Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works the same in Mac OS and Windows since time immortal as well.
since time immemorial
Thanks, I've probably made that mistake before, heh
Confusing UI in iOS7
91–100 of 192 posts
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#92The lack of affordance in iOS7 is a real usability killer. People argue that the lack of button borders and inconsistency invites exploration. That's the kind of BS argument bad designers make when their designs test poorly. iOS7 is great in many ways, but is harder to use than ever before. Ugg.
What about when people back in the day argued that links on the web were difficult to use because they were just underlined text instead of buttons? Lots of link styles today have no text decoration but are rather just a different color, and are as easy as ever to use.
Web browsers let you hover over a link to query if it's clickable before clicking it.
Also in this case the problem is if a site has some text that's blue & clickable, and some text that's blue & not clickable. That's more or less what iOS 7 is doing. Colored text doesn't mean it performs an action. It might, it might not. Similarly, black text might be clickable, it might not. It might have a border, it might not. And these are all mixed together in the same app, or even a single screen such as the case of the alarm that the article is talking about.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#93Nice post. The one that REALLY annoys me is reminders. If I want to add a reminder, I would assume subconsciously I have to press the add symbol. But that adds a new list. To add a new item you have to tap an empty white box with no visual cue . Brilliant.
Yep. Discovered this one today. Completely ridiculous. If anyone wants evidence that iOS 7 was rushed, all they need to do is see things like that (and the parent post). All this is fixable though, rather than something endemic in the design of iOS 7, so I'm hopeful it'll get fixed soon enough.
We know it was rushed, and we know why. Scott Forstall (the architect of iOS 1-6) was fired, and Jonathan Ive promoted to VP of Design, on 29th October 2012, 11 months ago. 11 months -- really 7 months, as it had to be mostly done in time for the WWDC demo -- is an astonishingly short length of time to do a ground-up UX redesign of an OS. The only way it's possible is to parallelise the design process to some extent, which makes consistency issues inevitable.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#94Finally a post that doesn't just say "iOS7 BAD". Pretty well motivated, and I can agree with it in part. The inconsistencies it shows with the red button are confusing indeed (I just tried it on my iPad, the button in the stopwatch will change state when you begin touching, the one in the timer changes state when you lift your button, which is confusing because it doesn't work as expected). The one thing I don't agre…
> You just need to put a small amount of thought in using it. Isn't "Don't make me think" widely accepted as a design mantra to aspire to?
Yes but there are limits in the way. Not saying Apple has reached the limit, but it's not as easy as one might think to reach that point.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#95I'm actually surprised that there's so little visual consistency there... this stuff usually would be handled by reusable widgets - which, of course, gives you consistency for free. Still, people bag on Apple's design problems because Apple's stuff often feels almost perfect. I tried out a BB Q10 the other day and I couldn't even figure out how the heck you get to the home screen. I got stuck in the voice-search app…
To speak to your point about the Q10, the lack of affordances for moving between apps was a deliberate design choice. It creates a small learning curve when you first get the device, which is supposed to be ramped up through a short tutorial after unboxing (I'll admit the effectiveness of this is problematic and there needs to be more effort spent here). The gesture for moving between apps is consistent everywhere so…
I get what they're going for, but doing a completely non-discoverable interface is ballsy to say the least.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#96The next Apple statement placating congress about jobs created can probably also include " With iOS 7, we have also created the largest number of design critics, UI designers and UX experts in history - Everybody is now an expert and we believe the world will be a better place for it. "
> Everybody is now an expert
Everybody is an expert in deciding what they don't like. It doesn't matter how much designer-speak bullshit you can spew, if the person using it doesn't like it or finds it too confusing, it failed.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#97This kind of post annoys me. It's driven by the fact that the author has some theories about UI design, and wants to share them with us. There's nothing wrong with that. But this post pretends to be like a real usability audit, which it is not.
> When I tap it, it turns red — but wait — it doesn’t give me the visual feedback. Did I break it?
> The alarm is shown as a red filled square, so when I tap it, it should perform a negative action, right?
These comments are disingenous. You didn't get confused by these things.
You, as a person who's analysing a UI, have an almost totally different mindset to someone who is just using the thing for real. You know this, so here, you're just play-acting. You're thinking, what might I get confused about if I was a normal user? That's a bad way to look for what's really wrong in a UI design.
Yes, when you present points like these, they sound reasonable, but that doesn't mean they're right. Perhaps the alternative (e.g. banning the use of red anywhere in the OS other than for a negative action) might be over-restrictive as a requirement, which could cause excessive complexity elsewhere in the UI and lead to a worse overall result. Or perhaps you're right, the colour–meaning thing should be 100% consistent above all other considerations. Either way, you don't know, and speculation about what might confuse a real user should not be presented as fact.
Theories just guide us in what to test.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#98I'm actually surprised that there's so little visual consistency there... this stuff usually would be handled by reusable widgets - which, of course, gives you consistency for free. Still, people bag on Apple's design problems because Apple's stuff often feels almost perfect. I tried out a BB Q10 the other day and I couldn't even figure out how the heck you get to the home screen. I got stuck in the voice-search app…
In my UX design classes, we would use the phrase "You can't polish a turd" to describe this situation.
If the stopwatch timer didn't record time properly, I'd see where you're coming from. UI polish isn't going to make fix an error in the timer. But here, all the core functionality works, the clocks show the right time, the stopwatch starts and stops. The main complaint here is about the colour of the buttons, which I agree could do with some polish.
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#99My biggest gripe with iOS 7 is how I can't predict that a UI element is tappable. With every new app (i.e. every app I already have that has been updated for iOS 7 and automatically upgraded by the iOS without me really knowing) I find myself having to tap various bits of UI stuff to figure things out. What's fascinating to me is seeing how my 2 year old does with it.
the UX designers behind the flat trend seem not realize that there is no mouseover in touch UI which is why you can get away with it in desktop UI.
flat design seems even more applicable for print design, i.e. completely non-interactive
Re: Confusing UI in iOS7
#100What I find worrisome is that these UI ideas are bleeding over into OSX. Take a look at the new Build Phases tab in Xcode. It used to be nice and clear, now it's just a see of white, and it's hard to visually see how different elements on that page relate to each other, especially on a large screen.
As I often say, life is about balance. Apple used to have way too much UI chrome. Now they have way too little. I hope they swing back a bit and find that balance soon. An I hope they stop sticking so many pure white backgrounds all over the place, it makes it hard on the eyes, at least for me.