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Apple's Products Are Getting Harder to Use

42 points by milen 11y ago

WorkingClassDev 11y ago
They are also getting more broken imho. Case point, multiple Apple TVs on the same network, quite often broken. iTunes WiFi sync often breaks without a plug in and fiddle session, I guess they really want you to use iCloud. App crashes on iOS are quite significant now where they used to be very rare imo.
- emsy 11y ago
  OS X is even worse. Up until Mountain Lion I could easily left my Mac on for weeks without needing to reboot (except for crucial updates). Since Mavericks and even more so Yosemite it has gotten out of hand. I need to reboot at least once a week, WiFi is broken and Finder regularly hangs up on me.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    I'm playing with the El Capitan beta right now on a ~4 year old MBP and I will say that it seems very snappy and I haven't needed to reboot except for updates, and I haven't had any wifi issues (had a lot on Mavericks). That said, it's a clean install and I've been pretty gentle with it. I'm cautiously optimistic that they're improving these matters.
  - zer00eyz 11y ago
    At the os level I have only had a more stable system with every OS upgrade. Wifi is back to its old happy self with the last few patches and seems more stable, Yosemite early days it was a bear I will give you that. What I have found is that some things just don't play nice with the OS. Openvpn is kind of a bear and I'm not sure what the underlying cause is, but its easy to kill and restart so not a major issue there. I do regular heath checks and cleanup though. EtreCheck is a great way to get a look at all the cruft in your system and make some calls on what to clean out/up!
MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
I agree with the observations. On a more technical level: I find it astonishing how bad AirDrop is. I am typing this on a brand new MacBook Pro, and I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6. I tried, multiple times, it simply doesn't work. Googling the issues tells me I'm not alone. Not a huge issue, but there was a time when this would have been unthinkable. Also, iTunes. Just give it the bullet. Please. Oh, and Finder - kill it with fire will ya? Windows Explorer is still better, which is embarrassing.
- Skunkleton 11y ago
  Wifi related things in general seem to give the iPhone a challenge. Handoff for example took a device reset to get working properly.
- newjersey 11y ago
  > I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6 I think the main issue is that Apple wants to abstract the idea of files and a filesystem away... at least on iOS devices. While Apple does not say it in as many words, here is a quote straight from the horse's mouth: > The iOS file system is geared toward apps running on their own. To keep the system simple, users of iOS devices do not have direct access to the file system and apps are expected to follow this convention. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/FileSystemProgrammingGuide/FileSystemOverview/FileSystemOverview.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileMa...
  - arrrg 11y ago
    Air Drop not working is a technical bug. It should work (but often randomly doesn’t for no discernible reason).
    - mercer 11y ago
      Agreed, but I think quite of these bugs are very much the result of Apple not really caring enough. They have their focus, and sadly for many of us, it appears to be iOS over mac, and the iOS approach to files over a filesystem. I don't think this is a new thing. The Finder is terrible, and has been for a long time. iPhoto hasn't been great for me either, nor iTunes. But if I look at how most of the less-geeky users (and I suppose the majority of Apple users) around me use their macs, I kind of get it. They don't use iPhoto, iTunes and Finder the way I do, so they don't generally have issues or miss features that I do miss. For the most part I can live with this situation, because the upside is that Apple's focus (and resulting neglect of other things) can lead to really great things. I love iOS and even though I have and would happily use an Android device, I am still willing to pay a premium for an Apple device. A lot of the most common use-cases, for me at least, are still superior within the Apple ecosystem. I'm enough of a 'common user' most of the time to accept the horrible experience whenever I step out of this role. For now, Apple feels a bit like those (new?) companies/startups that send you packages of ingredients with recipes once a week so you can cook a few quite good (but relatively pricy) meals throughout the week with little fuss. The experience is good, the result is healthy and fresh even though it feels a bit... extravagant/excessive sometimes. But for people like me who don't want prepackaged meals, but who also don't like cooking from scratch all the time (especially not just for myself), it's a good solution. The problem Apple is facing right now is that for whatever reason too much of the stuff they do focus on, and too much of their essential functionality, has been slipping, and if the continue on this track, they'll turn into McDonalds. And I don't go to McDonalds, because it's both unhealthy and strangely expensive. I'd just go back to cooking from scratch.
