Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name (2015)
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
People harp on this, but what changed is that phone screens are tiny. It's just not possible to show all commands and still show content. Also, people forget that "gestures" like the double-click were not intuitive at all and that Macs came with manuals which had to teach the basic concepts of computing (double-clicking, folders, windows, etc.). While young children seem to use iPads rather intuitively (and they don't come with manuals).
> clearly see how to select that action...
Tapping is just as intuitive as clicking... and select-tap for a context menu is no worse than click-and-hold for a drop-down menu, or right-click for a context menu.
> receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action...
I see no evidence this is any worse on phones. To the contrary, iOS brought a whole new world of animated feedback that makes feedback even clearer spatially (e.g. an app or folder expanding).
> and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.
In the most advanced applications, yes. But "undo" was never a universal concept on the desktop -- it was mostly limited to text editing and actions in Office-type applications. E.g. in System 7 you couldn't undo creating a folder or moving a file or an operation in the calculator, you've never been able to undo setting a preference or resizing a window, and you certainly couldn't undo overwriting a file until Time Machine and file versions came along more recently. (And on iOS, things like drawing and text editing apps usually do have undo, same as on desktop.)
I would argue things haven't gotten any worse, because they were never that idyllic to begin with, and that most of what does seem worse is forced by smaller screens, not by suddenly ignoring principles.
(edit: changed "tap-and-hold" above to "select-tap" which I meant to write, e.g. when bringing up the copy/paste menu for text)
and us being so familiar with the desktop that we can no longer see what is unintuitive about it for newcomers
iOS7 and up degraded usability relative to iOS6. See: https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ for comparisons of iOS and MacOS old vs new designs.
With the passing of Steve Jobs Apple has lost its design mojo.
What UI people forget is most people don’t sit and study the UI long enough to ask such questions.
If it didn’t do what they wanted they tap again, the color or highlight changes and they remember.
A lot of UX people want the “answers from the back of the book” right in their face.
For most, after 1-3 taps they get it and stop giving af.
However, you've now made a gesture that was instantaneous with a hardware button require a LOT of UI to overcome the limitations of the smooth plane of glass input mechanism.
I'd agree that moving a mouse requires learning that when moved, a cursor appears, and you then have to learn what the buttons do, and generally that the right-click button isn't what you want. So I'm not going to say that a touch UI is easier or harder to learn, as both technically require experimentation or explanation since neither uses on-screen UI to indicate an area can be right-clicked. Users have learned to select, and to right-click, within text fields, which is why that pattern carries over well enough on iOS.
So how would I fix this on iOS? Well, I'd start by continuing to enhance drag-and-drop. Why can't I perform a gesture or click a button to reveal recent clipboard text, then drag the text where I want it? Kind of like how a recent screenshot appears on the screen briefly, it'd be nice if the same were available for text. The biggest difference -- and biggest advantage -- to the touch screen UI is how the entire screen can become whatever control you need at the cost of precision (or screen space to make up for it), while a monitor is an entirely passive experience, where the tools you interact with are literally separate from the screen and so are always available for instant use. Frankly the most interesting times will be when we've the best of both worlds -- when your laptop's lower half is replaced with touch screens that mimic mice and keyboards with haptic feedback and are meant for interaction attached to touch screen displays. That's when we'll be able to get the benefits of both worlds, old and new, as it makes sense to do so.
Another thought -- it's not that touch screens can't do instant right-click, as two-finger tap works that way today on touch-pads, but that on a touch screen two finger tap is ambiguous, you need a cursor to increase its precision. To that end, if the loupe/cursor is visible, I could imagine a power-user interface would be one which either shows the actions before you have to wait, or lets you tap after dragging in order to lock in your cursor's position and perform an action. I could even imagine that after tapping that second time, you could drag through the menu to scroll, or as Microsoft has shown countless times, use a wheel of actions centered around your finger and flick in a cardinal direction to perform an indicated action.
So I'm really not disagreeing here, that UIs are flexible, but I would say we've lost something useful with the disappearance of the mouse cursor and its replacements, just as when I switch from Mac to Windows, I really feel the disappearance of being reduced from two primary hotkeys (cmd and ctrl, with alt and shift modifiers) to one (ctrl, with alt and shift modifiers) because Windows owns its key and doesn't share it. The more restrictive your input mechanisms are (within human limits), the more creative your UI and uses of it have to be to continue to have the same amount of expressiveness as a more full-featured input mechanism would have.
Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If those ads were really honest, Mac would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts, while PC effortlessly tore his apart with both hands.
The underlying design principle is close to "undoable" .. but not quite that either and perhaps "design for experimentability" captures it better. It may also just be the more common insignificance of actions to be taken - "publish a document" versus "like a post" or "take a selfie".
