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Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

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Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#21

Post by tinus_hn »

spectramax wrote: post #15

One of the biggest gripes I have with modern UI (both Apple and Android) is animation times. Try exporting an image from Dropbox app to Photos app on the iPhone. There are so many animations that take up precious time. Do it 10 times and you're tired . I feel like designers today want "sleekness" more because it sells when people look at it. Ohh...look at that shiny animation, so impressive. I want instant actions at…

Oh I’m so tired! Too tired to find the switch that turns off the animations if they bother you so much.

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#22

Post by breatheoften »

t34543 wrote: post #12
josteink wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestu…

I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today. Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.

I came here just to say the same thing — Apple really needs to track the statistics on success rate for text selection ...

“User Selected the text they wanted first try”

“User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds”

“User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute”

“User Failed to select the text they wanted”

I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#23

Post by josteink »

t34543 wrote: post #12
josteink wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestu…

I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today. Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.

> I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics.

Seconding this. It literally took me months after I updated to iOS13 until I was able to reliably use copy & paste again.

At some point I had given up completely, but then later on I randomly read an article which explained how this core feature has been changed, how it was supposed to work now.

A seriously wtf moment. Definitely not cool, and definitely not good UX.

Is this the butterfly-keyboard equivalent for touch-interfaces?

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#25

Post by hs86 »

I never owned an iOS device personally and when I offered my help to an older relative who wanted to bookmark a page on their home screen, it took me like 10 minutes to find out that I have to scroll horizontally on that Safari share menu. Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.

This gets worse whenever I see new Apple keynotes about their latest iPad gestures for multitasking or text editing. On the computer I have visible menus where I can peek the shortcut for each action but is there anything like that on i(Pad)OS? Just adding more and more gestures without giving the user some intuitive hints/signifiers seems like a degradation of usability. The scrollbar tells me that there is more to show and auto-hiding it was a first step into the wrong direction.

I am glad that Android got rid of the dedicated menu button which only worked in very special places without showing any on-screen indication for its availability and I feel like the Option key on Macs is still hiding important things from their users.

The now deprecated(?) 3D Touch on iPhones also seems to suffer from this issue. I was expecting some sort of visual clues to the user (like differently colored buttons) that certain elements offered special actions with a harder press but instead the 3D Touch-enabled elements continued to look the same and mostly the tech-savvy users kept up with where this feature was enabled and where not.

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#26

Post by redleggedfrog »

afandian wrote: post #19

I remember as a child showing my mother how to do stuff on our family Mac with OS 7.5 and being baffled that she didn't 'get' the UI. A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously. Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and i…

I don't know if android is immune anymore. The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons and I didn't figure out how to get them back.

It's a sad state of affairs across the board.

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#27

Post by josteink »

cycloptic wrote: post #20
threeseed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes no sense. Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes. It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.

The over-reliance on gestures and other hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem. It's a complete about-face from their classic 90s design policies, which were about ensuring applications were fully discoverable and did not hide any state from the user.

> hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem

I’ve had an iPhone for around 5 years now and I still have no idea what 3D Touch is.

I hear it’s not supported on all models, so my phone may be lacking it, but if it does, I wouldn’t even be able to tell.

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#28

Post by kohtatsu »

charlesism wrote: post #10
krackers wrote: post #7

I feel that for OSX, everything past Mavericks has been a downgrade. What's the point in having a beautiful hiDPI display if you're going to flatten all UI elements into a solid color?

Everything past Snow Leopard . Lion was a disaster, and there is literally no feature I use that I prefer in any Mac OS created since then. What's more, the OS has become uglier and buggier. Edit: actually, I like the addition of Finder > Cut, and Finder > Rename. So, hey, there is something!

Just picked up a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard (10.6).

I can confirm all (95%?) the features I've grown to love about macOS and regarded as innovative human design are still there.

Edit: I do however think iOS has been steadily improving, with some mild-moderate missteps. iOS 8 on my first 5s is a far cry from iOS 13.3 on the 11P. For comparison Snow Leopard was 2009, iOS 8 was 2014.

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#29

Post by josteink »

jbverschoor wrote: post #18
threeseed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes no sense. Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes. It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.

The iPhone has become a 2-handed device instead of a 1-handed device.

The iPhone SE may have been the last true iPhone IMO. Too bad Apple seems hellbent on the much less usable 6” monstrocitious these days.

Re: Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

#30

Post by Nextgrid »

t34543 wrote: post #12
josteink wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestu…

I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today. Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.

I was gonna post about this as well.

How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it?

The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models).

Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no “prior art” so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it always gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn’t move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even themselves had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.

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