Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Confusing UI in iOS7

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 192 posts

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#131

Post by gurkendoktor »

dandelany wrote: post #113
jmcatani wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my UX design classes, we would use the phrase "You can't polish a turd" to describe this situation.

This is exactly backwards - all of the iOS 7 complaints I've heard so far have been about the UI polish and not the underlying functionality. Polishing a turd would be a beautiful UI in front of a buggy, slow system. Apple didn't ship a polished turd, they shipped a rough, unhewn diamond.

But each major iOS version is slower than the one before, it's just that we got used to it (and loud people on the internet always use recent devices anyway). I think this blog post is a good example of something that is definitely a polished turd. A clean, beautiful UI for a resource hog:

http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/blog/2013/09/20/lifting-the-li...

And something else that we have accepted is that Apple's services are what they are. For example, iOS 7 has polished the Photos and Camera apps. But in the big picture, Apple's ecosystem for photos is still a complete mess. There is Photos.app with its own Camera Roll, iPhoto for iOS, Photostreams, Journals, Moments, iPhoto '09 with its own Events, and no sane way to keep everything in sync.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#132

Post by gurkendoktor »

MaysonL wrote: post #124

And yet, despite all the valid criticism of all the flaws in iOS 7, it's a massive improvement over iOS 6. And the user reactions show that.

How do they show it? We don't know how many % of the iOS user base uses Twitter or any observable channel to praise iOS 7 or complain about it.

Plus it's impossible to downgrade, so any iOS 7 user in a statistic might be an unhappy one; or the other way around, maybe I would love iOS 7 on my iPad 3rd gen, but I won't irreversibly upgrade for now.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#133

Post by rescripting »

MaysonL wrote: post #126
pseudometa wrote: post #25

The lack of affordance in iOS7 is a real usability killer. People argue that the lack of button borders and inconsistency invites exploration. That's the kind of BS argument bad designers make when their designs test poorly. iOS7 is great in many ways, but is harder to use than ever before. Ugg.

The lack of affordance in iOS7 is a real usability killer. Actually, it's a learnability problem: once you learn how to use its features, iOS 7 is a vast improvement over 6.

I actually do believe iOS7 a step back usability wise (at a component UX level, not in features). The reduction of visual affordances in controls makes it very hard to tell at a glance what is interactive, and often even where the touch areas of controls begin/end. This slows you down, and I find it takes me a few moments to orient myself on a new page.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#134

Post by shurcooL »

Nice article, I agree with most points.

Just one comment. Don't people know you can drag and drop alarms; you just have to tap and hold? Similar to rearranging apps on home screen.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#135

Post by cl3m »

iOS7 default apps are quite confusing. The calendar is way worst than before. Now you tap on a event from the month view and you don't see it in the day view if your current time is not close to the event time.. It feel rushed. I hope they fix it but it might not happen before next year. That good for third party app though.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#136

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

kllrnohj wrote: post #92
andrethegiant wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about when people back in the day argued that links on the web were difficult to use because they were just underlined text instead of buttons? Lots of link styles today have no text decoration but are rather just a different color, and are as easy as ever to use.

Web browsers let you hover over a link to query if it's clickable before clicking it. Also in this case the problem is if a site has some text that's blue & clickable, and some text that's blue & not clickable. That's more or less what iOS 7 is doing. Colored text doesn't mean it performs an action. It might, it might not. Similarly, black text might be clickable, it might not. It might have a border, it might not. A…

Mousing over ever piece of text in a document to see if it's clickable isn't a great user experience. If you've ever tried using a site whose link style is 'non-underlined, blackish blue', you'll understand the problem, particularly if you suffer from colour blindness. The Guardian is a prime example of poor-usability when it comes to text links.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#137

Post by opnitro »

rescripting wrote: post #133
MaysonL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of affordance in iOS7 is a real usability killer. Actually, it's a learnability problem: once you learn how to use its features, iOS 7 is a vast improvement over 6.

I actually do believe iOS7 a step back usability wise (at a component UX level, not in features). The reduction of visual affordances in controls makes it very hard to tell at a glance what is interactive, and often even where the touch areas of controls begin/end. This slows you down, and I find it takes me a few moments to orient myself on a new page.

Ok, maybe you can explain this to me then. Before iOS7 came out there were a bunch of people saying that Apple had to stop holding users hands as much.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#138

Post by VMG »

modfodder wrote: post #109
jmcatani wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my UX design classes, we would use the phrase "You can't polish a turd" to describe this situation.

Jerry Lewis "You can't polish a turd." Stanley Kubrick "You can if you freeze it." http://everything2.com/title/Kubrick+polishes+a+turd

Mythbusters even did without freezing it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI&noredirect=1

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#139

Post by aw3c2 »

robterrell wrote: post #80

My biggest gripe with iOS 7 is how I can't predict that a UI element is tappable. With every new app (i.e. every app I already have that has been updated for iOS 7 and automatically upgraded by the iOS without me really knowing) I find myself having to tap various bits of UI stuff to figure things out. What's fascinating to me is seeing how my 2 year old does with it.

It's even better when those taps lead to actions. I permanently deleted some messages because of a non-descript icon (on Android's confusing modern look).

The worst thing about all this icon frenzy to me is that they often even take up more space than text that could descripe their function.

Re: Confusing UI in iOS7

#140

Post by dpkendal »

devx wrote: post #49

Gone are the days when Apple used to make "perfect" user experiences. These days Apple seems care more about "modern aestethics" that look "beautiful" than actually good design , as it used to when Steve Jobs was alive. I expect the Mac OS X interface to become worse with time, too.

Funny, that's exactly what people used to say when OS X came out, right after Steve Jobs came back …
Post reply on HN