Excellent reason to test interfaces with people who've never used it before
This is a bit like writing novels with main figures that are very much unlike yourself: if you want to paint a convincing picture, you will have to research and figure out how people do things. And if you go deeper you need to understand where their ideas come from.
It is quite sad, that many people in the tech world have a very one-dimensional collection of possible user characters. In the worst case they divide the world into people that are like them and idiots who have no idea.
The only thing worse than this is not thinking about design at all.
Large beta pools and other feedback mechanisms could credibly get reports like "Siri doesn't work for me" to come in. Then you have to have people to trace those down. Really? It works for me? What are the recent queries on this account? Ohhh, he's just saying hello back, then the exchange ends and Siri misses his question. How many other people have this pattern? Can we get a fix so, if the user replies with a greeting the conversation stays open?
Having people getting and tracking down reports from customers will cause your organization to develop something that's a lot like empathy. You'll learn what customers have problems with and fix them.
And this as you said depends on the organization, but if your product speaks to people and it doesn’t know that greeting back isn’t necesarilly the end of the conversation, you skipped conversation 101
I find I agree with pretty much everything he says.
Because they are not only aware of what is ideal, they are aware of the effort-payoff balance involved in doing it right.
The ones that have a secure brand and are sharing knowledge for free (as opposed to the ones using their website to build/establish a personal brand) don't have a lot of incentive to invest heavily.
Handcoding HTML is a lot more effort than picking up one of the many canned tools that you configure some settings and throw text at and it produces a blog.
I like the minimalism, I don't mind the ugly, but the minuscule font size is just awful.
Forgetting that properly good design is both usable and also doesn’t look like a dog’s dinner.
> What an absurd and tiresome article.
> IOS is significantly easier and more intuitive than any PC ever was, including the Mac.
> The only people who could possibly find iOS unintuitive are those whose minds have hardened in a PC shaped mold.
Sounds like he has no place for alternative opinions of any form.
I mean come on, what could possibly be more intuitive than dragging a photo or screen to the right when you want it to move to the right? Barring mind-controlled computers, I think this is as intuitive as it could possibly get.
Keep in mind also that mouse controlled computers introduce a whole level of indirection.
Inconsistent and not discoverable, which isn’t anything like a right mouse button at all.
You even had stuff like the puck mouse, which didn’t support the feature.
Ditto the similar force-press thing on the newer Macbook touchpads—my file drag-and-drop operations drop to a success rate of about 50% with that enabled. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong with my new laptop first time I used one, because I'd forgotten about that "feature".
Also I agree that mouse has tactile feedback. Even if I wanted to experiment with 3D Touch, I can never know whether there's nothing 3D-touchy under my finger or I just did not apply enough pressure.
IMO they should have some standard UI idiom for 3D-touch enabled regions and they should have negative feedback (like some vibration) when user pressed 3D-touch on unsupported region. But in its current iteration 3D touch is almost user-hostile. I can't imagine why Apple released it without better polish.
How so?
One of the key points of the article is that the the perceived intuitiveness, especially among expert users, doesn't extend to people unfamiliar with the interface. I have seen my own folks struggle with iOS, especially recovering from accidental taps as the article mentions. My mom hits the home button on her iphone whenever she hits the wrong UI button. On her laptop, that happens much more rarely. I forgot who said this first, but I firmly believe that software developers should personally watch non-expert users interact with their UI before shipping.
Your point about toddlers being able to scroll and zoom, applies to most things kids do. They can pickup a remote and turn the TV off, or unlock doors, play handheld video games, etc, etc.
I knew IOS was nothing for me when I couldn’t access a file system, there was no way to switch between open applications and the backups were not backups of my photos, but some special format only meant to be played back onto another iphone.
Things might have changed since, but the iphone I had never felt as if it belonged to me, it felt as if I belonged to the phone.
And it might be the case that app switching was possible (I cant really remember) but either it didn’t convince me or I didn’t find out how it worked.
I think it was true in the very, very early days of the iPhone, where the only way to switch apps was to go home then tap on the app you wanted, internally it was switching between suspended apps, but to the user it felt like you were closing and opening a new app each time.
Stuff like this should be simple. On android it is connecting the cable and copying the pics. The only reason you are not able to do this is, that Apple values lock-in over good design. And I do not trust a company with these values to store my pictures indefinitly, sorry.
And no, lock-in is not what drives design at apple.
Design is always about solving problems. Toddlers wiping screens is the equivalent of toddlers smearing paint. They explore, they don’t solve problems.
