11 ms·

Destroying Apple’s Legacy

190 points by milen 11y ago

happyscrappy 11y ago
Not that Google has a legacy of great design, but don't all these points apply to Material as well?
- epistasis 11y ago
  Yes, and also to Microsoft's flat UIs these days as well. But that doesn't stop criticism of Apple's UIs from being relevant.
- notjustanymike 11y ago
  Actually no. Take a look at the Google clock app - it actually addresses a lot of the negatives in this article. The article argues that Apple is bad at UI design, not that flat & material are wrong.
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    Hear, hear. In exactly the same way that some of the current bad design decisions were made as an overreaction to the worst excesses of skeuomorphism, people often exhibit an unwarranted negative reaction to 'flat design', just because some of it -as in Apple's case - is so awful. It is entirely possible to adhere to the concepts behind flat design, yet still differentiate between a label and a button. Just because Apple can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done.
- on_and_off 11y ago
  More or less. Microsoft, Apple and Google are all pursuing variations of what can be called flat design. There are many variations in flat design though. In the small details, Google and Apple have as many similarities as differences. One of the differences is that Material relies heavily on shadows (one of the very few good design ideas from the first versions of Android). The most important buttons are usually elevated. Color is also used to inform the user. The accent color of the app is used to color clickable elements. I am currently in the process of implementing material design in a large scale mobile android app. So far it is going extremely well, the new design direction respond to many of our gripes with Holo and is good enough in order to be able to make a strong point with the product team in order to implement it instead of making a frankenmonster between iOS design & Holo like we did in the past. Time will tell how well it performs with our users.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    I'd argue that MS did a great job with flat design in Windows Phone 7 because they were willing to sacrifice aesthetics for consistency. Everything on WP7 was stark black backgrounds, which made it really obvious what was a button - a colored box was always clickable. The moment you let graphic designers in who care about making things look good, flat design falls apart because they want to change it up. Flat works if you let the designers construct the design language and then never let them near the actual individual UIs and get tempted to deviate from their original language.
- tdkl 11y ago
  Their material "whitespace" design is really functional. /s New Google app: http://imgur.com/HWZDjXK http://imgur.com/HWZDjXK Youtube redesign on an Android tablet: http://imgur.com/a/ciqgD http://imgur.com/a/ciqgD Youtube on a phone makes you realize why they're pushing 5.5"+ phones: https://i.imgur.com/2d0Neg2.png https://i.imgur.com/2d0Neg2.png (yes, that whole large card is an ad, while top 25% of the screen is static) Landscape is even worse: https://i.imgur.com/kEYoHyM.png https://i.imgur.com/kEYoHyM.png
  - norea-armozel 11y ago
    Yeah, it's weird how non-vendor apps take their design cues from Apple, Google, and Microsoft but they tone down the obsession with empty/negative space separation which makes it wholly easier to use. Seriously, I don't know why but every time I use the Google Youtube App it's hard for me to focus on what I'm doing. I'm not sure if it's all the empty space or the lack of any explicit separator between items (videos and what not). But it's just harder to use the app than to just open the web browser and get the video that way. :/
epistasis 11y ago
I have found the flat design incredibly difficult to use. In particular, the new Apple Music app was almost completely undiscoverable for me. It wasn't until I was reading patch notes that I realized that it had a key feature that I had been searching the UI for more than a month. That feature was to show only the music available offline, and it's hidden behind a down arrow next to a heading label. (Rather than the ... that other menus have). Apple has never been perfect at UIs, but they've always been better than this in my experience. Deciding to hide key information and be as cryptic as possible works great for designers that already know the UI, but it works terribly for users that are still learning it. This type of elementary mistake, all too common by those who are deep in the act of creation, is best corrected by stepping back from the problem and approaching everything with the mind of a beginner. That or giving the device to an outsider and observing them, good old fashioned trials. That's what UX needs these days, not more fashionistas trying to remove data and UI cues. The industry needs a big wakeup call. Mobile and even the web (like Google Docs) are becoming a churn of bad experience.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Agreed on the new iTunes and iPhone Music app. I had to re-learn how to shuffle songs, and how to pull up the album of the song that was playing the other day. Extremely non-intuitive and hidden behind 4-5 interactions. All for the sake of cramming in new paid features that I'll never use - "For You", "New", "Radio", and "Connect". Why Apple? You make enough money from iPhone sales already. Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?
  - minthd 11y ago
    >> Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line? They will try to use radio in 2 way: 1. Make it unqiue and hard to copy, to add one more reason for people to use their device. 2. When making content deals, it's hard to get good deals if you come without a large crowd of subscribers.So apple plan to to use your radio subscription as content negotiation tool, and than upsell you a tv service - and there's a lot of money there.
  - bluedino 11y ago
Shivetya 11y ago
the dramatic loss of color and warmth when the new look came about took me back to the days when I had a PS/2 50z with the VGA gray scale monitor. While everything can look well defined it does at times look a little too stark; if software could have a dystopian air to it compared to what came before they did well.
astrodust 11y ago
