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Comment by laborcontract | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related: I recently googled Steve's son, Reed, out of curiosity. I haven't thought to look his kids up since when he died.

Reed is a spitting image of Steve[0] - voice and all. Steve was a hero of mine since I was a kid (I don't care what your opinion is about having a hero, let alone having steve as one). Seeing reed talk made me wistful. I miss steve dearly.

It also reminded of the many things I miss about the Apple I grew up loving. Leadership with an opinion is one of them. And by opinion, I mean a leader who isn't a slave to the A|B test or to shareholders. Someone who cared deeply about his product and could communicate it in words that made me care.

0: edit here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBZhruuQ44

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> Reed is a spitting image of Steve - voice and all

i thought you might be exaggerating but holy crap, you're right

what's wrong with a/b tests?

Instagram is a product of a/b testing. Go figure

I'm using A|B as a blanket term for things that make a company think it's improving by using the opinions of others in lieu of having an opinion themselves. Focus groups also fall into this category.

It works for hardware, because that's the only way to do it. There's no 2 populations for hardware. All decisions are one way doors.

Software must use feedback, otherwise you'll end up with duds like Camera Control, 3D touch, and .. Apple Maps (1.0).

Apple doesnt have that culture, and it shows in their software.

I don’t dislike them inherently, but as people tend to believe they’re a one-stop solution it’s worth pointing out what they can’t do:

- On their own they don’t provide a hypothesis. You need to do user research to discover those.

- On their own they don’t tell you the value in what you’re testing. You need further analysis to understand that.

- They’re typically a short-term solution to longer-term problems. It’s easy to use them to achieve local maxima without understanding the wider picture.

- They’ll only tell you what the majority of your users find effective, without highlighting what hurts the journey for a minority of users. For example you could A/B test something that improves the journey for every group apart from visually impaired users, but block them completely, and still implement it because it’s the winning bucket.

Yes, there are guardrails you can put in place for all of these, and good teams do, but that requires a degree of maturity that is hard for a lot of organisations.

It's a good tool for optimizing around local maxima and is (generally) incapable of propelling you through a major product gap to the next (and hopefully greater) maxima.

But IMO the industry dogma is to use it for everything, particularly around greenfield development and new product areas that are pre-PMF.

Importantly also is that in many organizations A/B testing has become a crutch to avoid understanding the underlying system being measured.

Conversion rate rises by 5% if the button is green. Why? But rather than using experimentation as a tool for structured understanding many organizations devolve to "just test every change".

The practical outcome is that product teams commit elementary errors because they fail to understand why their products are successful, and product velocity slows as teams prove unable/unwilling to make any decisions without pushing something to prod.

People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.

I'd say that what apple did with liquid glass, forcing it onto its customers is kind of what jobs would do. "We know better, shut up plebe"

In that way, the apple from today isn't very different from the apple of jobs.

I think everything I know about Apple's culture under jobs was that steve let his lieutenants have at each other. That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.

> That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.

This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple.

Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.

I'd say that the majority of users instead are between "I don't care about this" and "this looks cool, whatever".

The "majority" you talk about doesn't exist in my experience, it's like the 1% arguing between "this is life changing" and "I hate this".

> People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.

The reality is, people hate change period. The flat UI that everyone is now pining for was pretty roundly hated when it debuted too. And the reaction to the original OS X interfaces with its "lickable" buttons was also pretty full of hate and anger. And in every one of those cases, some of the complaints were valid, and Apple in some of those cases walked the changes back or adjusted them. But a large UI change also just comes with a lot of hate in general because everything is different.

There are plenty of parts about the new liquid glass UIs that are fine. They may not be your preferred aesthetic choice, but the flat UI or the heavy skeumorphic UI of days of old wasn't everyone's preferred aesthetic choice either. Personally I've found myself recently looking for KDE themes that bring back late 90's platinum/beOS/Next style "drawn 3D" UIs (which is a terrible term for it, but I don't have a better word at hand for what I'm thinking of). Liquid Glass will be refined, improved and sanded down into something people are fine with and in 10 more years when Apple releases a new UI we'll have this same discussion again.

I greatly liked flat UI. That was the first time I actually liked iOS design, skewmorphism was yuck.

And I'm sure some people greatly like (or will come to greatly like) Liquid Glass. Personally, I think I like the overall concept better than the flat UI, but there's no question that in comparison, Liquid Glass is very unpolished. My biggest problem with flat UI was that everything was ... flat. I think that's part of what's been driving me back to late 90's UI themes too. We have fancy, complex machines capable of faking 3d perspectives in amazing ways and for way less compute cost than we paid for it in the late 90s. And depth can convey a lot of information that you can easily lose in a flat UI.

But there are some real rough edges to be sanded down still. There are places where the transparency effects mean the underlying color/text bleeds into the menu / UI text that you actually want to read. It happens way less than you'd expect from critical screen shots, and a lot of the time it's less that it makes the UI text unreadable and more that it makes it look like a graphical glitch. But it does happen, that's not great and needs to get cleaned up.

There's also a weird level of "flatness" to some parts of the UI, that seem to rely on color contrasts to get the depth, but then that means that in certain situations the depth that should be there is missing. A good example if this is the safari button bar. On a site like HN where the background is white/off-white, the buttons and their bezels just sort of look like a flat white on a flat light grey. A site with a solid dark grey like daringfireball's website on the other hand allows the edges of the buttons to give a little bit of depth, but there's basically 0 contrast between the control backgrounds and the bar background. But then a site like slashdot has a medium grey background and now the buttons not only have color contrast but the slight shading around the bottom edges gives them depth that's not present in either of the other cases. When it works, the effect is nice, the problem is their theming system isn't (yet?) smart enough to make it work all the time.

I don't have problems with flat. I do have problems with unnecessary borders around buttons. In my opinion, space separates design elements enough and borders, beautiful as they are, with glass transparency effects and other bells and whistles, is just a visual clutter. And Liquid Glass design introduces quite a lot of new borders upon borders upon borders, in a style quite resembling an unholy love child of Windows Vista and flash websites of the 00s.

The could definitely do with cutting down some of the empty space and the “border stacking” problem that feels like old fashioned “div padding” stacking when doing html, though I feel like that trend started a few versions back in the flat ui design. Interestingly the iPhone version of Liquid Glass seems to have much less “extra” white space than the Mac version of it, which seems backwards because the iPhone should need/want more for larger touch targets. Or maybe it’s just less noticeable because it needs those large touch targets but also lives on a smaller screen.

I guess it's part of the trend now. Some time ago both Google and Apple rolled out very flat UIs -- Apple in iOS 7 and Google with Material Design in Android 5, and both where mostly flat. I don't know, maybe they were influenced by Microsoft's Flat UI that ultimately went nowhere. Yet, over time, Google began introducing more and more meaty designs with more aggressive rounded corners, eventually ending up doing everything very curvy. Maybe folks at Apple looked at that and wanted some of those curves, too. So previously the trend was to flatten everything, now the trend is the reverse of the previous.

> People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.

Based on what?

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