Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design | Hacker News Reader

Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

daringfireball.net

100 pointsmqt47 comments

This feels like Gruber being Gruber.

For me personally, I love Apple hardware, love the iPhone and like the iPad. I am just not a fan of OSX. I was, for about a five year period, but have gone back to Linux this past year in Ubuntu and have not looked back.

I bought my first mac in 2003/2004, Power Book G4. Tolerated the slowness that the UI had b/c it gave me something I didn't have in any other OS: A *nix base w/ a great UI.

Over time I feel that OSX's lead in this eroded as Ubuntu kept getting better and better and OSX stagnated. Now I feel I can have a rock solid Linux (Debian based Ubuntu) with a really good UI that just works without weird restrictions. OSX isn't the only player in town anymore in that front and since I can install it on cheaper hardware, that is awesome.

A big difference between iOS and OS X is that desktop applications have more than 20 years of UI research and convention behind them, while touch interfaces have less than half (maybe even less than a quarter) that. There's thus a lot more room for experimentation in touch interfaces since there isn't as large a body of best practices. Apps that try to go their own way UI-wise on OS X are more than likely going to end up subtly violating the norms of OS X application behavior that standard Cocoa apps all follow implicitly, much like Qt apps on OS X do. Indeed, Gruber's example of Twitter 2 already misbehaves in a number of head-scratching ways: among the ones I've noticed, hitting cmd-W from the tweet list hides the entire app rather than closing the tweet window, and the "compose tweet" box floats over everything even when the app is in the background. I think the tolerance for UI annoyances like these is a lot lower, and apps that try to go their own way are going to expose them a lot more than apps that stick to the tried and tested standard widgets.

Good point. One of the main reasons against non-standard UI design is that there is a huge amount of behaviour attached to the standard UI and once you start implementing your own interface elements, you’ll almost never get everything right. Keyboard shortcuts, accessibility, system hooks for other apps, etc.

For better or worse, I think he is right. Non-uniformity has been the norm in Apple's apps for a while, Garageband, Aperture, every iTunes release, among others. I believe the majority of third party mac developers used to be pre OS X developers, and because of that they had and incredible amount of respect for the HIG, but now, the (problematic) apps in the Mac App Store are coming from iOS developers, who didn't grow up with the guidelines. A different UI has given them an edge in the iOS App Store, and the are gonna try the same on the mac.

Maybe. But if the HIG is not that important anymore, I think that should also imply that Apple should allow for other UI toolkits in its stores, such as Qt.

There's a difference between "ugly attempt at matching the standard controls" and "extending nicely into a different style of UI".

The average user would not be able to tell the difference between a well-adapting Qt application and a Cocoa application. We have a Qt application for searching treebanks, and when showing it to another Mac user, he replied "nice, you wrote it with Cocoa?".

Twitter's (or the App Store's) deviation from the Mac look and feel, on the other hand is very noticeable. And I am not sure it is proven that we are talking about "extending nicely into a different style of UI". The Twitter UI is plainly confusing (where do you drag this window?) and having the backward/forward buttons next to the window controls is questionable at the very least.

Did you just show it to the Mac user, or did you let him actually sit down and use it? Qt does a great job of mimicking the look of Cocoa apps, but it doesn't always get the behavior right, and if you're going to behave differently, you ought to warn the user by looking different.

This idea disappoints me. The system-wide Control-Command-D dictionary works in Twitter for Mac: That doesn't work in apps written in almost-facsimiles of Cocoa. That's only one example, but these's always something quirky about these replicas which is never desirable.

Do the Mac App Store guidelines actually disallow Qt apps?

If I'm reading this correctly ( http://pastie.org/1236378 ), the only major requirements are that apps don't screw around with the HIG too much, and they don't use "deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta)". Admittedly, the only Qt app I recall using on OS X is Last.fm, but that seemed to be mostly HIG-compliant (a couple things felt a tad out of place, but nothing major).

the (problematic) apps in the Mac App Store are coming from iOS developers, who didn't grow up with the guidelines. A different UI has given them an edge in the iOS App Store, and the are gonna try the same on the mac.

