineimap for mail. Baïkal (on my own server) for contacts and calendar. My photos are outside of Photos. My music is outside of iTunes. As a final result of the process, my iCloud account has all the checkboxes unchecked. I would…

Why do think anyone gives a shit what programs you use?

> As a final result of the process, my iCloud account has all the checkboxes unchecked.

Flippin' fascinating. Why are you telling anyone this?

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#126

Post by jp_storvick »

marssaxman wrote: post #88
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?

> I never got on the iphone bandwagon

i-Holes and g-Holes are just different kinds of a-holes. Nobody cares which you are or why.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#127

Post by jp_storvick »

marssaxman wrote: post #88
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?

> I never got on the iphone bandwagon…

you got on the google bandwagon. i-Hole, g-Hole: different kinds of a-holes. Nobody cares which you are or why.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#129

Post by Silhouette »

ThomPete wrote: post #115
Silhouette wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All interaction is learned. There is literally nothing that is obvious to the unexperienced thats not the discussion here. But there is a scale of how easily something is learned, and a UI with more or better affordances will be easier to learn than one with worse or fewer affordances. As someone who designs a lot of UI, I was nodding through much of this article. The most obvious part I disagreed with was the idea t…

Thats not really how to look at this though. There are of course completely useless UI but for most of the UI we are talking about here it really just is a matter of learning it and most of the times making something easy to learn might mean that it's not as powerful to use. I.e. there are no right solution just a bunch of solutions each with their various drawbacks and advantages. In the context of this discussion t…

There are of course completely useless UI but for most of the UI we are talking about here it really just is a matter of learning it and most of the times making something easy to learn might mean that it's not as powerful to use. I.e. there are no right solution just a bunch of solutions each with their various drawbacks and advantages.

That may be true to an extent, but UIs could offer a lot more support to beginners trying to find their way around than many of the current generation of mobile UIs do. I agree there is always a balancing act, but at the moment we seem to be getting the worse end on all of the scales at once, with limited functionality, limited discoverability, and limited aesthetics. And the really sad part is that this has been a step backwards from the state of the art just a few years ago, when the typical mobile UI was both more attractive and easier to use than the flat junk that Apple, Google and Microsoft seem to be obsessed with today.

Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name

#130

Post by Retra »

pedalpete wrote: post #109
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.

The company that didn't want the second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus always hid the functionality behind a keypress-mouseclick. How this was ever better for the end user is beyond me. My theory has always been that Apple liked the design aesthetic of a single mouse button and and aesthetic won out over actually good design. From my experience this is the Apple way. I ca…

As someone who's spent some time doing pixel-perfect graphics work, I would have never considered a cordless mouse ten years ago. I'm not even sure they were bad ten years ago, but the ten years leading up to 2006 taught me to avoid them.
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