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

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

jnd.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 509 posts

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

#291

Post by dmitriid »

WillYouFinish wrote: post #120
dmitriid wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think iOS is a shit show, I give you App Store on MacOS [1][2] :) If there was a competition on how many guidelines you can break in a single app, this would take all the prizes home. The addition of Apple Arcade only increased the amount of WTFs. [1] There are Apple HIG, and then there is MacOS App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P [2] Here's a quick and easy way to see which apps are currently bein…

That was fun to look at, but I see you also have an issue with UI/UX on your website: you cannot easily reach the footer when scrolling down because of that infinity scroll.

It's a joke by the creator of the website :)

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

#292

Post by bambataa »

t-writescode wrote: post #70
threeseed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes no sense. Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes. It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.

I’m sorry, what? Their phone UI used to have a button you could tap on the bottom. That button powered many things and now it is gone. Now ‘take screenshot’ and ‘turn off screen’ are nearly ergonomically indistinguishable. Now ‘shut down’ is somewhere random. Seeking through text has changed, too. It used to provide a bit of a zoomed in view when you slid your finger across the text, so you could see where your curso…

Thank you so much for the space bar trick. I have been cursing the broken text seeking. How on Earth am I supposed to have known the space bar now seeks? I actually like idea but I went months without knowing that.

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

#293

Post by toast0 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #2

Is anyone trying to back this up with a proper scientific study of whether users find it easier or harder to use? Seems just like opinion and debates about aesthetics otherwise? If I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.

As far as I know, the last time anybody used science to help make a good UI was for Windows 95. If you can find "The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering" you can see they were thorough. I would love to be wrong, but I don't think anything like this was posted for any more recent Windows, or Mac OS X or any of the many mobile operating systems.

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

#294

Post by zentiggr »

fcarraldo wrote: post #226
anoncake wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better solutions for that such as an ordinary notification.

Personally, I don't want apps that I'm not using to send a disruptive notification that there's something new in the app. I'd prefer that the app let me know the next time I launch it, as being described by OP.

A notification sounds like less interruption than a full screen modal "Click here!" that will fire the feature to demonstrate it. Absolutely hate those dialogs.

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

#295

Post by adthomsen »

remarkEon wrote: post #271
CydeWeys wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the mouse to switch to a given program in the take bar isn't necessarily slow. It's actually faster if you have a decent number if windows open; clicking on exactly the right one straight away is faster than repeatedly pressing Alt-Tab and seeing if the new window brought to the foreground was the right one.

Im sure you know this but in Windows 10 if you hold down Alt after hitting Tab the first time it’ll display which windows you already have open, and hitting just Tab again will cycle though them. You can even hold down Shift as well to cycle through the list of icons but in reverse.

After the first Alt-Tab you can also use the arrow keys to navigate to the window you need.

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

#296

Post by remarkEon »

TechieKid wrote: post #289
remarkEon wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sure you know this but in Windows 10 if you hold down Alt after hitting Tab the first time it’ll display which windows you already have open, and hitting just Tab again will cycle though them. You can even hold down Shift as well to cycle through the list of icons but in reverse.

I'm sure you know this, but, I think at least since Windows 7, while having the Alt+Tab "popup" open, you can use the arrow keys while holding Alt down to directly navigate to the window you want to open. Very useful if, like me, you have 20 windows of browser tabs open, and the application you want is in the middle of the list.

Yes - and you can also mouse over them and click now too. All three of these interactions are, imo, very intuitive and easy to do.

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

#297

Post by bluegreyred »

lostgame wrote: post #258

The massive amounts of white empty space in iOS 7+ makes me long for the skeuomorphic days. The dark theme helped, but should have been an option since day one. Pre iOS 13, the sheer amounts of white space drove me nuts. And why did they remove visible UIButtons? I miss the real days of iOS.

Apple's hardware recently improved by reverting some changes done over the last few years. Many attribute this to the departure of a certain designer that was also in charge of iOS 7, so I feel like there’s hope.

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

#298

Post by abandonliberty »

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…

I think this is related to the other issue that functionality changes are often not readily visible; everything needs an explanation.

At the other end of the spectrum several times I thought Google maps had removed a feature, only to find they had hidden it somewhere else.

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

#299

Post by hellomyguys »

Razengan wrote: post #287

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and lea…

As someone who does product design for a living and has used an iPad for almost 10 years now, I still get so confused with the Slide Over multitasking. There's no discoverability at all for this. You have to read the manual and memorize the gestures. Absolutely mind-blowing that they've made something this confusing.

I know when people say "it's like they don't even use their products" it is usually hyperbolic, but I don't know how they can explain the seemingly random continual prompting of Apple/iCloud login on OS X I see a few times a year.

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

#300

Post by Nextgrid »

sjy wrote: post #210
wwweston wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing this on my SE. Only thing that makes me remotely interested in newer models is the improved camera abilities. Not sure it’s worth it to give up the form factor and affordances. Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.

I’d take the complaints about iOS 13 text editing with a grain of salt. I’m on board with most of the criticisms of iOS 13, including that the new text editing functionality is hard to discover, but now that I am familiar with it I would not want to go back to the old UI.

Just curious, which parts of the new UI do you prefer compared to the old one? To me it seems like a huge loss in functionality (loss of the "long press + magnifying glass" method) with subpar alternatives being offered ("picking up" and moving the cursor without seeing what's under your finger, hold space bar to get a rudimentary touchpad, etc).
Post reply on HN