So we can retire the meme that any random iOS app has a more consistent user interface than any random Android app?

Sometimes it takes seeing the apps all next to each other to realize it like http://wellplacedpixels.com/ does (which effectively documents the inconsistency in iOS apps, and this inconsistency being praised ("beautiful software")).

What about games? They have inconsistent interfaces in their platforms (and across platforms) and still work well.

I think it has something to do with the input methods. When all you do is to click buttons and fill in forms, it makes sense to have a consistent interface. On the other hand, some iPad apps produce a great experience based on their inconsistent interfaces (as in http://www.algoriddim.com/djay-ipad and http://www.korg.com/ielectribe)

Games obviously need a UI that is directly related to playing the game. I'm not including games. But these ones seem to be different for the sake of being different:

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9iz9hfWvl1qazfelo1_400.jp...

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l26vemSib51qazfelo1_400.pn...

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1illmwHTD1qazfelo1_400.jp...

And there's not really anything wrong with that. But one can't say that they prefer the iPhone vs something else because the apps are more consistent UI-wise and ignore the trend away from consistent user interfaces.

Then, there's something to be said for things like Sally Park, which is effectively a limited function app that doesn't have a lot of complex user interaction. A lot of these kinds of apps are commodity, so the way to differentiate is by the "prettiness" of the UI. And that's too bad in some sense, because I think usability suffers -- but maybe usability doesn't matter because, since they are one-trick pony apps, you spend more time looking at the screen than figuring out which button to hit or learning it (because the functionality is limited, not because the UI/UX is "obvious" or "consistent").

When it comes down to it, many iOS apps are do-one-thing (and hopefully do-it-well) independent apps, mainly because they don't integrate with other apps on the phone. You kind of expect standard widgets (or icons or labels for functions) (even if you think they are "ugly") on Android because of the integration. I have an Android app that adds a Flickr option to all "share via" functions on the entire phone. This isn't a standalone app that needs its own UI, and it would be dumb if it had its own UI as an independent app, partitioned off from the rest of the functionality of the device. It needs to integrate (hopefully smoothly) with everything else. When I select "share via flickr", uploading to flickr shouldn't be significantly difference in experience or widget selection than sharing with a contact, otherwise it would be too jarring. It shouldn't look like I'm going to some place else to do this, it should look like I'm sharing it without having to leave the app I found the thing I wanted to share in.

"In Mac OS X, Apple began experimenting"

Just a little nitpick: Actually, it started already with OS 9. Who does't remember the ugly brushed metal changes to Quicktime Player 4 and Sherlock 2? Apparently Gruber :-)

The question in the title remembered me of this quote:

"Good design is design that surprises, something that is unexpected but immediately comprehensible and pleasing."

Source: http://info.psu.edu.sa/psu/cis/phalloran/Teaching_Learning/g...

I think the cold truth is that in the OS X era, Apple's designers have been increasingly favoring eye candy over usability and consistency. OS X certainly looks better than just about any other OS I've seen, but other things like Fitt's Law and consistency have taken a back seat.

Do you have any examples of violations of Fitts law in OS X that weren't present in OS9?

Those small traffic light buttons come to mind. The traffic light buttons are tiny and extremely difficult to acquire targets. The resize handle is another. It's not only small, often times it's right near the dock at the bottom and ao whenever you try to resize a window you end up moving over the dock. This is exacerbated by the magnification effect on the dock of it's turned on.

Consistency is still important, especially on the "truck" computers which are much more prone to damaging actions by novice users compared to iOS. Hell, messing with standard interface elements can even mess advanced users up. Opened up Logic or Sound space designer recently?

Maybe regular users _are_ getting more used to different looking widgets (eg. All the different kinds of custom buttons on websites) but I don't think the HIG should be binned just yet. It needs to be abstracted: specific UI concepts/patterns, rather than specific colors of dropdown menus etc. That said, universal, system level elements like window controls shouldn't be messed with IMO.

