Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.

Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

View on HN

> Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.

This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost instantly noticeable.

I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.

Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.

Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.

People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.

Apple spent the next several years walking lots of the changes back, in particular the thin text and overdone translucency

One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)

I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.

Count me as someone who never turned around on the iOS 7+ flat design being a usability degradation.

> then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at

Sorry, who decided this? Which people exactly?

Alan Dye designed IOS7 as well.

iOS7 was great; it had mistakes but they ironed them out. Aqua under Jobs had mistakes too... OS X was hated at first.

Apple often took bold steps and then improved things.

But Liquid Glass seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com