An ironic piece where I had to wade through a preview ad and three poorly placed overlay ads to even this article.
How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
31–40 of 149 posts
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#32"Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist."
OMG have you guys tried to navigate the Apple Music iOS app?? You wouldn't think they could make it harder to use than iTunes... but they did! Almost impossible to find features, and when you finally do figure something out, it's hard to remember by the next time you run the app.
The bloated number of swipe gestures on iOS is ridiculous too... I am always cursing after swiping in some direction by mistake.
(I am generally a big apple fan...)
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#33As a side effect, result from all the tiny 'improvements' since Snow Leopard, I have moved everything from stock apps and services. Ecosystem is simply not something I would rely on. Mutt/offlineimap for mail. Baïkal (on my own server) for contacts and calendar. My photos are outside of Photos. My music is outside of iTunes. As a final result of the process, my iCloud account has all the checkboxes unchecked. I would not strive to be OS agnostic if Apple didn't bend over backwards to tie me in into their services.
So yeah I agree with other comments, half of the hidden gestures are there to tie us in. Bad move.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#34> Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. Case in point: calendar. I simply cannot tell where one month ends and another begins in the flat UI. Sure, the skeuomorphic version looked corny, but it was a lot easier to use.
and iTunes went from a fully featured media library that focused on managing the media on your hard drive. iTunes STILL manages the media on your hard drive, but it's nearly impossible to manage the files through the stripped-down iTunes interface. iTunes used to be a power-app, now I can hardly use it.
Did they strip it down? I haven't opened it for the past several OS releases. It always annoyed me that they added so many conceptually different applications to an audio player.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of Undo, one of google's common features across several of it's products is the use of undo instead of confirmation, I absolutely LOVE this. If I archive an email in gmail (app or browser) it doesnt't ask me if I am sure I want to do that, but it does give me the option to immediately undo that action. This little feature is so wonderful when you think about it. It allows you to complete an intended action i…
Apple does this too. Except they hide the undo command behind a completely insane "shake the device" gesture, and half the time it fails to retrieve the email.
And what's worse, it's easy to accidentally do and it pops up a modal dialog.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#36Agree with much of the article. I personally find Apple iOS devices completely unusable because I have to constantly try to guess what kind of action or gesture will achieve what I want to do rather than being obvious. The same for several apps which appear to have become successful first on iOS before being ported to Android. I find remembering these gestures and actions an unnecessary cognitive load.
If you put an iPhone in any 5-year olds hand they seem to have no trouble figuring it out.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#37Positioning of buttons on iOS is a big problem.
For instance, when on a phone call and you show the numeric keypad, there is no sane reason to make the "Hide" function a microscopic text label that is a finger-width away from the HANG-UP action. Functionally, these actions should be on opposite sides of the display from each other. I don't even think they placed it there for aesthetic reasons, since the Hide "button" just looks like an ugly hack.
Then there's positioning of keyboard keys. If I had a nickel for every time I deleted a character while trying to finish a word with "m", or every time I accidentally committed an action with incomplete text because of that stupid blue key! Instead of moving dangerous actions to the opposite end of the screen where they belong, too much effort was spent trying to emulate the precise layout of a real keyboard. I don't think users would complain at all if the "action" key was instead in the top-right corner, and if "backspace" was in the top-left corner.
The scrolling calendar widget is also a nasty example of poor positioning. Long after it was "improved" in iOS 7, I still can't create a single calendar event without doing the accidental-screw-up-date-instead-of-scroll action, usually with "helpful" automatic "corrections" for my change such as synchronizing the From and To times to both reflect my accidental date-change. Or if I'm really lucky, I don't even notice that I changed the time.
They need to step back and realize that design is how it works. Their interfaces are incredibly error-prone right now.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why, for me, the iPod ('classic') remains one of the greatest products Apple created. They managed to get so much of it right, almost uniquely. Hardware and software working very well together. Of course, it had a very specific function, which makes the task much easier, but I just wish they could follow it up with something remotely approaching as nice an experience.
I've been wanting to replace my iPod Nanos for a few years now (they're 10 years old already, and the batteries are starting to go), but everything nowadays is touch-screen, and so completely unusable for me. Why? With that tactile single click-wheel, it was very easy for me to put the iPod in my pocket and not look at it for the entire flight, even when I wanted to skip the next song or replay or pause.
I know! Similarly, what I've been pining for are smart watches with several tactile buttons that can be used as input for apps. I've been waiting on programmable generic buttons for AGES. Having a display would be icing on the cake.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#39I've long found it strange that the same company that didn't want a second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus now hide so much functionality behind gestures with a varying amount of fingers. This started while Jobs where still at Apple, so it can't be blamed entirely on his successors.
I remember discovering the iOS calculator has a lot more features when you rotate the device into landscape orientation: http://osxdaily.com/2011/12/29/iphone-scientific-calculator/ I haven't tried recent iOS versions so I don't know if it's changed. According to the comments there, everyone and their dog knew this from birth, but I think it should count as "hidden" functionality, and rotating to landscape is kind of like right-clicking.
Re: How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what gestures and what metaphors you are talking about. Touch something on the screen is not a metaphor it's the closest to what you would do in real life. This is why kids and people less experienced with computers have such an easy time picking them up and start using them.
Sure, touching is the easy part, but there are now quite a few gestures available: * Four finger swipes on the iPad to go to the task manager or switch between apps. * Swipe from the left to go back in a navigation controller. * Swipe from the top to activate the notification center. * Swipe from the bottom to activate the control center. * Swipe list elements right or left (but not from the edge) to delete or perfor…
I think you picked poor examples. All the ones you listed are power user accelerators for actions you can do in other ways that are slower but more straightforward.
Except this one:
> Swipe notifications from the left to perform the default action for that notification.
But this one has a “slide to open” text explainig what to do right below it.