I really agree with this perspective. I think folks get too hung up on the actual appearance vs. the usability. Sometimes I don't like the look when apps recolor standard controls, but I don't find them less usable. Just don't change usability patterns like keyboard shortcuts or the ability for a window to be minimized to the dock.

The most striking thing for me between Tweetie and Twitter for Mac (Tweetie 2), other than the dark sidebar, was the use of Helvetica instead Lucida Grande. It's subtle, but I believe it's a big step toward making an app feel like it was made for OS X instead of iOS.

Reeder for Mac, another port of an iOS app, is another good example. It uses Helvetica and it uses slide animations that make me think that the Reeder window has moved a few hundred pixels to the left.

I think maybe the OS X HIG is still in place, but it is migrating to the iOS HIG. We will increasingly see more and more apps falling over to the iOS "dark side" and culminating with the release of Lion.

Personally, while I loved my iPhone and think the iOS is a great thing on a small screen I'm not a big fan of the iPad. Let me re-phrase that, I'm not a big fan of the iPad's launcher. Anyway, Lion will be a big UI step, probably in the direction of iOS and away from OS X. That kind of makes me sad and worried about the future of Mac products. On the other hand, I'm very happily a Ubuntu and Android user and maybe they will pick up the torch and grow better and better.

I don't think people should look at this as an all-or-nothing debate. I think there is an importance to following an HIG as a basic guideline and stray from it as it seems appropriate or for the sake of creativity. It's when it strays too far from it when things can become problematic.

Just like with traffic laws, not coming to a full stop at a stop sign is not equal to speeding down a highway going in the opposite direction of traffic.

Apple straying and introducing a metallic patten does not equal the extent of an Adobe Air application forcing me to hit an icon button to access preferences rather than through the common menu bar location. One is aesthetic while the other is functional. And basically, one irritates me way more than the other.

That screenshot sums up my experience with Twitter nicely: A dozen random thoughts, truncated to fit a certain size, thus requiring investment to decipher, which at the end reveals somebody talking about something that's only really interesting to themselves, and actually makes you feel slightly embarrassed for them.

My assumption was that other people were using some form of magic tool that filtered out relevent stuff and presented it in a coherent form. Since this looks like a screenshot from the author's own system, it seems that even power-users are seeing the same useless garbage that I do.

Why would you install something like this on your computer?

On Twitter, you don't follow people who talk about things you're not interested in. It's that simple.

Now, obviously, nobody's 100% interesting all the time. So, yes, there is a "magic tool" to filter out uninteresting things: your brain. You see something that relies on context you're not privy to, you skip over it. It's that simple. You don't read Twitter, you scan it.

Everyone who criticizes Twitter seems to think that people use it to read boring things. No, I don't usually care what the people I'm following had for breakfast - except when Patton Oswalt describes his quick eats on a busy day [1]. Now, you might not find that funny. In which case, you stop following him, or you just furl your brow and keep skimming.

[1] http://twitter.com/#!/pattonoswalt/status/23362445531684864

Was that link an attempt to point out something good on Twitter, or to point out one of the tweets that you have to filter out to get use from it? It took a while to parse, then turned out to be, well, let's say I want my 5 seconds back.

Actually, can anybody here point to a single good Twitter message so that I can see what one looks like?

I think that HIG and default UI libraries are great to give the default app a consistent and decent look and UX. It makes it possible for anyone to write an app that behaves and looks at a good enough level.

But, unique interfaces that stray away from these are just fine as long as it results in a better UI/UX. iOS apps have shown in a lot of cases that developers that care can make something that are highly customized for the better (e.g. apps from TapBots (http://tapbots.com/) or TapTapTap (http://taptaptap.com/))

I must admit I'm not really surprised to see Gruber suddenly claim non-uniform application design is a good thing when everyone starts critizing Apple for 1. inconsistent UIs and 2. bad design. Also note how he completely focuses on the inconsistent UI-issue and completely ignores the part about bad design in the OSX App Store, probably hoping it will go by unnoticed.