keepitsurreal 11y ago
Is this really an issue? We're now living in a society saturated with smartphones, tablets and PCs. Kids today are born with iPhones and iPads. Older populations don't seem to be having problems using these devices, heck my 80 year old grandmother can use her iPhone, Mac, and iPad perfectly. As our society adopts basic principles of computer interaction we can make them more advanced while keeping the same relative level of simplicity.
- rymndhng 11y ago
  That's what I wonder as well. We've been inundated with mobile interaction for the last 7 sevens that maybe it's ok to start peeling off some of the layers. If you started with the flat iOS UI from the beginning it would have been very difficult to get accustomed to. Nowadays, we don't rely on those skeuomorphic affordances because we assume touch interfaces are the defacto. That said though, I do agree that we should think critically about seasoned vs beginner interfaces. We should strive to accommodate both without causing detriment to one group or another.
cmiles74 11y ago
This article is a bit weak on detail, leaving us to fill in with our own anecdotes. I have one, last night my partner couldn't figure out how to add a new item in the "Reminder" application. Looking over their shoulder, it wasn't obvious to me either. The answer: click on the blank line. Kind of elegant and at the same time, confusing. After years of pressing the "plus" icon, Apple has switched gears and left us behind. In my opinion, the problem is Apple's departure from the hints they've been training people on since the first iPhone.
mkozlows 11y ago
I think any observation that imagines that old-school dropdown-menu-based applications are easier to use than iOS/Android applications is empirically off-base. More people use, more fluently, phone apps than ever used those desktop ones. That's not to say that iOS-style interfaces are perfect -- obviously there are flaws there -- but if your starting premise is that MacOS was easier to use than iOS, you're just fundamentally at odds with reality, and need to figure out which of your premises are wrong.
- ehvatum 11y ago
  Compare the usability of newer versions of iOS with older versions, then. In my opinion, there's been a lot of regression.
tomelders 11y ago
I think Apple still is "The Best", but like many others, I feel it's fast becoming "The Best" of a bad bunch, which isn't good enough for me, and hopefully isn't good enough for Apple. I blame UXers.
alec626 11y ago
You could not be more wrong. They're still very easy to use, and way easier and less confusing than Android. The gestures for swiping between full screen apps are the same on the mac and iPad. They're both 4 fingers. And if you can fit 4 fingers on a magic mouse, I commend you because it's so small! I really don't see how they're getting harder to use. And I help people with it all the time, and what I hear all the time is, "wow that actually makes sense." It's the logical way. So, I completely disagree and I'd be willing to say the majority would also agree.
- lisper 11y ago
  > way easier and less confusing than Android That's a pretty low bar.
  - tenfingers 11y ago
    The "indicator of menu's presence" in Android is .. well, better than the indicator of scrollable pages? The issues in Android are countless indeed. Lollipop flashes the tiny scrollbar on the right in scrollable panes for a second (or less?), before disappearing. I cannot count how many times I just didn't realize I never saw options because the content was cut exactly between two lines. Despite knowing this fact, I regularly miss scrollable panes, even on dialogs I visited before. The ample (absurd) margins around all controls don't help. They made large (unpocketable) phone screens too small to display actual content! The last discovery was the red-on-blue color in the clock, which has awful readability. I never saw any worse as far as UI is concerned, even disregarding the seriously questionable "material design" concept, which might just as well be called "style", as there's no usability designed into it at all. The bar was always quite low, but has been lowered even further.
- molecule 11y ago
  > The gestures for swiping between full screen apps are the same on the mac and iPad. They're both 4 fingers. Not sure about iPad, but on OSX, it's three fingers for the track pad and two for the magic mouse: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895
cpcallen 11y ago
The trend of choosing minimalist styling over usability has been obvious for some time. Apple is one of the worst offenders - particularly in light of their previous commitment to usability - but sadly not the only one. My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations? (I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally, be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still used in other parts of the UI.)
