It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
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).
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...
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.
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.
Heavy research indeed
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.
I'm a Schrodinger's old man.