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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)

#221

Post by robertoandred »

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…

WiFi toggle is in the Settings app where it's always been. What's so confusing about that?

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

#222

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Glad to see Don Norman getting some attention. I’ve always liked him. The Design of Everyday Things should, IMO, be required reading for anyone that designs anything.

I think that Tog feels similarly. When OSX came out, he wrote a polemic, slamming the Dock.

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

#223

Post by PascLeRasc »

emidoots wrote: post #145
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…

I have had conversations with several "designers", some from FAANG, and all have held the general belief that having strong authority over how the UI looks and getting eye-candy at the cost of usability and ergonomics was 'without doubt the right choice'. In my frank opinion, many designers hold a position of subjective judgement and thrive on the power that comes with that. This is like a developer making arbitrary…

Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day, or my opinion about data (which I don't see backed up by any data)? If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

On another topic, putting someone's job into quotes just isn't a good look for any argument. If you have to straw man to get your point across, it might not be that great.

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

#224

Post by Izkata »

gryfft wrote: post #220
nicoburns wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is even worse in this regard. There really is no way to undo changes in text fields! I'm generally a happy android user, but I find it absolutely infuriating that this hasn't been implemented. Text editing on phones is fiddly, and I've lost quite a few comments/messages due to this issue.

I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard and I have the dollar sign key mapped to ctrl. I was pleased to discover ctrl-z works the way it should. This doesn't help the vast majority of users, I know, but it's one more thing I love about having a physical keyboard on my phone.

Oh nice! Mine has left-shift and right-shift, I mapped right-shift to ctrl long ago (so I can use screen when ssh'ing from my phone) but never thought to try - undo (and redo, ctrl+y) both work here too.

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

#225

Post by debt »

egwor wrote: post #17
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.

The Apple TV app is a great example of half thought out design. * You start downloading a movie. It doesn't show it downloading anywhere that I could see it. The only place I could find it was by going back * I had to login about 5 times * The Apple TV app is so new that you can't give Apple Feedback because the app isn't listed. * Supposedly I get a free year of apple tv with my new mac. I have no idea where to find…

Apple TV without a doubt has the most poorly designed UI of any Apple product.

There is so many problems with it it’s like they invented AppleTv+ solely to raise money to pay a team to basically entirely rewrite AppleTV.

It’s hard to believe Apple even sells the AppleTV.

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

#226

Post by fcarraldo »

anoncake wrote: post #176
drusepth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I don't want apps that I'm not using to send a disruptive notification that there's something new in the app. I'd prefer that the app let me know the next time I launch it, as being described by OP.

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

#227

Post by emidoots »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #223
emidoots wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had conversations with several "designers", some from FAANG, and all have held the general belief that having strong authority over how the UI looks and getting eye-candy at the cost of usability and ergonomics was 'without doubt the right choice'. In my frank opinion, many designers hold a position of subjective judgement and thrive on the power that comes with that. This is like a developer making arbitrary…

Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day, or my opinion about data (which I don't see backed up by any data)? If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone. On another topic, putting someone's job into quotes just isn't a good look for any argument. If you have to straw man to get your point across, it might not be that great.

The reason I put air quotes around "designer" was to convey the fact that I believe _good_ designers would base their decisions on logic discovered via some form of the scientific method. Studying what makes user interfaces understandable, and why.

Data doesn't need to be "track everything the user does and do A/B testing", it can come from many sources: user behavior studies done in the past, cognitive psychology, experience gained from mentors, etc.

Would you make the same "they do it every day so they must be right" argument for engineers? Product managers? Stock brokers before data-driven trading? Doctors before the rise of modern medicine?

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

#228

Post by kranner »

Bud wrote: post #215
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.

Let's not pretend this is a matter of how Apple "couldn't be bothered". Everything like this is an affirmative choice. All such choices (or their alternatives, like what is being asked for here) have both costs and benefits.

How do we really know this was a deliberate choice? There isn't enough information to discard the "Apple couldn't be bothered" hypothesis in this instance.

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

#229

Post by IAmGraydon »

Aeolun wrote: post #204
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? It usually pops up a message asking if you want to undo, which you need to tap. I'm pretty darn sure this is how the feature has worked since it was introduced.

Probably, but you do not necessarily expect half your text to disappear when you click accept right?

When a message pops up asking me if I want to undo my typing and I click yes, I do in fact expect the text I typed to disappear.

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

#230

Post by eloop »

I think this trend is seen in many areas, e.g. architecture and landscape design that looks and sounds great in a magazine but is actively hostile to humans. Products vying for the attention of a society obsessed with the latest shiny thing. Is Apple catering for the market, or creating the market?
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