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  This was also one of my biggest issues with Windows 8 (became slightly better in 8.1 and so far seems much better in 10). There were so many things that were hidden behind what I would call "right-click in the middle of nowhere" and had no other way to access them (I assume that's supposed to be equivalent to the long press in a touch UI) that I never figured out until I gave up and went to youtube to figure out how the hell things work. Apparently you were intended to just go around right clicking on anything until something happened? I don't necessarily mind that they changed the UI, but I shouldn't have to go wade through a morass of bloated youtube videos just to figure out how to do anything. Even the Microsoft website never had instructions. And of course using builtin search (which used to be great on Windows) never explained shit about the modern UI.
alialkhatib 11y ago
It's probably worth pointing out that the author is Don Norman - one of the pioneering thinkers in user-centered design and Human-Computer Interaction in general. He wrote The Design of Everyday Things, which I would argue is required reading for anyone interested in HCI (admittedly a bold claim, considering how broad the field is). I'm tempted to agree, but I'm not sure whether this is entirely Apple's fault (some of it is, certainly), or whether this is partly the fault of developers (or maybe shifting the blame back to Apple, Apple's fault for not imposing even stricter interface guidelines). Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Is this what Norman is talking about? It's not clear because he avoids giving specific case studies, which isn't his style (DOET is a veritable plethora of strong examples to illustrate his points), making me think he's saving them for his later critique. Norman mentions research that users can't remember more than a small number of icons, and I'd like to know what research in particular he's referencing, but coming from a cultural anthro background and with some very superficial knowledge of semiotics, that seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete; maybe he's talking about people learning icons in a very constrained timeframe? People learn to identify countless icons throughout their lives and (within a given culture) you can reliably show people hundreds of iconic symbols and images that they would recognize immediately. I agree with the general argument that Apple (and others) are overloading us with iconography that we need to internalize (iOS emoji in particular seems like too much too quickly, but maybe that's just me), but I think the answer to this is that it takes time for cultures to adopt icons into their lexicon. I would argue that helping the user form a consistent and "accurate" mental model for how things work is the most important thing a designer can do. He points to this in some examples (swipe gestures in particular, which evidently are inconsistent between iPhone, iPad, Trackpad, and Magic Mouse), but he doesn't name the overarching point as such (or if he ties it all together, I missed it). At the end, Norman previews that he and Bruce Tognazzini are writing a critique on "How Apple ruined design", giving me the sense that this post was about drumming up interest for that. If that's the case, mission accomplished.
- kps 11y ago
  > Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe > from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Interesting example. If the phone is set to a RTL language, do you swipe from the right to go back? Or is the answer some do, some don't?
toddmorey 11y ago
Look, it's not without its faults, but iOS makes for a _much_ more approachable device than a 1993-era Mac. My young son cannot read, write, or speak, and I'm amazing at how productive he is on the iPad. For example, without instruction, he's organized his programs into folders, a task that I know he still can't perform on a Mac, complete with all its menus. Probably the most compelling advancement of iOS is that it has a "home" state. No matter how far you go or how lost you get, you can always press one physical button to get back to a familiar starting point. I didn't realize how big that would be, and how much it would do to make users feel grounded and encourage exploration. For all types of users, I think that's a great advancement. As for the gestures, there really are some confusing advanced ones, and I'd bet they have very little real-world traction. Happily, tap, swipe, and pinch are pretty much the only ones you need, and most users can pick those up in the first few minutes.
- lordleft 11y ago
  That insight about the home button is brilliant! I never realized how important it is to have that.
kleer001 11y ago
Author seems to me to mainly focus on the gestures of an interface. I'm not a big fan of greasy fingered swiping on a tablet or phone. I'll use it if I have to, but won't prefer it. Three fingers swipe up is back and two fingers in a circle is save?! Not literally, but there's usually a dozen different gestures all with ambiguous meaning. At least ambiguous to me. But I don't have an immediate fix for the tablet interface. I guess I'm an old fogy and prefer typing on a keyboard with my withered vestigial arms.
dont-say-that 11y ago
I guess this isn't up for discussion on HN. Blasted from the top page straight out of the top 1000!
musesum 11y ago
