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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)

#391

Post by aduitsis »

afandian wrote: post #19

I remember as a child showing my mother how to do stuff on our family Mac with OS 7.5 and being baffled that she didn't 'get' the UI. A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously. Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and i…

(copy and paste of my own comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21354314)

" This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.

I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.

I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI. "

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

#392

Post by lordnacho »

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…

This is a subtle problem of incentives and information. The designer has the problem that the product will ship with only one of the possible designs. And the feedback process is patchy at best. There's no way to get a good overview of a bunch of forums where some people love it, but others hate this or that function.

What you can get feedback for is how eye popping or outrageous (no F keys!) your suggestions are. People in the office will react, and they are the ones who will decide what actually gets shipped.

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

#393

Post by [deleted] »

Razengan wrote: post #287

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and lea…

[deleted]

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

#394

Post by artimaeis »

neor wrote: post #331
Razengan wrote: post #287

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and lea…

I fully agree, there is a steady decline in usability and its a bloody shame because for years the usability is what set Apple apart from the others. A few things which hugely annoy me; - Saving a photo from iMessage.... the option has disappeared. I get a popup to airdrop the file, interact with some apps and a huge copy button. In fact, I can scroll down in this menu but there is not a single visual indicator that…

> "Saving a photo from iMessage"

I feel like I see the root of this problem everywhere in "card"-based UIs. The share button opens a "card" on top and you can move the card up in the view. There should definitely be some consideration for how to represent that there's more "card" outside of your screen.

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

#395

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Razengan wrote: post #287

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and lea…

> Because a flower for photos is not a connection that many people can intuitively make

This icon only makes sense if you used earlier versions of iOS where the icon was an actual photo of a flower. Objectively bad design.

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

#397

Post by neuronic »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #395
Razengan wrote: post #287

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and lea…

> Because a flower for photos is not a connection that many people can intuitively make This icon only makes sense if you used earlier versions of iOS where the icon was an actual photo of a flower. Objectively bad design.

What makes it 10x worse for me is that the desktop Slack app icon looks 90% identical.

The Photos app icon is a blurred version of the Slack app icon. Ugh.

Edit: put them next to each other and took a screenshot to underline my post above: https://imgur.com/jPFJMx4

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

#398

Post by Razengan »

crispyambulance wrote: post #386
Razengan wrote: post #287

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and lea…

What makes all this stuff even worse is if you want to ask a question and, naturally, end up asking it on one of the numerous web-based "communities", including Apple's. It's like being dropped into a dungeon where helpless people are endlessly flailing about trying find an answer so they can escape and instead being told useless, out-of-date, or crazy information by other clueless users.

Oh man, wait till you try to develop for the latest Apple platforms.

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

#399

Post by Razengan »

zentiggr wrote: post #290
JohnTHaller wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you want to updates your apps? That's easy. Open up the App Store and then click on your profile picture. Wait, what?

Wow, that's seriously dysfunctional. I get that Apple doesn't do UX testing but maybe they could do some UX testing? Getting at least one user's opinion about a redesign might have nipped some of this in the bud

THIS right there is what seems to be the core issue at Apple these days:

It doesn't feel like they have anyone who uses their own products anymore (dogfooding.)

The one thing about Steve Jobs was that he was a user like us, sharing most of the same annoyances and frustrations and in a position to make the engineers do something about them.

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

#400

Post by whywhywhywhy »

umbos wrote: post #175
chrbarrol wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why wouldn't you just Google it?

What if the problem was how to turn it on?

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