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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)

#161

Post by njarboe »

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…

Way back, a long time ago, software came with large, detailed, paper manuals. The quality varied, but a well written manual was a godsend. I guess the constantly updating that goes on with current software does not allow for such a thing these days, but it sure was nice when you could get a version of some software and use the same thing for 5 years without learning new tricks all the time.

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

#162

Post by anoncake »

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…

Maybe putting engineers in charge of UI design isn't all that bad. We may not be good at making a UI work but at least (trying to) make things work is what we do. With designers, it's hit and miss.

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

#163

Post by mihaaly »

lostmsu wrote: post #57
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…

A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover even when you know what are you looking for. I don't have time for making those introductions, and end up getting feedback requests for some features my app already has.

I am going to be a little rough, but no-one cares about your difficulties! Especially when your inability of producing intuitive - or easy to discover - features blocking users instead of helping! A tool should help users not being the poor man's self advertisement medium! Otherwise there's no point using those. Do it properly or find a living where you are competent! Again, sorry for being rude, but hopefully it helps you getting the 'user perspective'...

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

#164

Post by meerita »

threeseed wrote: post #8
meerita wrote: post #5

Apple made a huge mistake when it launched iOS 7: it failed to improve its UI. I don't know if it was a matter of the best and most capable designers leaving the company or bad decisions by the managers, but the truth is that iOS 7 was never a good UI for iPhones, especially the biggest ones. There are many things that are missing that are obvious, such as being able to organize the icons on your Home screen as you w…

Not sure why you are talking about iOS7 since it was released 7 years. But anyway the reason Apple doesn't allow for customisation of the home screen is because it adds complexity. And given they are trying to sell to people who are computer and technology illiterate you don't want complexity.

Many of the problems started there: the departure of Forstall, Steve Jobs getting so sick and dying, departure of many important roles at Apple and moving Ive to the head of design in the digital part, in my opinion brang the company to a disadvantadged position. In opposite, Google moved quickly and cleanest with Material Design taking Android phones to a new level Apple couldn't reach. Nowadays iPhones are the minority in every market.

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

#165

Post by Nextgrid »

breatheoften wrote: post #104
Nextgrid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s because idiots don’t know/care about selecting text to begin with and their products are more and more targeted to them, as opposed to people why (try to) do real work on their devices as opposed to scrolling social media?

I don’t know many people who would be unable to derive value from the use of text selection on their mobile device - that should be a low percentage of the market, because everyone should be succeeding at using the functionality ...?

In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance.

What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features.

Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s

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

#166

Post by saagarjha »

microtheo wrote: post #116

I just made the move from Android 10 to iOS 13. I was shocked how complicated the process was. Not saying that one is more intuitive than the other. But man... No back button. The password manager didn’t integrate well. The keyboard didn’t adapt to the language I was typing in. Parameters were hidden in the settings app but sometimes also in the app itself. Force touch is impossible to predict without trying it (acti…

> No back button.

Swipe from the left edge of the screen, or tap the chevron in the top left.

> The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel).

The lock screen hides historical notifications. You can scroll down to see them.

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

#167

Post by anoncake »

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…

I agree. When I open an app, it's because I want to do something. That something is not "reading release notes". This kind of bullshit is why people don't read warnings but reflexively close pop-ups to get the damn machine to shut up and obey their orders.

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

#168

Post by anoncake »

saagarjha wrote: post #156
gnicholas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons I disabled app auto updates. There are only a few apps that need to be updated regularly, like uber and some banking apps. The rest can wait until I decide to update them. Also saves space on my device by not always having the latest version.

> Also saves space on my device by not always having the latest version. How so?

Bloat?

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

#169

Post by wayneftw »

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 never got how people could even get past Mac window management or rather lack of window management. They've never had a Maximize function and they always pushed that stupid Zoom functionality instead, which every window implements differently. Then they moved onto making Full Screen the default which I find utterly frustrating as I wait for some junior programmer, who chose a Macbook, swiping furiously to find that lost window. Many other times, they'll put the pointer too close to the top of a full screen window and window chrome will expand downwards to get in their way.

And that's just one tiny facet of a single set of features that they got terribly wrong. There's so many other things wrong with Macs, macOS, iPhones and iOS... I could go on for hours and hours detailing these things.

Despite all of that, like you, I will happily recommend a Mac to beginners because they do have system stability down to a science. I also use an iPhone and I recommend them to everyone since they're just safer and more secure than Android as far as I have seen. I'm hoping one day I can stop giving Apple money though because I don't want to support their shit attitude towards power users. I used to only buy used iPhones, but now I stay about 2 or 3 models behind their current offering (and I buy them at a deep discount - my new iPhone 8 was only $350 with no contract from Boost Mobile which works just great for my needs).

I'm really hoping my iPhone 8 will be my last iPhone because the task switching shortcut for the newer home button-less iPhones is very finicky from what I can tell experimenting in stores. Maybe they'll bring the home button back one day or I'll finally switch back to some other mobile OS.

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

#170

Post by lstamour »

ryall wrote: post #112
xvector wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gesture is now a two-finger swipe back. For some reason Apple couldn’t be bothered to add an “undo” to the cursor dialogue though.

Thanks for the two-finger tip, just lost a whole block of text in slack ;)

Slack has the worst text editor under iOS 13. I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated by the keyboard disappearing when I want to select and copy or paste text... If the keyboard stayed open like in every other sensible app, I wouldn't have such frustrations editing text, but leaving text edit mode, Apple makes it impossible to edit text with touch at that point...
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