The Apple Watch has been getting a bad rap for complexity, even though it is simpler than the iPhone. What are the main gestures, today, for the iPhone? Home-button-press(once twice long-siri thrice), home-button-double-tap, home-screen-swipe(left right middle-down mid), bottom-up, top-down (Today Notifications), three-finger-swipe, pinch, shake. What did I miss? Compare that with the original iPhone. We started simple, and then year-by-year, a new gesture is added, which seems natural because it's only a small change from what was done before. The UX has been boiling the frog. So, then the Apple Watch comes along. It is less complex than the iPhone 6, but more complex than the original iPhone. Because it is starting from scratch. It highlights how complex iOS has become. Would love to see a UX reboot. But, who at Apple has power to do so? Would it turn out like Window's tiles?
- secstate 11y ago
  The boiling frog is a great analogy for what's become of Apple's UI and UX
- dingaling 11y ago
  I had a colleague recently who handed me his iPhone ( a 5, I think. Tall and skinny. ) and asked me to look-up some astronomical data while he was busy. Not having used one before, I can say the the interface is far from intuitive. I couldn't find the way to switch between running apps, I kept having to go back to the home screen and hit the app's icon. I've just searched now out of interest and apparently I should have swiped four-fingers to the left. How is that in any way discoverable? Or even easy to do when walking.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    FYI, double-tapping the Home button shows you a list of recent applications. That would be the most commonly used way of switching apps, and it's one of the first tips that is shown to a user on a "new" phone by the OS. Four finger swiping is an optional feature that power users can turn on. Discoverability is still a valid issue, of course.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
xname 11y ago
iTunes is the hardest to use. I never understand the logic behind library / sync / drag&drop ...
hellofunk 11y ago
It would probably be fairer not to compare Apple's products today with Apple's products from yesterday, but its products today with other companies' products today. As technology and tech culture and users evolve, so too do the interfaces. Now I have not used a Windows computer in a couple of years, but when I made the switch to OSX, I found it much easier and more instinctive to use. I'd probably say the same about a Windows computer from 2 years ago vs. an Apple computer from 15 years ago, which like in this article, is an unfair comparison.
- hnal943 11y ago
  When I switched from Windows to OSX, I was constantly frustrated by the way Apple chose to organize things. I hated having the menu bar be on the top of the screen and not part of the window for example. Trying to take a screen shot was impossible without google. It was just as least as difficult learning to be productive on a mac as it was when I transitioned to Ubuntu. I've come to believe that there is no such thing as a universally intuitive interface - consistency is achievable, but everyone comes to your interface with a different background and therefore a different sense of what is intuitive.
  - kps 11y ago
    Jef Raskin wrote an essay from CACM (21 years ago!) titled Intuitive equals familiar. Text here: http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    I find Apple's use of the trackpad for swiping between desktops or between full-screen apps to be much quicker for navigating an environment than the alt-tab or mouse use on Windows. Perhaps Windows has improved to offer similar Apple navigation techniques, but I really like that when I switched to OSX. I also think Time Machine is one of best native OS tools I've ever seen, painless incremental backups with no effort by the user.
    - hnal943 11y ago
fimoreth 11y ago
It could be just because we're coming from Android, but my friend and I experienced an approachability problem with the iPad about a month ago. I was using an iPad on a flight (the in-flight entertainment was broken) and it took us, both computer engineers, a good ten minutes to figure out how to turn down the brightness. It was a painful experience trying to find the settings - swipe down? No.. swipe other directions, nope. It took us forever to discover that 'settings' is just an app on the tablet. Maybe it was just because we are part of the Android ecosystem, but using one didn't seem very logical. Note: Neither of us specifically avoid Apple products, but just found them way too expensive with university for purchase.
- skygazer 11y ago
  As an iOS guy, I've had an exactly reciprocal experience struggling to navigate Android to change seemingly basic settings. I think our mutual difficulties make more sense if we assume "intuitive" is secretly a synonym for "familiar." We've quietly absorbed our preferred platforms preferred metaphors and idioms over time, and they're intricate and (hopefully) self-consistent. Without intending to sound too flowery, what I find most interesting though is that the competition between the platforms seems to simultaneously drive both convergence and differentiation that's almost — musical. If you step back and watch the entwined evolutions you can see a lot of mutual love and hate.

