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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)

#131

Post by jrobn »

krtkush wrote: post #34
redleggedfrog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons Try using a third party launcher, maybe? Nova is a great alternative.

LOL, this is exactly the problem. You shouldn’t have to download a third party launcher, desktop, app screen to use the device efficiently.

I think iOS and Android are both shit shows. I pick up an android device and it’s a pain in the ass to figure out. That’s terrible design.

iOS seems to break their own rules and hide more and more in the name of minimalism. It’s asinine. 3D Touch was moronic. More than three gestures is moronic. Context sensitive swipes off the screen are moronic.

All of this became abundantly clear seeing my 77 year old grandma, who used a old android phone for years, have so many WTF moments on iOS 13. It’s not clear what is a button. She accidentally gestures and thinks her phone is busted.

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

#132

Post by mihaaly »

chrisseaton wrote: post #74
mihaaly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 will have to fall back to user opinions and debates So what's the point? If it's all just random subjective opinion why are we indulging in it? If you can't even demonstrate any issue in the first place then why bring it up?

I believe that repeated, persistent and enthusiastic user feedback may be considered as demonstration... ;)

(the lack of reliable and exact measurement does not equal to the lack of existence...I thought it is evident)

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

#133

Post by FpUser »

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it.

Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that the product sucks "cause it is ugly". Most of those complaining were Apple users who installed a product using Parallels. One of the emails actually was written by pro UX designer (at least this is who the author claimed to be). This got me curios to find out what is really wrong in my GUI that irritates some users so I asked for short interview on Skype/Phone. We had a discussion. Among the things he showed me the example of light gray text on white background and told me that is very eye pleasing an mine are too contrast. For fuck sake I could not read the example he showed to me without glasses and when I complained he said that the beauty trumps usability/ergonomics. I just bailed out. Maybe he is right but I'll stick to what I believe works.

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

#134

Post by amelius »

I remember having to install standard system software updates through iTunes. In windows you have to press the "start" button to shutdown the machine, but in iOS you have to open a music player to upgrade your OS (or at least, it used to be the case). Which is worse?

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

#135

Post by perl4ever »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #113

When Jobs came back to Apple, and continuing after his passing, there seems to have been a conscious decision away from "the computer for the rest of us" (aka 'entry level' 'easy' computer, and thus hard to sell to the aspirational) branding to various forms of luxury branding. The point of the UI in the iOS and OS X era is not so much to be easy to use, but to provide a consistent luxurious experience. A kind of mar…

I think that an opaque interface actually helps sell a luxury product and making it more difficult is intentional and strategic up to a point. A lot of features on, say, a BMW don't actually improve the experience, like say soft-closing doors or automatic wipers. But what they do is they constantly remind you that you have a luxury product while you are getting used to it, and after you have gotten used to it, you are constantly reminded if you drive anything else, because your reflexes and expectations are tuned for the "special" way of doing things.

It's a way to inhibit people from switching to a competitor, but of course it's possible to go too far. People joke about BMW drivers not using their turn signals, and as it happens, the traditional turn signals on their car work quite differently than on other cars, so quite likely many drivers simply never figured them out. Recently they have changed them to work the same way as on Japanese cars.

"Good" design is insufficient for aspirational/luxury products in general, because you can get it on mid-range products and incrementally higher pricing can't pay for substantially better design. So anything for the high end has to be ostentatiously or subtly different.

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

#136

Post by robomartin »

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…

A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.

This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.

In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.

I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.

Progress isn't without side effects I guess.

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

#137

Post by Yabood »

iamleppert wrote: post #124

iOS was never designed to be a general computing platform. It was designed to be minimalist mobile consumption only and light interaction. You can tell this in the original iOS which lacked multi-tasking completely. Only later was it shoe-horned in (along with undo, copy/paste, the concept of a cursor, etc) The result of what we have now has been an iterative journey, the product of a bunch of user requests who insis…

Or perhaps Apple wanted to get the iPhone out to the market quickly, so they kept multitasking, copy/paste, and other features for later iterations.

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

#138

Post by chrisseaton »

mihaaly wrote: post #132
chrisseaton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates So what's the point? If it's all just random subjective opinion why are we indulging in it? If you can't even demonstrate any issue in the first place then why bring it up?

I believe that repeated, persistent and enthusiastic user feedback may be considered as demonstration... ;) (the lack of reliable and exact measurement does not equal to the lack of existence...I thought it is evident)

But that's a great example of what I mean - are HN users grumbling a statistically significant result? Do they represent average users? Should Apple listen to it or ignore it? I don't know - do you?

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

#139

Post by mihaaly »

manicdee wrote: post #82
mihaaly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice isolated example that tells nothing about the "hard to use" factor. We can repeat such for days without yielding reliable empirical results. The issue is too compound.

Opinion of the users, especially repeated ones ought to be enough to justify a concern. There are too many to doubt its validity even without exact but half cooked partial numbers.

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

#140

Post by jiofih »

FpUser wrote: post #133

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it. Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that…

> beauty trumps usability/ergonomics.

That can not possibly come from a UI designer. Usability is always first, and it’s possible to make it look good while maintaining a11y/usability properties.

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