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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)

#81

Post by at_a_remove »

Fearing (correctly) that the laptop I had refurbished for my mother was soon to die, I bought her an iPad. She is not in any way computer literate and dislikes change. Surely, I thought, they would have some "cheat sheets" available to boil down the basics. I bought a few on Amazon and found them to be either insufficient or crowded with esoterica.

So I set about making a set of laminated cheat sheets of my own, with a consistent design, using screenshots of all of the applications I had installed, and so on. One points out all of the buttons on the iPad, another one shows the different screens, and a third was a diagram of common gestures.

Finding the gesture list itself was ... well, quite a bit harder than I thought it ought to be. Everything seems opaque. I am reminded of one of those escape room puzzles where one must painstakingly iterate through an array of taps, drags, swipes against each and every corner, edge and pixel. It seems that one must flail about against all of the idols, oh, I'm sorry, icons, hoping that one of the motions I have just performed will propitiate the gods. Watch for signs.

It seems, from my vantage, that learning the Apple Way was done with the very first Apple products and that now there is an expectation that everyone has been following along all this time. Certainly, that was my experience with my first smartphone, the iPhone SE. I was constantly having to look up how to do the smallest things and hoping that the information I found was not outdated. I also had to pester other Apple users for tips. My high school computer science teacher would be appalled at the lack of forthrightness.

While I think I did an alright job with the cheat sheets, she never did use that iPad much.

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

#82

Post by manicdee »

mihaaly wrote: post #41
chrisseaton wrote: post #2

Is anyone trying to back this up with a proper scientific study of whether users find it easier or harder to use? Seems just like opinion and debates about aesthetics otherwise? If I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.

As long as we miss SI unit for the "hard to use" attribute we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates - and potential randomly constructed half cooked polls. The opinions and debates are not looking well for Apple though.

We already have usability testing, but there are more dimensions to usability than can be encapsulated by one SI unit. As an example one measure might be the number of seconds required to perform a set sequence of actions such as copying text from a web page to a Notes entry. That's a completely different task to copying a pre-written comment from Notes into a web page, even though they both involve the same apps and are measured in seconds.

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

#83

Post by paulie_a »

mellowdream wrote: post #75

I've wanted to like Apple's way of doing things for years - Unix-like and support for MS Office, "ecosystem" integration - but every time I've used their products I've returned them or passed them off to my family members hoping they'd get more use out of them. Nowadays, I get more questions than ever asking for help on how to do X Y or Z thing that seems really trivial on Android/Linux/Windows systems (like copying…

I've passed off excessive tech support calls for a few people by suggesting they get a Mac. Not because it's easier to use, I really doubt that is true anyways. But for the simple reason I don't know how to use them being an Android, Linux and Windows guy. The calls went away fast. I first started doing that when the bosses wife called me at 12:30 at night and had the audacity to expect me to do a home visit to help her.

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

#84

Post by manicdee »

dmitriid wrote: post #72
matthew-wegner wrote: post #60

New gestures introduced in iOS 13: Copy: three-finger pinch Cut: three-finger double pinch Paste: three-finger pinch out (expand) Undo: three-finger swipe left (or three-finger double tap) Redo: three-finger swipe right Shortcut menu: three-finger single tap

While doing all that they broke "slide finger across screen to move cursor easily"

Now that's press and hold on the keyboard to move the cursor without your finger being in the way so you can never figure out where the cursor is going to land in "teh".

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

#85

Post by zik »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #60

New gestures introduced in iOS 13: Copy: three-finger pinch Cut: three-finger double pinch Paste: three-finger pinch out (expand) Undo: three-finger swipe left (or three-finger double tap) Redo: three-finger swipe right Shortcut menu: three-finger single tap

I would never guess any of those gestures. It's very much the opposite of intuitive.

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

#86

Post by veddox »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #60

New gestures introduced in iOS 13: Copy: three-finger pinch Cut: three-finger double pinch Paste: three-finger pinch out (expand) Undo: three-finger swipe left (or three-finger double tap) Redo: three-finger swipe right Shortcut menu: three-finger single tap

I was really excited to see multitasking coming with iPadOS 13. Unfortunately, it turns out to be absolutely horrible to use and insists on turning itself on with annoying regularity...

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

#87

Post by heavenlyblue »

drusepth wrote: post #76
heavenlyblue wrote: post #42

You know what I hate? I hate the fact that every time I open an app (most of which I use relatively rarely), I get a bunch of popups trying to introduce me to a variety of features I never needed in the first place. That goes beyond iOS, but also websites including Slack. E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?". What…

Your opinion here is completely valid and probably pretty widespread, but I feel almost entirely the opposite. Every time I get one of those "what's new" pop-ups in an app I already enjoy, it feels like Christmas morning for me and I almost always immediately go try out the new feature(s). I don't think I would find most of them (or wouldn't find them as quickly) for most apps without a nudge saying what to look for.

I constantly use: Slack, Datadog, Gmail, Sentry, JIRA, Confluence, Google Cal, IDEA.

And that’s excluding the apps. CityMapper, Google Maps, Amazon, WhatsApp.

Every day there’s something new released in one of those apps.

I can barely keep up with my email stream - you are either not using enough apps or you have too much free time on your hands.

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

#88

Post by ajmurmann »

vardump wrote: post #58
hs86 wrote: post #25

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…

I was so confused and panicked once I accidentally overwrote some text from an important note on an iPhone. For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything . Apparently there was no way to undo! After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously? I think there must be a lot of people wh…

I once shook my phone because I was annoyed by autocorrect repeatedly messing up. The shaking undid more than half the text I had written. I couldn't find a way to redo.

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

#89

Post by saagarjha »

lostmsu wrote: post #80
CamperBob2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition. One suggestion might be to start by removing hieroglyphic icons, or at least augmenting them with text labels.

> Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition. You assume it can be tackled. Here's a concrete example: The tool automatically snaps new windows to where user wants them to be. Rarely the user wants to undo that. The core functionality (autosnap) does not require any visible interface whatsoever. If I want user to see the undo button, I have to place it somewhere over his app's window, which bloats…

Does it show up when you hold down the Command key?

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

#90

Post by heavenlyblue »

lostmsu wrote: post #80
CamperBob2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition. One suggestion might be to start by removing hieroglyphic icons, or at least augmenting them with text labels.

> Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition. You assume it can be tackled. Here's a concrete example: The tool automatically snaps new windows to where user wants them to be. Rarely the user wants to undo that. The core functionality (autosnap) does not require any visible interface whatsoever. If I want user to see the undo button, I have to place it somewhere over his app's window, which bloats…

Well, the problem is that you have already been bombarding that user with a bunch of other useless features, so what they are going to do is to quickly skip through your tutorial and then end up swearing “why the hell did they decide to switch that functionality I am used to?”.

Also, I am yet to find a single piece of software that does snapping better than tiling window managers, so I am not so sure about your use-case.

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