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There's so much more information on screen, you can configure what buttons appear in control center, and it's much harder to accidentally kill an app (I did this on accident with an upward swipe on iOS 10).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then don’t bother. Unless an app has a pretty bad bug, you don’t need to force-kill it, and that’s what you’re doing here.
Furthermore didn't they add some sort of option in iOS 11 to get rid of things that haven't been used recently… thus automatically keeping things clean?
I love it. Erica is a dev as far as I know, not sure if she has much idea about design.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
One other thought: I think the author is a bit harsh on this particular UX on iPad primarily because the author is omitting (or forgetting) the fact that when a user enters the app switcher he or she will likely already be anticipating the primary area of focus on the screen that appears and will tunnel-vision his/her focus to only that region of the screen. In other words, after using the new app switcher a dozen or so times the user will unconsciously focus on only the region of that screen they know contains the actions he/she is looking for and they will do this in a anticipatory fashion since we are, after all, relentless pattern recognition machines. So I argue that what the designers have done here is to maximize instantaneously available information density while simultaneously utilizing classic visual design cues (such as "items in closer proximity to each other have similar purpose") to create 3 primary regions in which, per any given usage of the app switcher, a user is likely only focusing on one region. Here's a quick visualization I've done, a sort of heatmap of how user's would likely process this UI:
The light areas are the areas which users are most likely to focus on and they'll only be focusing on one of three regions most the time. The darker areas are there as increased available information density but the overall UI design is done well enough so that these darker areas should not negatively impact the "80% of the time" lighter areas but instead only serve to help the user during the "20% of the time" scenarios.
I have a couple of problems with this article, the first and most glaring of which is the fact that the author is conflating the new iPad UI with the iPhone UI. The second problem is that the author went out of her way to turn on every possible option for the control center, then complains that can’t tell what things are - using specific examples that aren’t even on by default. I personally like the new iPad UI - it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably, but in using it on my iPad it is my biggest annoyance. If they don’t keep the swipe up to close they should at least have a drag to rearrange. The reason I want to be able to remove it is because I usually have a few things going on when using my iPad now. Mail, slack, Twitter, notes, messages. Then I open some random app and want to get it out of my “working space” but the new system makes that quite slow.
Then don’t bother. Unless an app has a pretty bad bug, you don’t need to force-kill it, and that’s what you’re doing here.
The stacked-card app switcher in iOS is the worst thing ever. It scrolls to the side instead of flinging an app "up" and closing it. You can see maybe a fraction of the most recent app, and barely any of another two, and then you have to scroll through a list of apps that have been open since I last rebooted my phone. How anyone can think the iOS app switcher is the pinnacle of design baffles me.
(Not a defense, just an FYI) If you turn on Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion, it makes the app switcher a bit easier to use.
So even when a design is perfect, it just has to be changed eventually because everything has to be reviewed and modified.
The provided screenshot doesn't show that. Rather it shows large window icons and big enough targets for everything.
The rest of the post goes downhill fast.
Not to mention that it fails to account for all the ways in which the new app switcher (and assorted options mentioned, control center, etc) make iOS 11 a much more powerful machine.