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

Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#21

Post by CrazedGeek »

microtonal wrote: post #3
redial wrote: post #2

For better or worse, I think he is right. Non-uniformity has been the norm in Apple's apps for a while, Garageband, Aperture, every iTunes release, among others. I believe the majority of third party mac developers used to be pre OS X developers, and because of that they had and incredible amount of respect for the HIG, but now, the (problematic) apps in the Mac App Store are coming from iOS developers, who didn't gr…

Maybe. But if the HIG is not that important anymore, I think that should also imply that Apple should allow for other UI toolkits in its stores, such as Qt.

Do the Mac App Store guidelines actually disallow Qt apps?

If I'm reading this correctly ( http://pastie.org/1236378 ), the only major requirements are that apps don't screw around with the HIG too much, and they don't use "deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta)". Admittedly, the only Qt app I recall using on OS X is Last.fm, but that seemed to be mostly HIG-compliant (a couple things felt a tad out of place, but nothing major).

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#22

Post by zoul »

jckarter wrote: post #10

A big difference between iOS and OS X is that desktop applications have more than 20 years of UI research and convention behind them, while touch interfaces have less than half (maybe even less than a quarter) that. There's thus a lot more room for experimentation in touch interfaces since there isn't as large a body of best practices. Apps that try to go their own way UI-wise on OS X are more than likely going to en…

Good point. One of the main reasons against non-standard UI design is that there is a huge amount of behaviour attached to the standard UI and once you start implementing your own interface elements, you’ll almost never get everything right. Keyboard shortcuts, accessibility, system hooks for other apps, etc.

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#23

Post by alsomike »

trezor wrote: post #9

I must admit I'm not really surprised to see Gruber suddenly claim non-uniform application design is a good thing when everyone starts critizing Apple for 1. inconsistent UIs and 2. bad design. Also note how he completely focuses on the inconsistent UI-issue and completely ignores the part about bad design in the OSX App Store, probably hoping it will go by unnoticed. Really though. Isn't it always this way with Grub…

Apple is obviously following the innovations of web app design here. People use web apps with wildly different designs all the time, and yes, there are some usability issues with that, but when consumer OSes were first being developed some decades ago, HCI researchers assumed that everything had to look exactly the same between applications or users would freak out. The web never had a single HIG, so we found out that users are much more tolerant of differences, or at least they are now.

As web apps become more important, the notion of an OS HIG needs to evolve. Obviously an app needs internal consistency, but how consistent do two apps need to be between each other? An apt comparison is the world of typography: the rules for good text layout don't specify one font for every single book, we can handle the fact that different books use different fonts. But there are still rules for good typography, they're just more general than "All uppercase G's should look like this: G." This is the direction that HIGs would need to go, but whether this is a good thing is debatable. For whatever reason, I have a hundred or so books on my bookshelf and basically all of them have very good to excellent typography. Web sites and apps have nowhere near that level of consistent quality. Native apps are better, but now we're going to start to see more of the web's no-rules design norms applied there, which probably means a few really gorgeous apps and a whole lot of crap.

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#24

Post by chadk »

Consistency is still important, especially on the "truck" computers which are much more prone to damaging actions by novice users compared to iOS. Hell, messing with standard interface elements can even mess advanced users up. Opened up Logic or Sound space designer recently?

Maybe regular users _are_ getting more used to different looking widgets (eg. All the different kinds of custom buttons on websites) but I don't think the HIG should be binned just yet. It needs to be abstracted: specific UI concepts/patterns, rather than specific colors of dropdown menus etc. That said, universal, system level elements like window controls shouldn't be messed with IMO.

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#25

Post by tjogin »

trezor wrote: post #9

I must admit I'm not really surprised to see Gruber suddenly claim non-uniform application design is a good thing when everyone starts critizing Apple for 1. inconsistent UIs and 2. bad design. Also note how he completely focuses on the inconsistent UI-issue and completely ignores the part about bad design in the OSX App Store, probably hoping it will go by unnoticed. Really though. Isn't it always this way with Grub…

Apple has been straying from their own HIG for years and Gruber has been criticizing them for it every step of the way. You assume too much.

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#26

Post by sdfghrjtr »

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#27

Post by jasonkester »

That screenshot sums up my experience with Twitter nicely: A dozen random thoughts, truncated to fit a certain size, thus requiring investment to decipher, which at the end reveals somebody talking about something that's only really interesting to themselves, and actually makes you feel slightly embarrassed for them.

My assumption was that other people were using some form of magic tool that filtered out relevent stuff and presented it in a coherent form. Since this looks like a screenshot from the author's own system, it seems that even power-users are seeing the same useless garbage that I do.

Why would you install something like this on your computer?

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#28

Post by larsberg »

Well, all the OSX users should just Thank Steve that the XCode designer is no Visual Basic so at least you're limited to people with a significant amount of development savvy doing non-standard UI. Otherwise, you'd have the hodge-podge horror that's been visited upon Windows for the last decade and a half or so.

It'll get there, though, just wait! I'll chuckle when I see the first 200x200 OK/CANCEL buttons in AppStore screen shots :-)

Re: Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

#29

Post by tjogin »

demallien wrote: post #13
trezor wrote: post #9

I must admit I'm not really surprised to see Gruber suddenly claim non-uniform application design is a good thing when everyone starts critizing Apple for 1. inconsistent UIs and 2. bad design. Also note how he completely focuses on the inconsistent UI-issue and completely ignores the part about bad design in the OSX App Store, probably hoping it will go by unnoticed. Really though. Isn't it always this way with Grub…

Wait, you can't claim that Gruber is never critical of Apple. For example, he was one of the first and most persistent critics of the iPhone App Store's submission guidelines until they were amended by Apple. It's true that he rarely criticises Apple's design choices. But I don't think it's because of any sycophantic defence of Apple, but rather because his design aesthetic is very similar to that of the lead designe…

Here's a few links to Gruber criticizing the poor state of the HIG, and Apple's design decisions:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/hockenberry_hig

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal

http://daringfireball.net/2003/05/much_ado_about_click-throu...

http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective

http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/inconsistencies

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/themes

http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/more_smart_cut_copy_paste

http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/when_in_rome

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/does_brushed_metal_matter

That Gruber rarely criticizes Apple's design decisions is simply false. Apple's inconsistency in UI design and application of the HIG is a pet peeve of his, and it has been for many years.

Post reply on HN