IOS might be the better thing for a certain class of problems, but for other classes of problems it can become a burden very quickly, even to undemanding people like my father.
Truly good design would grow with the user and give each person the level of control they need. OSX works much better in these regards IMO.
The best example of this is Undo. Shake to undo is the dumbest thing ever (well, dumbest aside from Google's "shake to leave feedback")
The number one way I would want to use my iPad daily is to have it in portrait mode with a book or video on the top half and my note book on the bottom. This cannot be done. The only way to split the screen is side by side (which I have never found useful for anything), and only for a couple of predefined widths. Further, I had to go online to find out how any of that worked since it was completely undiscoverable for me. Even further, when switching between apps, they regularly lose state (e.g., Apple's Notes jumps to the top of the document so I have to scroll all the way down to continue).
These issues make multitasking on iPad a completely frustrating experience for me. While all of these things were worked out in the very first multitasking graphical user interfaces, where multiple windows would just open and I could move and resize them at will.
Also,
> The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?
I have never seen this be an issue? On macOS, you scroll with two fingers because you have a cursor, and on iOS you use one. Since Magic Mouse has an alternate way of moving the cursor, you can actually use both methods.
― Alan Kay
Apple used to live by that quote, but maybe they ignore the latter part now.
>and works the same on any phone.
Well yes, that's what Jobs' "thermonuclear war" was about. In fact Google is still at it with Android Q. They've given up and just aped the iPhone X gestures [2]. Apple might be mad about it but they shouldn't be because it just makes switching from Android to iOS easier.
[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/09/ios-7-gestures.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18530599/google-android-q-...
Apple’s gesture for this requires starting at the edge of the screen, but Instagram allows you to start swiping anywhere.
I’d hesitate a guess that without this difference, the ape wouldn’t have been able to browse Instagram nearly as easily.
Though in fairness, I do think the iphone is pretty intuitive. My parents picked it up quite well (mac too).
However, there are a variety of mid-tier functions that are not very discoverable. Not pro features, even simple stuff like screenshots and certain sharing options.
This is a strange line to find 90% into the article. It seems like a lead in rather than a late acknowledgement. iOS struggled to find its way back to usability after rejecting “skeuomorphic design” in favor of flat design (see the drop in emphasis on metaphors), but it’s doing better now.
> Discoverability
This does continue to be an issue. However, the subtle bars that indicate the availability of the swipe up from the bottom and swipe down from the top right are helping.
> Undo
This is a huge design flaw. I finally enabled shake-to-undo because I’ve started doing more work on iOS and needed undo, but I feel foolish shaking my phone. Photoshop introduced the history palette years ago and that’s a fantastic approach to undo/redo. Now the feature is common on desktop apps. iOS badly needs a “time machine” control as a universal access to undo/redo. The rewind/fast forward 2-finger gesture introduced in the Paper by 53 was a nice solution, but not widely implemented. An icon would be better.
> Feedback
The most satisfying feedback on iOS is the click vibration when the flashlight or camera app snap open after a long press on the lock screen.
It's not like they don't know, they shipped watch complications with a time machine control, and of course OS X has time machine baked into its backup UX.
I’m assuming it’s this: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-10631
I also wish the X line of phones had the two-finger touch keyboard cursor control... It seems like iPad is innovating (maybe because the potential universe of pissed off users is less) & hopefully we’ll see some of those updates on iPhone in the future.
* Power and volume buttons on exactly opposite side means you often press one when you meant another when held in one hand.
* Extremely slippery surfaces means the devices slips away and fall down all the time.
* No easy way to organize app icons. Over time you accumulate 100s of apps and its lot of pain to organize and discover apps.
* Cannot disable click sound when taking photos easily.
* Cannot search and organize photos easily.
* Anything related to iCloud is either mess or dysfunctional.
... and so on.
They fired Scott Forstall for not assuming the failure of Maps V1. What do you think the likelihood is that Jony Ive will be fired for the butterfly keyboard fiasco, notched iPhone and other design catastrophes?
I don’t understand the other complaints. Anecdotally, users are more proficient with iOS than Windows or macOS, for similar usage times.
The back button being furthest place away from the thumb on the iPhone was another thing that never made sense. I think ppl just get used to it but a lot of the good design is really good marketing.
It makes perfect sense to put such a control at the top of the screen next to the title. The interface is clear: you are here, you can go back where you came from — and these two things are grouped together.
Android has now adopted this which is great, because it's still a crapshoot where the hardware back button will take you on an Android phone — back in the navigation hierarchy? Out of the app entirely and into a different one? Will it just dismiss a popover? In the past moreso than now, the button's behaviour could almost have been described as entirely arbitrary.