Really though. Isn't it always this way with Gruber? If Apple or OSX does something better or different than the other platforms it's not only good, it's the standard. It's the only way(tm). End of story. Whoever disagrees be uneducated and unsophistitcated.

The second Apple strays away from that, his response is always "but this isn't important any more" or "this is a good thing, really". Really, Gruber?

I must admit I'm getting fed up with his appologyism. If there is still insight and actual content to be found in his blog-posts, he is making it very, very hard to find.

Suddenly?!

This has been a long and gradual transition (not even all that much of a transition), what he wote shouldn’t be surprising to any longtime reader of Gruber.

This piece is also mostly about Twitter for Mac, an app that was not developed by Apple.

– edit: I found one relevant article from 2004: http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/does_brushed_metal_matter

“I’ve been thinking about brushed metal windows and Apple’s inconsistent use thereof at least since Panther shipped a year ago. So, why wait until now to write about it? Well, because I just wasn’t sure it actually mattered. And I’m still unsure.”

“This is precisely at the heart of my uncertainty as to whether these brushed metal issues really matter. Maybe it is just aesthetics — merely the color of pixels, rather than how the interface truly works — and I’m looking for serious implications that aren’t there, simply because I happen to think brushed metal windows look stupid.”

(Just as a side note, all the articles on Daring Fireball from around that time – about brushed metal, clickthrough and poofing – are in my opinion some of Gruber’s best. I would very much like him to write more about stuff like that.)

Wait, you can't claim that Gruber is never critical of Apple. For example, he was one of the first and most persistent critics of the iPhone App Store's submission guidelines until they were amended by Apple.

It's true that he rarely criticises Apple's design choices. But I don't think it's because of any sycophantic defence of Apple, but rather because his design aesthetic is very similar to that of the lead designers at Apple. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to see him do a piece soon on the sub-par design of the Mac App Store, because it is sub-par (at least in some aspects).

Here's a few links to Gruber criticizing the poor state of the HIG, and Apple's design decisions:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/hockenberry_hig

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal

http://daringfireball.net/2003/05/much_ado_about_click-throu...

http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective

http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/inconsistencies

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/themes

http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/more_smart_cut_copy_paste

http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/when_in_rome

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/does_brushed_metal_matter

That Gruber rarely criticizes Apple's design decisions is simply false. Apple's inconsistency in UI design and application of the HIG is a pet peeve of his, and it has been for many years.

That's like 9 articles in as many years. How many did he write in support of them? Not that there's anything wrong with it - just that I don't think I can count his writing about Apple as "objective criticism".

Articles I found mentioning HIG wherein Gruber praises Apple's design consistency: zero. Why don't you try finding some for yourself?

Like I said, this has been a pet peeve of his for years.

Hmm, was I misunderstood? I didn't mean to ask you how many articles he did supporting Apple's HIG consistency. I was just pointing out that that it's a small minority among the total articles he writes about supporting everything Apple does. At least that's my understanding. Like I said, I wouldn't really go to Gruber's blog for objective analysis, though he does make some good points. I used to enjoy his writing about Apple quite a bit a few years back. Now the blatant fanboism kinda turns me off. FWIW.

I've read Gruber since he began writing Daring Fireball, I don't think he's changed much at all. I don't see how he's turned from Apple pundit to Apple fanboy, a rather peculiar thing to happen to anyone with time, really.

What has changed is that Apple's success has accelerated, exposing Apple to more customers, press and analysis. Gruber has always covered these things, but with more of it there's more to cover, and with more clueless analysts claiming things about Apple, there's more of that to dispute and ridicule.

And let's just face it, he's usually right about the significant things. That's not fanboyism, that's insight.

Besides, I don't think Gruber very often writes articles just to "support" anything (what would be the point?), usually he's trying to understand where Apple's motivations come from — why they're doing what they're doing — which is the part where most other analysts are fumbling in the dark.

Sometimes he agrees with them, but really, a lot of the time he doesn't (that usually makes for more interesting articles as well). Just writing support for a decision or strategy makes for a really boring read, what he usually does is explain the underlying reasons for it, whether he agrees with it or not.

When OS X was first released he was very critical of it's ui. Specifically how Finder worked (and the whole brush metal theme ). He even alluded to this in this post. Now he's merely observing how things have changed. He never claimed that he liked it.

Apple is obviously following the innovations of web app design here. People use web apps with wildly different designs all the time, and yes, there are some usability issues with that, but when consumer OSes were first being developed some decades ago, HCI researchers assumed that everything had to look exactly the same between applications or users would freak out. The web never had a single HIG, so we found out that users are much more tolerant of differences, or at least they are now.

As web apps become more important, the notion of an OS HIG needs to evolve. Obviously an app needs internal consistency, but how consistent do two apps need to be between each other? An apt comparison is the world of typography: the rules for good text layout don't specify one font for every single book, we can handle the fact that different books use different fonts. But there are still rules for good typography, they're just more general than "All uppercase G's should look like this: G." This is the direction that HIGs would need to go, but whether this is a good thing is debatable. For whatever reason, I have a hundred or so books on my bookshelf and basically all of them have very good to excellent typography. Web sites and apps have nowhere near that level of consistent quality. Native apps are better, but now we're going to start to see more of the web's no-rules design norms applied there, which probably means a few really gorgeous apps and a whole lot of crap.

People use web apps with wildly different designs all the time because there are no UI standards and there is no basic toolkit. It's a bug, not a feature.

It's a bug, not a feature.

I'm not sure that's right... would the web have caught on and be as well-loved if everything used "system" colors and designs? Maybe you're envisioning something different, but I'm not sure where the middle ground is between the web as it exists today and a classic Windows 3.1 / Mac looking app - what would a "basic toolkit" look like beyond the HTML elements and form controls that we have?

The thing is that, to the extent that it is a bug, it's a very harmless bug. The freedom to experiment and innovate with web apps has probably outweighed any harm from lack of consistency.

Apple has been straying from their own HIG for years and Gruber has been criticizing them for it every step of the way. You assume too much.

It's very simple to understand - when Apple does something that's inconsistent it is bold pushing-the-envelope. When Android (to pick one of his favourite targets) is inconsistent, it's because a bunch of socially retarded engineers don't know any better and they should be more like Apple.

Really, Grubber is the tech writer equivalent of Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin - he's got so much vested in his ideology, he's gonna push it as hard as possible no matter how much mental gymnastics are needed. Amusing, but ultimately worthless.

No, he isn't.

"One thing I should make clear, given some of the email I’ve gotten this week, is that I’m rooting for Android, big-time." --Gruber

Personally, I'd rather not see his articles here as they never contain any discussion of the topic, rather tons of bitching about the man himself.

Right, funny that how never manifests in his writing, no? I can point to many instances, but here is a fairly recent one: When CBS and a few other networks started banning Google TV from watching content, a lot of people thought that was a bad example of Big Content making decisions for people - ie, why can I watch online TV with my HTPC, but not a specialized HTPC like Google TV? These people criticized the networks for doing that. Grubber's take? The equivalent of a Nelson Ha-Ha. Very insightful and mature of him.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/11/22/google-tv-viacom

This characterizes most of his writing on Android, Google TV, etc etc.

Right, funny that how never manifests in his writing, no?

that's why i unsubscribed from his rss feed recently. i subscribed a long time ago because i enjoyed reading his commentary on apple-related things, but in the past few months it's been more about how much android sucks.

First time Gruber embeds images into a post?

Well, all the OSX users should just Thank Steve that the XCode designer is no Visual Basic so at least you're limited to people with a significant amount of development savvy doing non-standard UI. Otherwise, you'd have the hodge-podge horror that's been visited upon Windows for the last decade and a half or so.

It'll get there, though, just wait! I'll chuckle when I see the first 200x200 OK/CANCEL buttons in AppStore screen shots :-)

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