42 points by milen 11y ago

They are also getting more broken imho. Case point, multiple Apple TVs on the same network, quite often broken. iTunes WiFi sync often breaks without a plug in and fiddle session, I guess they really want you to use iCloud. App crashes on iOS are quite significant now where they used to be very rare imo.

emsy 11y ago
OS X is even worse. Up until Mountain Lion I could easily left my Mac on for weeks without needing to reboot (except for crucial updates). Since Mavericks and even more so Yosemite it has gotten out of hand. I need to reboot at least once a week, WiFi is broken and Finder regularly hangs up on me.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  I'm playing with the El Capitan beta right now on a ~4 year old MBP and I will say that it seems very snappy and I haven't needed to reboot except for updates, and I haven't had any wifi issues (had a lot on Mavericks). That said, it's a clean install and I've been pretty gentle with it. I'm cautiously optimistic that they're improving these matters.
- zer00eyz 11y ago
  At the os level I have only had a more stable system with every OS upgrade. Wifi is back to its old happy self with the last few patches and seems more stable, Yosemite early days it was a bear I will give you that. What I have found is that some things just don't play nice with the OS. Openvpn is kind of a bear and I'm not sure what the underlying cause is, but its easy to kill and restart so not a major issue there. I do regular heath checks and cleanup though. EtreCheck is a great way to get a look at all the cruft in your system and make some calls on what to clean out/up!

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago

I agree with the observations. On a more technical level: I find it astonishing how bad AirDrop is. I am typing this on a brand new MacBook Pro, and I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6. I tried, multiple times, it simply doesn't work. Googling the issues tells me I'm not alone. Not a huge issue, but there was a time when this would have been unthinkable. Also, iTunes. Just give it the bullet. Please. Oh, and Finder - kill it with fire will ya? Windows Explorer is still better, which is embarrassing.

Skunkleton 11y ago
Wifi related things in general seem to give the iPhone a challenge. Handoff for example took a device reset to get working properly.
newjersey 11y ago
> I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6 I think the main issue is that Apple wants to abstract the idea of files and a filesystem away... at least on iOS devices. While Apple does not say it in as many words, here is a quote straight from the horse's mouth: > The iOS file system is geared toward apps running on their own. To keep the system simple, users of iOS devices do not have direct access to the file system and apps are expected to follow this convention. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/FileSystemProgrammingGuide/FileSystemOverview/FileSystemOverview.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileMa...
- arrrg 11y ago
  Air Drop not working is a technical bug. It should work (but often randomly doesn’t for no discernible reason).
  - mercer 11y ago
    Agreed, but I think quite of these bugs are very much the result of Apple not really caring enough. They have their focus, and sadly for many of us, it appears to be iOS over mac, and the iOS approach to files over a filesystem. I don't think this is a new thing. The Finder is terrible, and has been for a long time. iPhoto hasn't been great for me either, nor iTunes. But if I look at how most of the less-geeky users (and I suppose the majority of Apple users) around me use their macs, I kind of get it. They don't use iPhoto, iTunes and Finder the way I do, so they don't generally have issues or miss features that I do miss. For the most part I can live with this situation, because the upside is that Apple's focus (and resulting neglect of other things) can lead to really great things. I love iOS and even though I have and would happily use an Android device, I am still willing to pay a premium for an Apple device. A lot of the most common use-cases, for me at least, are still superior within the Apple ecosystem. I'm enough of a 'common user' most of the time to accept the horrible experience whenever I step out of this role. For now, Apple feels a bit like those (new?) companies/startups that send you packages of ingredients with recipes once a week so you can cook a few quite good (but relatively pricy) meals throughout the week with little fuss. The experience is good, the result is healthy and fresh even though it feels a bit... extravagant/excessive sometimes. But for people like me who don't want prepackaged meals, but who also don't like cooking from scratch all the time (especially not just for myself), it's a good solution. The problem Apple is facing right now is that for whatever reason too much of the stuff they do focus on, and too much of their essential functionality, has been slipping, and if the continue on this track, they'll turn into McDonalds. And I don't go to McDonalds, because it's both unhealthy and strangely expensive. I'd just go back to cooking from scratch.

