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Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

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Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#181

Post by andy_ppp »

The article contains here-say mixed with facts about how bad Apple’s design process. It’s worth pointing out that while there have been some failures there have been some beautiful successes too. I love how the author blames the design team for complicating the touch wheel in one design, who knows if this is true it just fits with the narrative that is trying to be told.

My guess is that all of this is a lot more complicated than the author thinks and the road to simplicity is a very difficult one that has changed our technical devices for the better (overall). We’d still have plastic phones with “ergonomic” slide out keyboards if it was up to the author.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#182

Post by Fins »

acdha wrote: post #82
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile Huh? Windows CE and, later, Windows Mobile had quite a large number of apps for its era since the programming model was similar to desktop Windows (pre .NET) meaning that there was a ready-made base of developers for it. They weren't necessarily easy to find since the idea of an app store (and Apple/Google eating 30% of your revenue) didn't exist yet but they were there.

They had apps but the quality was low and prior to the Apple App Store’s standard terms discoverability was basically paying baksheesh to the the carriers – our clients were quoted a minimum of $50k per carrier just to be in the store, scaling up based on your perceived ability to pay.

There certainly where high quality applications for WinMo, and discovery was as simple as reading a forum or two. Sure, maybe not quite as easy as going to the app store and downloading some fake app that does absolutely nothing and steals your info, but it worked pretty well. And chances of the WinMo app being actually malicious were lower, too.,

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#183

Post by WoodenChair »

darkpuma wrote: post #173
kerng wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ipaq had touch 3-4 years before iPhone came out. Obviously not as slick. People seem to always forget that the iPhone was just an evolution not some kind of magically unexpected or unanticipated device.

I remember CRT touchscreens being used as cash registers in the late 90s. It's true, touch was nothing new. What was new was the combination of capacitive touch and a slick responsive UI. Previous systems had unresponsive GUIs or inferior touchscreen technology like resistive, IR or lightpen. Getting both right at the same time was the big first for the iphone, not the bare concept of touchscreens as input devices.

What both you and grandparent are missing is the biggest iPhone touch innovation of all: multitouch. Multitouch was invented largely by a one-person startup that Apple purchased, and the iPhone became the first device to mass-produce it. The book The One Device covers its development well: https://amzn.to/2lrbKA7

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#184

Post by r00fus »

leoc wrote: post #117
idlewords wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gratuitously making a mouse unusable during charging, where there was an easy and obvious way to make it usable during charging, is bad design.

But there's no easy and obvious way to make a good cable connector that will make the mouse usable during charging. You could add a connector that works somewhat poorly, on the theory that those shortcomings don't matter since the mouse will only be plugged in occasionally and briefly. But if you do that then many users will in fact leave the mouse plugged in permanently, "just in case", effectively transforming it,…

> But if you do that then many users will in fact leave the mouse plugged in permanently, "just in case", effectively transforming it, in their experience, from a nice wireless mouse to a dodgy wired mouse.

I had a reasonably cheap wireless mouse back in the early 2000s which could take rechargable lithium batteries and charge them with a wire that also allowed me to use the mouse at the same time.

I'm no power user, that device lasted me years and the reason it's still not used all the time is the cable frayed and died after 10 years.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#185

Post by FraKtus »

pkamb wrote: post #69

I for one quite like the Apple TV 4 remote. It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way. But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision. It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote. There are ju…

I have 2 Apple TV at home, and the symmetrical design drives me crazy.

The way I did fix it is that I put some ugly tape on the bottom of the remote.

Pretty sure Steve or Jony would hate to see what I ave did to their beautiful remote :-), But at least now I know how I am holding it with looking at it.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#186

Post by moogly »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #26

"That vague hostility towards humans keeps peeping through." A story recounted here last year [0]: During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practic…

They released several super uncomfortable phones with sharp edges in the iPhone 4-5(S).

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#187

Post by oaththrowaway »

xioxox wrote: post #147
tachyonbeam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life. My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and l…

Interesting on the battery lifetime. My ThinkPad Carbon X1 gen 6 can do 10-12 hrs in Ubuntu, though I had to switch the bios sleep mode to Linux. Maybe the lack of an Nvidia graphics card helps.

Could you go into more detail about this?

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#188

Post by mstolpm »

moogly wrote: post #186
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #26

"That vague hostility towards humans keeps peeping through." A story recounted here last year [0]: During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practic…

They released several super uncomfortable phones with sharp edges in the iPhone 4-5(S).

To be honest, I prefer the "sharp" edges over the slippy rounded ones of the newer models because it gives a better grip. Your mileage may vary but I don't feel that old design uncomfortable.

Re: Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design

#189

Post by chrischen »

scarface74 wrote: post #111
idlewords wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.

Skeuomorphism wasn’t a failure. The iPhone and the touch interface were new to the market. Making the interface look familiar was important at the time even though it went too far. The iPhone did well from iOS 1 - iOS 6 and I don’t remember too many complaints until iOS 6.

Even today I feel like the new flat UIs are a bit too flat, like how some input fields (like in the Phone app on iOS) are completely invisible so you don't know that they're there.
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