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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)

#491

Post by ikurei »

nicwolff wrote: post #429
neor wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now the trackpad is enabled by using two fingers on the keybard. To select, you can long-touch where you want the selection to start, and select more by using this trackpad gesture.

At least that's how it works on my iPad Air 2, which is a bit outdated, but has the latest iOS.

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

#492

Post by shinkarom »

randomsearch wrote: post #477
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…

Thanks for posting this. I completely agree, and I think that “put this in front of someone who doesn’t have prior experience of this device” is an acid test for design. The other replies frustrate me as much as Apple’s design direction, in that they “get it” even less than Apple. Bad design is not that I can’t figure out how to copy an image from mail. That’s annoying, that could be better, but you’re not even seein…

Will it help? These days, you either open the design as IBM famously did with their 5150 or earn enough to see yourself become Apple, the great hegemonist. (I'm clearly and biasedly on PC's side, so you may ignore my ranting)

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

#493

Post by shinkarom »

spike021 wrote: post #114
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…

To be fair, many people don't really know how to multitask on Windows or Mac OS (alt-tab, cmd-tab, etc.) either. It's not like the buttons have icons or anything on-screen to emphasize the key combo can be used to multitask. Not trying to defend Apple, but really just that interfaces in general haven't always been perfect and still have issues, not just one (mobile) platform.

I was lucky to have a book which introduced Windows 95 and 98 before I got my own computer in 2005. It never occurred to me that a total newb might not guess about alt+tab.

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

#494

Post by shinkarom »

FpUser wrote: post #246
PascLeRasc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day..." Those designer might actually be very good one's but they might have different goals. Their design might be all about eye pleasing hoping that mos potential customers will glance at it, like it and buy it. Ergonomics might not be their concern at all. There are other UX designers though, making GUI for pilots, nuclear station operators etc. etc. Th…

If you read The Design of Everyday Things, you'd gladly remember that to each user-unfriendly design, the author sarcastically added "but it won a lot of design awards". Which implied that the givers of those awards had one-track mind. And since the book's author co-wrote the article that we discuss, aesthetics at the cost of usability is a major sin for him.

On the other hand, since (insert obligatory joke about $1000 monitor stands), losing customers is no longer their worry.

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

#495

Post by JdeBP »

nineparts wrote: post #356
bbarn wrote: post #268

There's one key difference in modern, big company software, vs. the software of yesteryear, in my opinion - 20 years ago, most software was written by people who would use the software. Today, software is written and designed by people completely disconnected from the user, or, in the case of things like apple, people whose status as a designer matters more (legitimately) than what they design.

This is the case with most of open source software. Three notable cases: 1. GIMP, which is unusable to such a degree that somebody actually decided to make a version with a decent interface, called GIMPshop... what happened to GIMPshop you can only guess [1]. 2. LibreOffice which is much much worse interface-wise than Apache OpenOffice, although hyper-aggressively promoted. That being said, neither of them are even r…

You have asserted that systemd is "written and designed by people completely disconnected from the user". This is not true at all. The systemd people most definitely use systemd. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of any system or service management toolset where its authors were not also some of its users.

Moreover, the headlined article is talking about graphical user interface design, something which is largely inapplicable to systemd, and to system/service management toolsets in general.

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

#496

Post by IAmGraydon »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #332
IAmGraydon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the question that was asked.

The question that was asked was obviously hyperbolic as the undo function doesn’t just delete half of what you typed.

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

#497

Post by anoncake »

fcarraldo wrote: post #226
anoncake wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's orthogonal.

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

#498

Post by robomartin »

DonHopkins wrote: post #482
robomartin wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hilarious! What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people! ...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right b…

The crashed car prank is epic! Sounds like something Bertram Gilfoyle would do to Dinesh Chugtai's Tesla. I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.

All of this definitely required everyone to have a sense of humor. It developed over years of working together. The participants could take it as well as they dished it out. It sure makes for a lot of great stories to remember.

Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.

At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!

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

#499

Post by naravara »

robomartin wrote: post #240
kalleboo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Couple of decades ago" could mean Classic MacOS, which is indeed mostly unusable without a mouse

I don't remember the OS version at the time. I do remember it was the PowerPC era.

If there were pinstripes and candy colored buttons it would have been OSX. If the windows were boxy and square it would have been one of the “classic” OSes.

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

#500

Post by gryfft »

JadeNB wrote: post #235
gryfft wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard What phone? Do you recommend it?

Sorry for missing this, but as other commenters noted, I'm using the Key2.

I can't recommend it for everyone, but since you're reading HN here's the hacker pros/cons:

Pros:

* Every physical alphabet key can be mapped to two app/action shortcuts (long press/short press)

* Good construction, satisfying to use

* Great battery life

* Great security and permissions management

* Unlocked version is more or less bloatware-free (bundled BlackBerry software is there but is either useful or easy to disable/ignore)

Cons:

* Due to hardening, not all apps are available (I do miss Ruboto)

* Due to hardening, root is not currently possible (I'd like to root my device but I appreciate the security of BB-hardened Android)

* Camera isn't up to iPhone standards (I don't care as much about this and find it kinda nifty that the camera app allows fine control over shutter speed, etc even though I rarely take photos)

* Some of the BlackBerry-specific features are pretty poorly documented (there's a hover gesture that's only available while the phone is charging which shows the charge level as a line extending around the edge of the screen. It's difficult to Google and not very useful, but I got it disabled.)

All in all, I'm happier with it than I've been with a phone in a long time. It's got two SIM slots if you care about that kind of thing. It hits a particular sweet spot for me. Ymmv.

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