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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)

#421

Post by kalleboo »

masswerk wrote: post #360
robomartin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, you could always access and navigate menus by the keyboard on Macs (Ctrl + F2 nowadays). It's just that this was/is a relatively unknown feature.

How do you do this on System 7.5? Would actually be super useful on a PowerBook I have where the trackpad goes wild on cold days before the machine warms up.

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

#422

Post by lightedman »

zapzupnz wrote: post #262
mihaaly wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hel…

The rude user perspective. Don’t be so presumptuous as to think your rude virtual exhalation of breath could represent all users.

"Don’t be so presumptuous as to think your rude virtual exhalation of breath could represent all users."

It's representative of users that actually know what the hell is going on and have a clue.

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

#423

Post by domador »

riffraff wrote: post #417
Razengan wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

on the contrary, to me it feels like they have people who only use the latest product, and know it 100%. So when something new comes along, nobody is confused. Just all of us who don't live at apple 24/7.

You got that right! I'm all for dogfooding, but at some point, it can turn into kool-aiding, if you don't take a look at how people out on the street are actually using your products (or trying to.)

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

#424

Post by Razengan »

robomartin wrote: post #136
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…

> 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.

I don't mind this that much. It just shows that Apple elevated the mouse to an essential input system that must always be available, as opposed to being an optional accessory, and designed the system around that requirement.

You can make the same argument about not being able to do anything with a mouseless computer if the keyboard was disabled too.

In fact, even if the keyboard was unavailable, you could still use a computer with just a mouse + onscreen keyboard ...or a touchscreen. :)

So a physical keyboard is actually more expendable than a mouse.

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

#425

Post by domador »

riffraff wrote: post #417
Razengan wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

on the contrary, to me it feels like they have people who only use the latest product, and know it 100%. So when something new comes along, nobody is confused. Just all of us who don't live at apple 24/7.

The following, classic comic speaks more to Windows-style UI pathologies, but it seems appropriate here as well:

http://okcancel.com/comic/4.html

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

#426

Post by Accacin »

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…

If you don't click on the image in the 'message view', but instead click and hold you can select save from there.

I'm the opposite, I didn't even try to click on the image and save from the screen that appears.

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

#427

Post by nagVenkat »

hetspookjee wrote: post #319

After a lifetime use of Android and Windows I switched a month ago to Catalina MacOS, as my very first mac experience. The experience has been amazing so far, at the moment of unlocking I instantly fell in love with the instantness of the logging in. On windows this will, always, take atleast 1 second of black screen. While I am relatively up to speed with most basic things of this OS, I must admit that I severely un…

Look at spectacle for snapping windows to left half right half etc.

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

#428

Post by Razengan »

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…

> The Apple TV app is a great example of half thought out design.

ugh the TV app on the Mac is riddled with bugs and BS.

Just trying to see all the things I get with an Apple TV+ subscription is a labyrinth of clicks here and there.

Or the episodes of a show. Multiple different pages for show, episode, downloads and unintuitive ways of navigating between them.

Only a single player window allowed.

Clicking on "Resume Episode" if it's already open in a player window, fucking closes the player!!

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

#429

Post by nicwolff »

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…

And 3D Touch on the virtual keyboard, which used to turn it into a trackpad with which you could move the text cursor freely and 3D Touch again to select text has been replaced with "Haptic Touch" which lets you long-touch the space bar to move the cursor but offers no way to select text so you have to revert to the old "touch the word you want to edit" UI.

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

#430

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #409
Razengan wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core problem is that every manmade tool eventually has to choose 2 of the 3: • Be intuitive for new users • Have features for power users • Sane number of customization options Like the dock labels issue. I personally don't need or want labels in the Dock. But there should be an option to enable dock labels for people who are not familiar with all the icons. In fact I would like to hide the labels for ALL…

Two separate points: 1. You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them. 2. For a long time, Apple's way around the problem was to have different platforms for different markets. The iPad was a simple computing platform for very casual users, and the Mac was the more capable option for m…

> You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them.

Which of course makes them completely undiscoverable, too.

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