keepitsurreal 11y ago

Is this really an issue? We're now living in a society saturated with smartphones, tablets and PCs. Kids today are born with iPhones and iPads. Older populations don't seem to be having problems using these devices, heck my 80 year old grandmother can use her iPhone, Mac, and iPad perfectly. As our society adopts basic principles of computer interaction we can make them more advanced while keeping the same relative level of simplicity.

rymndhng 11y ago
That's what I wonder as well. We've been inundated with mobile interaction for the last 7 sevens that maybe it's ok to start peeling off some of the layers. If you started with the flat iOS UI from the beginning it would have been very difficult to get accustomed to. Nowadays, we don't rely on those skeuomorphic affordances because we assume touch interfaces are the defacto. That said though, I do agree that we should think critically about seasoned vs beginner interfaces. We should strive to accommodate both without causing detriment to one group or another.

cmiles74 11y ago

This article is a bit weak on detail, leaving us to fill in with our own anecdotes. I have one, last night my partner couldn't figure out how to add a new item in the "Reminder" application. Looking over their shoulder, it wasn't obvious to me either. The answer: click on the blank line. Kind of elegant and at the same time, confusing. After years of pressing the "plus" icon, Apple has switched gears and left us behind. In my opinion, the problem is Apple's departure from the hints they've been training people on since the first iPhone.

mkozlows 11y ago

I think any observation that imagines that old-school dropdown-menu-based applications are easier to use than iOS/Android applications is empirically off-base. More people use, more fluently, phone apps than ever used those desktop ones. That's not to say that iOS-style interfaces are perfect -- obviously there are flaws there -- but if your starting premise is that MacOS was easier to use than iOS, you're just fundamentally at odds with reality, and need to figure out which of your premises are wrong.

ehvatum 11y ago
Compare the usability of newer versions of iOS with older versions, then. In my opinion, there's been a lot of regression.

tomelders 11y ago

I think Apple still is "The Best", but like many others, I feel it's fast becoming "The Best" of a bad bunch, which isn't good enough for me, and hopefully isn't good enough for Apple. I blame UXers.

alec626 11y ago

You could not be more wrong. They're still very easy to use, and way easier and less confusing than Android. The gestures for swiping between full screen apps are the same on the mac and iPad. They're both 4 fingers. And if you can fit 4 fingers on a magic mouse, I commend you because it's so small! I really don't see how they're getting harder to use. And I help people with it all the time, and what I hear all the time is, "wow that actually makes sense." It's the logical way. So, I completely disagree and I'd be willing to say the majority would also agree.

lisper 11y ago
> way easier and less confusing than Android That's a pretty low bar.
- tenfingers 11y ago
  The "indicator of menu's presence" in Android is .. well, better than the indicator of scrollable pages? The issues in Android are countless indeed. Lollipop flashes the tiny scrollbar on the right in scrollable panes for a second (or less?), before disappearing. I cannot count how many times I just didn't realize I never saw options because the content was cut exactly between two lines. Despite knowing this fact, I regularly miss scrollable panes, even on dialogs I visited before. The ample (absurd) margins around all controls don't help. They made large (unpocketable) phone screens too small to display actual content! The last discovery was the red-on-blue color in the clock, which has awful readability. I never saw any worse as far as UI is concerned, even disregarding the seriously questionable "material design" concept, which might just as well be called "style", as there's no usability designed into it at all. The bar was always quite low, but has been lowered even further.
molecule 11y ago
> The gestures for swiping between full screen apps are the same on the mac and iPad. They're both 4 fingers. Not sure about iPad, but on OSX, it's three fingers for the track pad and two for the magic mouse: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895

cpcallen 11y ago

The trend of choosing minimalist styling over usability has been obvious for some time. Apple is one of the worst offenders - particularly in light of their previous commitment to usability - but sadly not the only one. My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations? (I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally, be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still used in other parts of the UI.)

