The Decline of Usability (2020)
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The Decline of Usability (2020)
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Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#2The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey.
This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behind that hover animation you can't easily target it because the actual target area is not visible and active until after you have moved the mouse in the exact area. Most egregious is the Music app as well as notification actions.
Edit: Another issue is the lack of distinct draggable area in window titles, never understood why one pixel makes the window draggable, then the one below which looks identical is not.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#3The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey. This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behi…
Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff.
IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse.
What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#4I for one miss the 3-D buttons of the Windows 95 era. It was obvious what could be clicked and what could not.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#5Ok so where are the good examples, anyone doing anything of note to address this?
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#6The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey. This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behi…
Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff. IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse. What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.
Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on.
Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#7I for one miss the 3-D buttons of the Windows 95 era. It was obvious what could be clicked and what could not.
It was so good that Google incorporated this idea in Material Design
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#8I for one miss the 3-D buttons of the Windows 95 era. It was obvious what could be clicked and what could not.
Absolutely agree; I think the anti-skeuomorphic "clean" fashion of the last decade has been terrible for discoverability even in mobile apps, and it's somewhat ironic that the same design cues have gone back to WIMP devices, giving us interfaces designed to look like touch screen mobile apps even though the tech is different — and design cues matching a different technology in order to give a sense of familiarity is the actual definition of skeuomorphic.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#9All true. It goes even farther: hiding the file structure, and even the concept of files. Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are stored - they have no idea. Ask if they are in the cloud - no idea. Worse - just as with UIs - there is no consistency where different apps store their data. We also shouldn't forget the idiocy of hiding file-extensions.
To add insult to injury Windows lies to non-English speakers. In German, for example, it will tell you your home directory is in "Benutzer", but there actually is no such directory, there is only "Users". These attempts to hide complexity wind up creating confusion and more complexity.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff. IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse. What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.
Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on. Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
From just a UI point of view, my preference is MacOS 8 — and I don't mean Mountain Lion, I mean Classic.
The rest of the OS would be a nightmare today for so many reasons; but the UI was fantastic.