Apple's Products Are Getting Harder to Use
jnd.org
jnd.org
Probably the most compelling advancement of iOS is that it has a "home" state. No matter how far you go or how lost you get, you can always press one physical button to get back to a familiar starting point. I didn't realize how big that would be, and how much it would do to make users feel grounded and encourage exploration. For all types of users, I think that's a great advancement.
As for the gestures, there really are some confusing advanced ones, and I'd bet they have very little real-world traction. Happily, tap, swipe, and pinch are pretty much the only ones you need, and most users can pick those up in the first few minutes.
My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations?
(I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally, be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still used in other parts of the UI.)
There were so many things that were hidden behind what I would call "right-click in the middle of nowhere" and had no other way to access them (I assume that's supposed to be equivalent to the long press in a touch UI) that I never figured out until I gave up and went to youtube to figure out how the hell things work. Apparently you were intended to just go around right clicking on anything until something happened? I don't necessarily mind that they changed the UI, but I shouldn't have to go wade through a morass of bloated youtube videos just to figure out how to do anything. Even the Microsoft website never had instructions. And of course using builtin search (which used to be great on Windows) never explained shit about the modern UI.
Case point, multiple Apple TVs on the same network, quite often broken. iTunes WiFi sync often breaks without a plug in and fiddle session, I guess they really want you to use iCloud.
App crashes on iOS are quite significant now where they used to be very rare imo.
Wifi is back to its old happy self with the last few patches and seems more stable, Yosemite early days it was a bear I will give you that.
What I have found is that some things just don't play nice with the OS. Openvpn is kind of a bear and I'm not sure what the underlying cause is, but its easy to kill and restart so not a major issue there.
I do regular heath checks and cleanup though. EtreCheck is a great way to get a look at all the cruft in your system and make some calls on what to clean out/up!
I find it astonishing how bad AirDrop is. I am typing this on a brand new MacBook Pro, and I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6. I tried, multiple times, it simply doesn't work. Googling the issues tells me I'm not alone.
Not a huge issue, but there was a time when this would have been unthinkable. Also, iTunes. Just give it the bullet. Please. Oh, and Finder - kill it with fire will ya? Windows Explorer is still better, which is embarrassing.
I think the main issue is that Apple wants to abstract the idea of files and a filesystem away... at least on iOS devices.
While Apple does not say it in as many words, here is a quote straight from the horse's mouth:
> The iOS file system is geared toward apps running on their own. To keep the system simple, users of iOS devices do not have direct access to the file system and apps are expected to follow this convention.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileMa...
I don't think this is a new thing. The Finder is terrible, and has been for a long time. iPhoto hasn't been great for me either, nor iTunes.
But if I look at how most of the less-geeky users (and I suppose the majority of Apple users) around me use their macs, I kind of get it. They don't use iPhoto, iTunes and Finder the way I do, so they don't generally have issues or miss features that I do miss.
For the most part I can live with this situation, because the upside is that Apple's focus (and resulting neglect of other things) can lead to really great things. I love iOS and even though I have and would happily use an Android device, I am still willing to pay a premium for an Apple device. A lot of the most common use-cases, for me at least, are still superior within the Apple ecosystem. I'm enough of a 'common user' most of the time to accept the horrible experience whenever I step out of this role.
For now, Apple feels a bit like those (new?) companies/startups that send you packages of ingredients with recipes once a week so you can cook a few quite good (but relatively pricy) meals throughout the week with little fuss. The experience is good, the result is healthy and fresh even though it feels a bit... extravagant/excessive sometimes. But for people like me who don't want prepackaged meals, but who also don't like cooking from scratch all the time (especially not just for myself), it's a good solution.
The problem Apple is facing right now is that for whatever reason too much of the stuff they do focus on, and too much of their essential functionality, has been slipping, and if the continue on this track, they'll turn into McDonalds. And I don't go to McDonalds, because it's both unhealthy and strangely expensive. I'd just go back to cooking from scratch.
In Windows, you can modify the path, eg, change from C:\Users\Scott\Desktop to C:\Users\Fred\Desktop easily just by selecting and typing.
In OSX, the Go To Folder dialogue remembers the last path you entered. So yet another step to drag the current Finder's folder icon into it, and then modify. For example.
Are there any other "generic text-areas" that actually support that? Discoverability again... :)
I blame UXers.
I'm tempted to agree, but I'm not sure whether this is entirely Apple's fault (some of it is, certainly), or whether this is partly the fault of developers (or maybe shifting the blame back to Apple, Apple's fault for not imposing even stricter interface guidelines). Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Is this what Norman is talking about? It's not clear because he avoids giving specific case studies, which isn't his style (DOET is a veritable plethora of strong examples to illustrate his points), making me think he's saving them for his later critique.
Norman mentions research that users can't remember more than a small number of icons, and I'd like to know what research in particular he's referencing, but coming from a cultural anthro background and with some very superficial knowledge of semiotics, that seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete; maybe he's talking about people learning icons in a very constrained timeframe? People learn to identify countless icons throughout their lives and (within a given culture) you can reliably show people hundreds of iconic symbols and images that they would recognize immediately.
I agree with the general argument that Apple (and others) are overloading us with iconography that we need to internalize (iOS emoji in particular seems like too much too quickly, but maybe that's just me), but I think the answer to this is that it takes time for cultures to adopt icons into their lexicon.
I would argue that helping the user form a consistent and "accurate" mental model for how things work is the most important thing a designer can do. He points to this in some examples (swipe gestures in particular, which evidently are inconsistent between iPhone, iPad, Trackpad, and Magic Mouse), but he doesn't name the overarching point as such (or if he ties it all together, I missed it).
