141–150 of 306 posts
What I am curious about is that isn't there a team or group in Apple with a keen eye for UX that are independent of the designing teams, sort of dogfood these changes over a period and have the authority to initiate corrections/fixes? Sort of like UX QA but with actual powers?
We have 'instinctive visual cues' for depth and light coming from above, hence why button gradients are so immediately effective,because our visual system recognizes it in milliseconds. we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing , that's why we are confused about underwater distances . That's why magnifying glasses make us dizzy. I just can't believe this is coming from apple.
Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI.
It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI.
It will make implementation way more complex than it is already and worse it will set off an avalanche of badly done imitations creating a mess throughout all touchpoints across companies taking years to clean up again - just as I thought that UI design finally reached an acceptable level of maturity.
Sad, really sad for a company like Apple to throw out precision, clarity and contrast for “effect”.
Sad.
Being a sceptic about the latter at first I must say, I wish the technology would finally allow having a "normal" pair of glasses with high resolution, no cable attached, AR overlay screens.
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Is that the real reason? I had always heard that a round hole prevents the cover from being able to fall back in the hole
From the perspective of "design the manhole cover first", the reason is that manhole covers aren't just round — they're (very subtle) domes. A dome is: 1. the best shape for taking stress from very heavy trucks putting all their weight on them without the manhole itself gradually bowing, and 2. is best at transferring that stress equally into the manhole wall (cast concrete cylinder) itself. (A square manhole + manho…
In the UK manhole covers are generally square.
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How is this wrong? Our visual system is optimized, rather extremely, for understanding 3d scenes under the simple perspective model that our eyes are based on: x' = (x * f) / z Outside of that 99.999% experience norm, that are brains are so used to, is disconnect and discomfort. If you've ever put on a new pair of glasses, with a different prescription, you'll understand exactly what he's talking about: depth offset…
the fact that it's surprising does not make it a visual cue. A cue to what? I am not aware of any psychophysics study that says we have perception of droplets or lens transformations (in contrast to shadows , gradients etc that are well studied). There also doesn't seem to be an evolutionary reason for it because the natural world does not have lenses and glass. And UIs are usually based on intuitive features.
Also, of course we have perception of droplets. What we don’t have is an intuitive understanding of how light interacts with droplets.
I suspect that Apple are trying to leverage this lack of intuition to make their ui interesting to look at in an evergreen way. New backgrounds mean new interesting interactions. I’m not confident that they’ve succeeded or that that’s actually a good goal to have though. I have it on my iPhone 13 and personally I find it annoying to parse, and I feel relief when I go back to traditional apps untouched by the update like Google Maps
They often get slapped on top willy-nilly, and wind up blocking something below - either from view, or from interaction with another tool.
While I recognize Apple's approach here tries to mitigate that complaint... I still appreciate when designers craft a distinct space for my buttons/menus/controls to live, treat those non-content pixels as precious screen real estate, keep them tight, and make clever use of layout within it across different tasks.
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Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006. One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure. So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.
Especially at Apple where it’s very well known that ultimate decision making is centralised around very few, very senior people.
Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions. Look at Jonny Ive's last design mistakes at Apple compared to the early successes that were perfection from all aspects.
Most people can't pull success after success forever, they always bottom out at some point then decline, some sooner than others, especially in a fast changing field like tech. So it's a high chance those senior higher ups at Apple are now dated and out of touch, but still have the high egos and influence from the bygone era. Happens at virtually 100% of the companies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn...