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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.

Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.

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> , designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback

Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.

You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.

It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

> You must be too young to remember

Hopefully. I wouldn't mind being young. I am also not a designer, so UI/UX history may be lost on me.

I can only say that the only Apple product I genuinely enjoyed from a design perspective was the iPod Nano I bought sometime in early 2000s.

I feel the same way about Google's design and development principles. What the fuck happened?

You mean how they heavily researched their latest redesign of Android? https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...

> M3 Expressive designs were overwhelmingly rated higher for attributes such as “energetic,” “emotive,” “positive vibe,” “creative,” “playful,” and “friendly.”

Heavy research indeed

I can't tell if you're joking. M3 Expressive is godawful and throws away so many hard-won lessons in UX R&D.

I spent some time navigating through the linked page.

I don't doubt designers spent a lot of time researching it. It still reads like an incredible amount of carefully crafted bullshit.

The more the design of things "evolve", the more I appreciate designs that simply don't.

Well to be fair their research confirmed that half of 55+ year-olds didn't like the new design

Funny, someone else mentioned in another reply that I may be too young to remember something from like 25 years ago.

I'm a Schrodinger's old man.

And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability.

When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple would get rid of the Human Interface Group. (Steve was rather hostile to Larry.)

Later, when it was up to Steve, he did exactly what he said: he got rid of HIG.

I think it’s easier to sell visual design than it is to sell usability because people see visual design immediately, but it takes time and experience to see and understand usability (and some users never seem to consciously notice it at all).

I had no idea Steve Jobs felt that way about Larry Tesler. There were so many great UI experts at Apple, like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. While I love Mac OS X for its stability and its Unix support, I prefer the interface of the classic Mac OS, and it seemed to me that many third-party applications of the era were even more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines compared to later eras.

A dream desktop OS for me would be something with a classic Mac interface and with conformity to the Apple human interface guidelines of the 1990s, but with Lisp- or Smalltalk-like underpinnings to support component-based software. It would be the ultimate alternate universe Mac OS, the marriage of Smalltalk (with Lisp machine influence) with Macintosh innovations. Of course, there were many projects at Apple during the 80s and 90s that could’ve led to such a system.

Now that I’m a community college professor, I have more free time in the summer months for side projects...

> It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

Same. For just one example, consider how submenus work. You don't notice when they're done right, but when they're done poorly, they will disappear when you try to choose a submenu item, or stick around when you expect them to go away. Getting them right is subtle; Apple got them right, and plenty of web pages still get them wrong.

That's interface design. Flashy translucency effects are something else.

Isn't macOS the one, though, which immediately closes menus if you accidentally click or release over a divider? That always bugs me.

Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.

And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.

So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.

Perhaps they learned something from that? Look at modern MBP models which have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card slots.

I think the implication was that if they went on anything but vibes, they would have never removed MagSafe, HDMI, or SD card slots.

Mr. Vibe works for OpenAI now.

Mr. Vibe wasn't the issue. Tim Apple was the one who gave his leash infinite slack, and he's still there calling the shots. Probably conferring equally stupid protections onto whoever replaced Ive internally.

Lord only knows Altman is probably doting on him in the same way. This industry just never learns.

Are you telling me that the trillion dollar company had to actually release a laptop with only two USBC ports to "learn" that people need more ports on a laptop? And you do that on a straight face on a sequence where it was claimed that they carefully consider usability and accessibility?

And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.

I think you're holding it wrong

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

Yes, I think they would do that.

Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.

Also, here's a list of bugs I've personally observed over just the last two months: https://gist.github.com/BenWheatley/29a3c22203d90ae80465cdb1...

3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.

Of course they would. Have you used Sequoia? It's a hot dumpster fire that's caused me unending frustration with how they've broken the bluetooth and networking stack, introduced unprecedented instability (anyone else's macbooks suddenly crashing and restarting while the lid is closed and it's in sleep mode?) and a host of other issues. Apples has been taking one step forward and two steps back with their software and design for a long time, and they have increasingly preferred form over function, and hidden, obtuse UX.

If their hardware wasn't so damn good for my professional work, I wouldn't go near this child slavery enabling shitshow of a corporation. I don't know if I've ever felt as trivialized or patronized as watching someone in formal dress talk to me about how many new ways I can express myself to my friends via emoji or whatever else as I have when watching Apple keynotes. It feels like they've tried to commoditize interaction even more than Meta. It all feels so hollow. You can tell Steve is gone.

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

Yes, and where have you been for the last two decades? :) The last time Apple did actual UX research must have been in the late 1990s.

Exposé and multi touch seem too well designed for no research.

Absolufuckingloothy.

The Apple of today is nowhere near what the Apple of Steve Jobs was.

Bugs galore, UX issues galore. Overall it's a mashup of various staff egos over everything.

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