fluidcruft 11y ago
This was also one of my biggest issues with Windows 8 (became slightly better in 8.1 and so far seems much better in 10). There were so many things that were hidden behind what I would call "right-click in the middle of nowhere" and had no other way to access them (I assume that's supposed to be equivalent to the long press in a touch UI) that I never figured out until I gave up and went to youtube to figure out how the hell things work. Apparently you were intended to just go around right clicking on anything until something happened? I don't necessarily mind that they changed the UI, but I shouldn't have to go wade through a morass of bloated youtube videos just to figure out how to do anything. Even the Microsoft website never had instructions. And of course using builtin search (which used to be great on Windows) never explained shit about the modern UI.

alialkhatib 11y ago

It's probably worth pointing out that the author is Don Norman - one of the pioneering thinkers in user-centered design and Human-Computer Interaction in general. He wrote The Design of Everyday Things, which I would argue is required reading for anyone interested in HCI (admittedly a bold claim, considering how broad the field is). I'm tempted to agree, but I'm not sure whether this is entirely Apple's fault (some of it is, certainly), or whether this is partly the fault of developers (or maybe shifting the blame back to Apple, Apple's fault for not imposing even stricter interface guidelines). Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Is this what Norman is talking about? It's not clear because he avoids giving specific case studies, which isn't his style (DOET is a veritable plethora of strong examples to illustrate his points), making me think he's saving them for his later critique. Norman mentions research that users can't remember more than a small number of icons, and I'd like to know what research in particular he's referencing, but coming from a cultural anthro background and with some very superficial knowledge of semiotics, that seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete; maybe he's talking about people learning icons in a very constrained timeframe? People learn to identify countless icons throughout their lives and (within a given culture) you can reliably show people hundreds of iconic symbols and images that they would recognize immediately. I agree with the general argument that Apple (and others) are overloading us with iconography that we need to internalize (iOS emoji in particular seems like too much too quickly, but maybe that's just me), but I think the answer to this is that it takes time for cultures to adopt icons into their lexicon. I would argue that helping the user form a consistent and "accurate" mental model for how things work is the most important thing a designer can do. He points to this in some examples (swipe gestures in particular, which evidently are inconsistent between iPhone, iPad, Trackpad, and Magic Mouse), but he doesn't name the overarching point as such (or if he ties it all together, I missed it). At the end, Norman previews that he and Bruce Tognazzini are writing a critique on "How Apple ruined design", giving me the sense that this post was about drumming up interest for that. If that's the case, mission accomplished.

kps 11y ago
> Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe > from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Interesting example. If the phone is set to a RTL language, do you swipe from the right to go back? Or is the answer some do, some don't?

toddmorey 11y ago

Look, it's not without its faults, but iOS makes for a _much_ more approachable device than a 1993-era Mac. My young son cannot read, write, or speak, and I'm amazing at how productive he is on the iPad. For example, without instruction, he's organized his programs into folders, a task that I know he still can't perform on a Mac, complete with all its menus. Probably the most compelling advancement of iOS is that it has a "home" state. No matter how far you go or how lost you get, you can always press one physical button to get back to a familiar starting point. I didn't realize how big that would be, and how much it would do to make users feel grounded and encourage exploration. For all types of users, I think that's a great advancement. As for the gestures, there really are some confusing advanced ones, and I'd bet they have very little real-world traction. Happily, tap, swipe, and pinch are pretty much the only ones you need, and most users can pick those up in the first few minutes.

lordleft 11y ago
That insight about the home button is brilliant! I never realized how important it is to have that.

kleer001 11y ago

Author seems to me to mainly focus on the gestures of an interface. I'm not a big fan of greasy fingered swiping on a tablet or phone. I'll use it if I have to, but won't prefer it. Three fingers swipe up is back and two fingers in a circle is save?! Not literally, but there's usually a dozen different gestures all with ambiguous meaning. At least ambiguous to me. But I don't have an immediate fix for the tablet interface. I guess I'm an old fogy and prefer typing on a keyboard with my withered vestigial arms.

dont-say-that 11y ago

I guess this isn't up for discussion on HN. Blasted from the top page straight out of the top 1000!

