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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)

#141

Post by Wowfunhappy »

FpUser wrote: post #133

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it. Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that…

I mean, it's very possible to create visually appealing UIs that also have lots of contrast.

Apple used to do it...

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

#142

Post by FabHK »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
t34543 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today. Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.

I was gonna post about this as well. How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it? The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as ea…

> Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly?

I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.

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

#143

Post by mihaaly »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #42

You know what I hate? I hate the fact that every time I open an app (most of which I use relatively rarely), I get a bunch of popups trying to introduce me to a variety of features I never needed in the first place. That goes beyond iOS, but also websites including Slack. E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?". What…

Very true!! I stopped visiting certain websites because of those useless junk blocking nonsense and iOS is very close to follow, very very close.

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

#144

Post by dkersten »

FpUser wrote: post #133

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it. Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that…

> Maybe he is right but I'll stick to what I believe works.

He’s not. If I can’t use a product, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is.

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

#145

Post by emidoots »

FpUser wrote: post #133

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it. Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that…

I have had conversations with several "designers", some from FAANG, and all have held the general belief that having strong authority over how the UI looks and getting eye-candy at the cost of usability and ergonomics was 'without doubt the right choice'.

In my frank opinion, many designers hold a position of subjective judgement and thrive on the power that comes with that. This is like a developer making arbitrary decisions about a product because they like the technical implementation better.

Data, and actual user preference, should always be the key decider. Not some arbitrary rule-decider.

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

#146

Post by ljm »

code_duck wrote: post #95
heavenlyblue wrote: post #42

You know what I hate? I hate the fact that every time I open an app (most of which I use relatively rarely), I get a bunch of popups trying to introduce me to a variety of features I never needed in the first place. That goes beyond iOS, but also websites including Slack. E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?". What…

It's much like how the design of Facebook constantly changes without adding any sort of benefits. I think that they have large design teams who have nothing to do because the product is already perfectly adequate, so they invent work for themselves.

I think it keeps more than the designers in a job. Half of these changes come with some exaggerated prose from a marketing or design consultant, explaining how their new logo or colour scheme or layout really speaks to the fundamental nature of the universe and our place within it, and how suitable that is for a chat client or an analytics platform. Throw a custom font in there too for good measure.

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

#147

Post by Stratoscope »

jiofih wrote: post #140
FpUser wrote: post #133

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it. Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that…

> beauty trumps usability/ergonomics. That can not possibly come from a UI designer. Usability is always first, and it’s possible to make it look good while maintaining a11y/usability properties.

Oh, it could easily come from some of the UI designers I've worked with in the past who followed modern design fads, especially regarding text:

• Contrast is bad and hard on the eyes. The less contrast the better.

• Decorative fonts with font-weight: 300 are better than ordinary normal weight fonts designed for readability.

• It's better to have a small font with a lot of extra line-height instead of just making the font bigger.

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

#148

Post by Nextgrid »

FabHK wrote: post #142
Nextgrid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was gonna post about this as well. How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it? The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as ea…

> Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.

Tap and hold between words used to bring up a cursor and a magnifying glass above your finger so you could move it and know where you were. Plus moving it away from the currently visible line would start scrolling infinitely allowing you to navigate beyond what you see on the screen.

Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field and the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable.

The “space bar trick” on the other hand doesn’t scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.

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

#149

Post by saagarjha »

paggle wrote: post #122
ajmurmann wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once shook my phone because I was annoyed by autocorrect repeatedly messing up. The shaking undid more than half the text I had written. I couldn't find a way to redo.

I tried it and got an “Undo Typing” confirmation. Did you?

You get that and then accepting it deletes a large portion of the text.

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

#150

Post by saagarjha »

ecaradec wrote: post #115
spike021 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People can still multitask using mouse only. It’s ok to have a hidden fast interface if you have a discoverable slow interface.

Sure, and you can do the same on your iPad by going through the home screen.
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