At the end, Norman previews that he and Bruce Tognazzini are writing a critique on "How Apple ruined design", giving me the sense that this post was about drumming up interest for that. If that's the case, mission accomplished.
> Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe
> from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't.
As our society adopts basic principles of computer interaction we can make them more advanced while keeping the same relative level of simplicity.
If you started with the flat iOS UI from the beginning it would have been very difficult to get accustomed to. Nowadays, we don't rely on those skeuomorphic affordances because we assume touch interfaces are the defacto.
That said though, I do agree that we should think critically about seasoned vs beginner interfaces. We should strive to accommodate both without causing detriment to one group or another.
What are the main gestures, today, for the iPhone? Home-button-press(once twice long-siri thrice), home-button-double-tap, home-screen-swipe(left right middle-down mid), bottom-up, top-down (Today Notifications), three-finger-swipe, pinch, shake. What did I miss?
Compare that with the original iPhone. We started simple, and then year-by-year, a new gesture is added, which seems natural because it's only a small change from what was done before. The UX has been boiling the frog.
So, then the Apple Watch comes along. It is less complex than the iPhone 6, but more complex than the original iPhone. Because it is starting from scratch. It highlights how complex iOS has become.
Would love to see a UX reboot. But, who at Apple has power to do so? Would it turn out like Window's tiles?
Not having used one before, I can say the the interface is far from intuitive. I couldn't find the way to switch between running apps, I kept having to go back to the home screen and hit the app's icon.
I've just searched now out of interest and apparently I should have swiped four-fingers to the left. How is that in any way discoverable? Or even easy to do when walking.
That would be the most commonly used way of switching apps, and it's one of the first tips that is shown to a user on a "new" phone by the OS.
Four finger swiping is an optional feature that power users can turn on.
Discoverability is still a valid issue, of course.
That is the way to switch between running apps. There are slightly faster ways to do it, but they do exactly the same thing, functionally.
This is why people say that the Apple interface is intuitive: you actually were able to accomplish your goal first try with no instruction.
Three fingers swipe up is back and two fingers in a circle is save?! Not literally, but there's usually a dozen different gestures all with ambiguous meaning. At least ambiguous to me. But I don't have an immediate fix for the tablet interface.
I guess I'm an old fogy and prefer typing on a keyboard with my withered vestigial arms.
That's not to say that iOS-style interfaces are perfect -- obviously there are flaws there -- but if your starting premise is that MacOS was easier to use than iOS, you're just fundamentally at odds with reality, and need to figure out which of your premises are wrong.
I was using an iPad on a flight (the in-flight entertainment was broken) and it took us, both computer engineers, a good ten minutes to figure out how to turn down the brightness. It was a painful experience trying to find the settings - swipe down? No.. swipe other directions, nope.
It took us forever to discover that 'settings' is just an app on the tablet.
Maybe it was just because we are part of the Android ecosystem, but using one didn't seem very logical.
Note: Neither of us specifically avoid Apple products, but just found them way too expensive with university for purchase.
Without intending to sound too flowery, what I find most interesting though is that the competition between the platforms seems to simultaneously drive both convergence and differentiation that's almost — musical. If you step back and watch the entwined evolutions you can see a lot of mutual love and hate.
I've come to believe that there is no such thing as a universally intuitive interface - consistency is achievable, but everyone comes to your interface with a different background and therefore a different sense of what is intuitive.
In my opinion, the problem is Apple's departure from the hints they've been training people on since the first iPhone.
Blasted from the top page straight out of the top 1000!
I really don't see how they're getting harder to use. And I help people with it all the time, and what I hear all the time is, "wow that actually makes sense." It's the logical way.
So, I completely disagree and I'd be willing to say the majority would also agree.
That's a pretty low bar.
Lollipop flashes the tiny scrollbar on the right in scrollable panes for a second (or less?), before disappearing. I cannot count how many times I just didn't realize I never saw options because the content was cut exactly between two lines. Despite knowing this fact, I regularly miss scrollable panes, even on dialogs I visited before.
The ample (absurd) margins around all controls don't help. They made large (unpocketable) phone screens too small to display actual content!
The last discovery was the red-on-blue color in the clock, which has awful readability.
I never saw any worse as far as UI is concerned, even disregarding the seriously questionable "material design" concept, which might just as well be called "style", as there's no usability designed into it at all.
The bar was always quite low, but has been lowered even further.
Not sure about iPad, but on OSX, it's three fingers for the track pad and two for the magic mouse: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895
And it’s literally only the number of fingers that’s different. And the only non-obvious gesture is probably to swipe up to invoke Mission Control.
Also, the way OS X is set up, those gestures serve as shortcuts (like hot corners used to, in the olden days). Nearly every single functionality can be reached via just clicking (Notification Center, switching from desktop to desktop or fullscreen app to fullscreen app) or buttons on the keyboard (Mission Control, Launch Pad).
Just relatively less important and central functionality is relegated to either the context menu (the ability to look up words in a pop-over can be activated via the context menu or three finger tap) or keyboard shortcut and gesture (swiping down for App Exposé).
Accepting an arbitrary number of fingers … sure I’m all for it. But those gestures aren’t really anything worth criticising. They are shortcuts that have to be explicitly learned. That’s why there are videos in the control pane. Apple knows that those have to be actually taught. That’s why the UI has non-gesture alternatives that are obvious and in your face.
This is not to defend Apple – I just want to point out that little personal pet peeves like these aren’t necessarily indicative of actual problems actual users have, especially if they come from an expert. (I also think you can always improve things and that’s certainly also true of how OS X implements gestures. But that’s just a truism that will never be wrong. As someone working in the field: Luckily. There are probably juicier targets than gestures in OS X, though.)