musesum 11y ago

The Apple Watch has been getting a bad rap for complexity, even though it is simpler than the iPhone. What are the main gestures, today, for the iPhone? Home-button-press(once twice long-siri thrice), home-button-double-tap, home-screen-swipe(left right middle-down mid), bottom-up, top-down (Today Notifications), three-finger-swipe, pinch, shake. What did I miss? Compare that with the original iPhone. We started simple, and then year-by-year, a new gesture is added, which seems natural because it's only a small change from what was done before. The UX has been boiling the frog. So, then the Apple Watch comes along. It is less complex than the iPhone 6, but more complex than the original iPhone. Because it is starting from scratch. It highlights how complex iOS has become. Would love to see a UX reboot. But, who at Apple has power to do so? Would it turn out like Window's tiles?

secstate 11y ago
The boiling frog is a great analogy for what's become of Apple's UI and UX
dingaling 11y ago
I had a colleague recently who handed me his iPhone ( a 5, I think. Tall and skinny. ) and asked me to look-up some astronomical data while he was busy. Not having used one before, I can say the the interface is far from intuitive. I couldn't find the way to switch between running apps, I kept having to go back to the home screen and hit the app's icon. I've just searched now out of interest and apparently I should have swiped four-fingers to the left. How is that in any way discoverable? Or even easy to do when walking.
- scott_karana 11y ago
  FYI, double-tapping the Home button shows you a list of recent applications. That would be the most commonly used way of switching apps, and it's one of the first tips that is shown to a user on a "new" phone by the OS. Four finger swiping is an optional feature that power users can turn on. Discoverability is still a valid issue, of course.
- snowwrestler 11y ago

xname 11y ago

iTunes is the hardest to use. I never understand the logic behind library / sync / drag&drop ...

hellofunk 11y ago

It would probably be fairer not to compare Apple's products today with Apple's products from yesterday, but its products today with other companies' products today. As technology and tech culture and users evolve, so too do the interfaces. Now I have not used a Windows computer in a couple of years, but when I made the switch to OSX, I found it much easier and more instinctive to use. I'd probably say the same about a Windows computer from 2 years ago vs. an Apple computer from 15 years ago, which like in this article, is an unfair comparison.

hnal943 11y ago
When I switched from Windows to OSX, I was constantly frustrated by the way Apple chose to organize things. I hated having the menu bar be on the top of the screen and not part of the window for example. Trying to take a screen shot was impossible without google. It was just as least as difficult learning to be productive on a mac as it was when I transitioned to Ubuntu. I've come to believe that there is no such thing as a universally intuitive interface - consistency is achievable, but everyone comes to your interface with a different background and therefore a different sense of what is intuitive.
- kps 11y ago
  Jef Raskin wrote an essay from CACM (21 years ago!) titled Intuitive equals familiar. Text here: http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
- hellofunk 11y ago
  I find Apple's use of the trackpad for swiping between desktops or between full-screen apps to be much quicker for navigating an environment than the alt-tab or mouse use on Windows. Perhaps Windows has improved to offer similar Apple navigation techniques, but I really like that when I switched to OSX. I also think Time Machine is one of best native OS tools I've ever seen, painless incremental backups with no effort by the user.
  - hnal943 11y ago

fimoreth 11y ago

It could be just because we're coming from Android, but my friend and I experienced an approachability problem with the iPad about a month ago. I was using an iPad on a flight (the in-flight entertainment was broken) and it took us, both computer engineers, a good ten minutes to figure out how to turn down the brightness. It was a painful experience trying to find the settings - swipe down? No.. swipe other directions, nope. It took us forever to discover that 'settings' is just an app on the tablet. Maybe it was just because we are part of the Android ecosystem, but using one didn't seem very logical. Note: Neither of us specifically avoid Apple products, but just found them way too expensive with university for purchase.

skygazer 11y ago
As an iOS guy, I've had an exactly reciprocal experience struggling to navigate Android to change seemingly basic settings. I think our mutual difficulties make more sense if we assume "intuitive" is secretly a synonym for "familiar." We've quietly absorbed our preferred platforms preferred metaphors and idioms over time, and they're intricate and (hopefully) self-consistent. Without intending to sound too flowery, what I find most interesting though is that the competition between the platforms seems to simultaneously drive both convergence and differentiation that's almost — musical. If you step back and watch the entwined evolutions you can see a lot of mutual love and hate.