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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)

#171

Post by drifkin »

xvector wrote: post #102
vardump wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.

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

#172

Post by dmix »

sjy wrote: post #130
poglet wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time Android user, I really like that on Apple you can go to Settings app and have a list of settings for all installed applications. Settings on Android can be confusing, especially when it comes to things like the "Google" app.

This is a great idea, but so often it’s just one of multiple locations where app settings are located.

This is true, for some crazy attempts at 'minimalism' companies will hide all settings in the OS settings app settings directory, which involves sorting through a very long list of apps and other menus to find it.

The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.

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

#173

Post by bondolo »

The Apple Mail client in iOS 13 has terrible half-thought out UX. Open a message you get a bar on the bottom with a trash icon and a reply icon. It is laid out for right handed users only with both icons on the right side. The icons are adjacent and the delete operation requires no confirmation. The reply action is actually the menu for all of the mail actions. Why it is reply icon rather than the more common "…" ellipses icon when it does not actually reply?

Besides being extremely buggy, the UI for the new Reminders app is even worse. I can't imagine the iOS 13 UI would do well in user testing at all. I can only assume they didn't do user testing.

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

#174

Post by deergomoo »

saagarjha wrote: post #92
dmitriid wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think iOS is a shit show, I give you App Store on MacOS [1][2] :) If there was a competition on how many guidelines you can break in a single app, this would take all the prizes home. The addition of Apple Arcade only increased the amount of WTFs. [1] There are Apple HIG, and then there is MacOS App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P [2] Here's a quick and easy way to see which apps are currently bein…

Apple's "services" apps–App Store, Music, Podcasts, TV–are the worst apps on the platform, period. They're so awful that I cannot understand how a sane developer could ship something like that.

Music (on iOS) has become so obtuse to use.

To enable/disable shuffle after selecting a song, you must tap a bar near the bottom (which gives no visual indication that it expands); once expanded, you must then tap an unlabelled button with a “list” icon. This will show your upcoming queue, but also holds the control for shuffle and repeat. These are also unlabelled, but at least the icons are fairly unmistakable.

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

#175

Post by umbos »

chrbarrol wrote: post #118
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

My first Apple product was a iPad Pro I got last year. I consider myself quite tech savvy, but the gestures was a huge pain-point when learning the device, to the point that it soured the whole experience for me: When trying to find the WiFi toggle button (which is accomplished by "pinching" the screen) I basically just tried every possible gesture until I found the right one (I know that some gesture opened it from…

Why wouldn't you just Google it? It would have taken you two seconds and then you'd have known all about control centre and how to access it.

Besides, none of those gestures are actually necessary; you could have gone settings app > Wifi > turn wifi on/off.

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

#176

Post by anoncake »

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.

There are better solutions for that such as an ordinary notification.

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

#177

Post by alien_ »

I don't have much to complain about the usability of the software, but they are making hardware that should not be made.

I'm the unfortunate user of a MacBook Pro company laptop with 8GB RAM and just two USB-C ports.

This sort of hardware should not be made anymore. The memory is insufficient (my laptop is always paging) and the USB-C is forcing me to always carry a dongle, not to mention that just two is not enough considering that one of them is used for the power cable.

It really feels like the people who designed this laptop never actually had to use it.

I wish they would be forced to use it for a while to get a feeling of how crappy it is, so they stop making such terrible hardware anymore.

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

#178

Post by mc3 »

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

Anything that needs 3 coordinated fingers is surely an accessibility hurdle.

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

#179

Post by captainredbeard »

saagarjha wrote: post #92
dmitriid wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think iOS is a shit show, I give you App Store on MacOS [1][2] :) If there was a competition on how many guidelines you can break in a single app, this would take all the prizes home. The addition of Apple Arcade only increased the amount of WTFs. [1] There are Apple HIG, and then there is MacOS App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P [2] Here's a quick and easy way to see which apps are currently bein…

Apple's "services" apps–App Store, Music, Podcasts, TV–are the worst apps on the platform, period. They're so awful that I cannot understand how a sane developer could ship something like that.

Interestingly enough, Eddy Cue's org consistently puts out the crappiest software while operating with the biggest ego (internally).

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

#180

Post by b3kart »

bitwize wrote: post #3

Apple has fallen into the same trap that Microsoft has -- changing their UI not to advance the state of the art, but just for the sake of changing it so they have something new to sell.

I’d play the devils advocate re. it being a “trap”. People get bored of things. Changing UI for the sake of changing UI is a sensible business decision if it scratches the customers’ novelty itch. At least a good short-term decision.
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