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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)

#431

Post by cycloptic »

nineparts wrote: post #356
bbarn wrote: post #268

There's one key difference in modern, big company software, vs. the software of yesteryear, in my opinion - 20 years ago, most software was written by people who would use the software. Today, software is written and designed by people completely disconnected from the user, or, in the case of things like apple, people whose status as a designer matters more (legitimately) than what they design.

This is the case with most of open source software. Three notable cases: 1. GIMP, which is unusable to such a degree that somebody actually decided to make a version with a decent interface, called GIMPshop... what happened to GIMPshop you can only guess [1]. 2. LibreOffice which is much much worse interface-wise than Apache OpenOffice, although hyper-aggressively promoted. That being said, neither of them are even r…

I actually think the real problem with those is the exact opposite. Those projects were initially hacked together for their own specific workflow, and are now going through the "growing pains" of becoming popular and somewhat ubiquitous.

On GIMP: There have been various forks throughout the years led by various groups of artists, but they have typically been very hacky. Currently the Glimpse fork is planning to do a redesign of the UI.

On Libreoffice: This is the result of the split from Oracle -- the project is now driven by consultants and ISVs. It works if you're willing to pay one of those or become one yourself. If you pay $0 and expect to get a perfect clone of MS Office then you will be disappointed.

On systemd: The design seems to be heavily inspired by the "giant ball of C" design that is already used by the Linux kernel. I would argue that GNU/Linux in general is too decentralized to have an overarching philosophy.

From my perspective as someone who does UI on open source projects, ultimately a lot of the high-level problems come down to lack of resources. It's hard to find good designers who are willing to contribute to open source, and it's expensive to put together a focus group to gather feedback. The typical corporate methods of gathering telemetry and doing A/B testing are not really useful to any of those projects you mentioned.

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

#432

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#433

Post by Razengan »

dahfizz wrote: post #256
Zarath wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying you took the pedals out of a car and people couldn't drive, it's to be expected unless they are driving a Flintstone's car.

You've missed the point. For Macs, the mouse is the pedals of the car because you absolutely need the mouse yo do basic things. On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do

> On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do

On your Linux setup, could you do just fine without a mouse AND without a keyboard?

Why is it OK for the keyboard to be an essential required device but a mouse should be optional?

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

#434

Post by nojvek »

Agreed. As Apple’s made more money, they have this pressure of growing at any cost. Some of the recent decisions of pop ups in your face and a whole of magic hidden gestures really make it seem they aren’t doing their due diligence like they used to.

I have as much respect for iOS/OSX as I did for pre-we-track-everything-Windows. It’s just clunky and shit gets complicated and slower on every version

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

#435

Post by dangus »

wang_li wrote: post #276
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand that mobile OSes need to change somewhat generation to generation as we’re still scratching around to figure out what works and what doesn’t. ...do we though? The iPhone came out more than a decade ago now, and I feel like we got it pretty darn figured out around 2015 or so. Newer versions of iOS have brought some improvements, but also a lot of miss-steps, and performance decreases on older devices (t…

The current versions of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 having obvious and frequently encountered rendering bugs in safari. If they let this out to users your expectation that they’ll allow the user experience to interfere with their awesomeness is surely going to be unfulfilled. Not to mention those stupid flashlight and camera buttons on the iPhone lock screen whose only explanation is some manager somewhere wanted to make th…

I agree with everything you said until you dissed the flashlight and camera buttons.

I use those all the time, via muscle memory. Getting to the camera and flashlight ASAP is critical.

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

#436

Post by Razengan »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #409
Razengan wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core problem is that every manmade tool eventually has to choose 2 of the 3: • Be intuitive for new users • Have features for power users • Sane number of customization options Like the dock labels issue. I personally don't need or want labels in the Dock. But there should be an option to enable dock labels for people who are not familiar with all the icons. In fact I would like to hide the labels for ALL…

Two separate points: 1. You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them. 2. For a long time, Apple's way around the problem was to have different platforms for different markets. The iPad was a simple computing platform for very casual users, and the Mac was the more capable option for m…

The Terminal/NSUserDefaults system is useless for navigation and discoverability of optional settings.

How would I see all the options available for an app? We're back to googling and peer support.

> For some reason, Apple has now decided that their simple platform needs to be as capable as the more advanced platform.

Because they were getting crap for it.

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

#437

Post by ItsMattyG »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #288
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…

Oh, you want to updates your apps? That's easy. Open up the App Store and then click on your profile picture. Wait, what?

Google and Netflix are horrible for this.

Want to switch which user account you're using? No problem, simply find the picture of the current user account that you definitely don't want to use, and click on it.

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

#438

Post by dangus »

There's a point where a device's insane amount of computational capability has to be balanced with usability given its available inputs.

I definitely agree with the general idea of the article, but, on the other hand, a typical non-technical user doesn't have to know every little nuance of the system to use it effectively.

The original iPhone didn't do 10% of what smartphones are capable of now. It couldn't install apps. It couldn't copy and paste. A massive amount of functionality has been added since 2007.

In the end we are limited to a small screen that can fit in our pockets. Adding buttons to the phone really isn't an option. Adding a plethora of menus and buttons to the screen UI to make everything infinitely discoverable isn't really an option, either: again, you're working with a relatively small screen here.

Since the article was written some improvements have been made. I find that the new pop-up long-press menus you can find around iOS 13, like on the home screen icons, are an improvement. Removing 3D Touch is an improvement.

Things like the three-finger copy, cut, and paste gestures sound completely ridiculous, but they aren't for non-technical users. They are for power users who will absolutely remember those gestures. macOS is praised for its extremely smooth, useful trackpad gestures but it isn't like my parents are using any of them.

I see a lot of comments complaining about things like the multitasking gestures in iPadOS, the app switching gestures on iPhone X and above, or those aforementioned undo/copy/cut/paste gestures, but on a smartphone or tablet, very few people actually end up needing them. Remember, there are still copy/cut/paste context menus when you select text.

Not only that, when you look at the competition, I don't think Android has a standardized Undo function at all? I could be wrong about that. If you Google that sort of thing you are met with a good amount of confusion, or suggestions to install add-on apps.

Is Alt-Tab (Command-Tab) discoverable? How about Command-`? Or any keyboard shortcuts that power users insist on during their daily lives? No, they're not discoverable outside of a manual or keyboard shortcut screen. But we wouldn't live without them. And the fact that non-technical users may never learn those shortcuts doesn't make the rest of the system unusable or unintuitive.

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

#439

Post by tzs »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #288
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…

Oh, you want to updates your apps? That's easy. Open up the App Store and then click on your profile picture. Wait, what?

If N updates are available, they put a red badge with an N in it on top of the profile picture, the App Store icon, and if you have moved the App Store icon to a folder on top of that folder.

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

#440

Post by scarface74 »

criddell wrote: post #413
scarface74 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the Mac needs a few things. - a low power mode - a restricted data mode - a modern scripting interface , basically port Workflows to the Mac

A low power mode feels like resource consumption improvements and a restricted data mode feels like a security improvement. Workflows doesn't need OS support beyond the current regular API, does it? On iOS at least, it was entirely a userspace program.

A low power mode would mostly be useful for laptops. When you turn it on you it would do things like disable power boost, basically starve background processes of cpu time, etc.

Restricted data mode would let you disable processes from accessing a network when on a metered or slow connection and inform other applications to be careful when they are using a network that you flagged as metered.

Workflow was initially a third party app and somewhat limited in its automation capability because of iOS restrictions. When Apple bought it, it integrated it more tightly with iOS and can now do things that third party apps can’t.

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