"Apple used to lead the world in interface design" does not mean their designs were without serious flaws. Nobody would get up and defend System 7 as the pinnacle of usability, it was downright quirky and strange in places, and by the time System 9 arrived it'd gotten downright surreal. Things only made sense in the context of history. The difference between Apple and other companies is not that Apple gets it right every time, but that Apple genuinely tries. Some other companies literally do not care how their products look, they just ship whatever the engineering team cobbles together with snippets from from Google Image Search. Microsoft's making similar efforts lately, so that's encouraging to see, and even Google is making strides in reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications.
- cmiles74 11y ago
  I would say that right now, Apple isn't really trying. Things have always varied from application to application, but right now it's a real hodge-podge. The tiny link targets in particular drive me nuts. I've been using the iPhone for years and sometimes I look at an app and I can't tell what is "click-able" and what's not.
  - jcoby 11y ago
    Try turning on button shapes. It's been a major help for me. It may not be as clean as the stock setup but it's far more usable for me. Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Button Shapes.
    - Malic 11y ago
      I do think the loss of visual affordances was a mistake on Apple's part. But enabling Button Shapes does offset things quite a bit. However, I do suspect that not all developers test with Button Shapes enabled. The native Twitter client looked a little "broken" for the longest time with Button Shapes enabled. It took awhile but I think it has been fixed.
- oconnore 11y ago
  > reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications The fact that you are talking about "ugly" is the entire problem.
amelius 11y ago
> ... has produced some of the best industrial design in the history of consumer products. Like the completely non-ergonomic, design-over-function, keyboards?
- jmduke 11y ago
  The author is not claiming that all of Apple's hardware products are home runs (I certainly agree with your take on the keyboard, and can't stand the Magic Mouse), but that some of them have been absolutely world class. Do you disagree with that?
  - amelius 11y ago
    Well the keyboard is the main device I interface with when I am actually using the product (besides the screen, which is just a flat panel). So one could hope that they could at least get that one right.
- spike021 11y ago
  I think everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Personally I see nothing wrong with the keyboards and actually prefer them to some regular keyboards. I can still type ~100+ wpm and the keys aren't particularly missing anything I need.
  - mitchty 11y ago
    Count me as another lover of their keyboards. I've even bought extras for work just so I don't need to use any of the crazy things they have here. Long travel keyboards annoy me, I vastly prefer the chiclet style keyboards.
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  That's a weak complaint – even if one of their products was not the best, it doesn't prevent the rest from being. That aside, Apple's keyboards aren't bad IMO. I'm pretty happy with them generally – they have decent durability, enough key travel, and are relatively quiet. Certainly better than the keyboards provided as standard by any other major computer manufacturer.
vinceguidry 11y ago
Software is harder than hardware. Both are incredibly hard, but software is harder. Software has to rely on the hardware, that's why any truly serious builder of software deeply understands the hardware and Apple understands that, with limited resources, hardware is more important to get right. You can always change software later. Hardware stays in the consumer's hands for years. Bad decisions there will go uncorrected, even if you take the extraordinary step of issuing a recall, not everyone will bring in their kit. This dynamic means that every company that has limited means, that is to say, every company, is going to have shitty software. Because hardware is more important, so it gets all the design attention. But software is harder. And if you're not doing hardware, like Microsoft, then your software is still going to be shitty because you don't understand hardware. It's why your VCR was famously hard to program, it's why the entertainment system in your car is horrible, it's why the old stuff that doesn't have any software at all is way more reliable than the new stuff that does. The answer here is not to criticize Apple, but to help them out by engineering better software. I used to hate texting on an iDevice because I loved using Swype and iOS didn't have it. Apple responded to the market with Smart Keyboards, they're not perfect but it beats the old way. Now they have an ad blocking API for browsers. Apple is the tech world's quality champion. No other company in the world can pump out quality like Apple. But again, software is really fucking hard. So let's work together here, folks. Show the world a new way.
- cozzyd 11y ago
  Perhaps in support of your point, Microsoft's hardware products (keyboards, Xboxes, the Surfaces) are excellent. Despite being an ardent Linux user, I always buy Microsoft keyboards.
gok 11y ago
The leading complaints about the "Edit Alarm" screen is kinda weird...unless "Apple’s new direction" means Apple's new direction post-2006. The new: https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374.png https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374.... The old: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-Software-Update-Patch-Ready-for-Alarm-Bug-2.png http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-S... There was always a "time-wasting dial." The labels were always "styled with more visual impact than the actual data." All four different types of data elements were always "styled the same, with the same visual weight."
- WWKong 11y ago
  Thanks for posting the images side by side. It was tremendously refreshing to see the previous interface. To me the affordance on that is way way higher than the new flat trend.
- AlexandrB 11y ago
  Yeah, the dials were always a questionable idea :( The one thing they're good at though is giving information on what's above/below the current option without having to click/tap (unlike a combo box). Is there a better interaction model for this kind of operation?
  - inyorgroove 11y ago
    I think android has a nice UI for this takes tow taps: 1. Select hour: http://i.imgur.com/0SZGvUA.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/0SZGvUA.png?1 2. Select minutes http://i.imgur.com/UOj43B6.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/UOj43B6.png?1
    - comex 11y ago
      Urgh. At least in my case, when I set an alarm, I already know what time I want and really don't benefit from any kind of visualization - so just give me a keypad and let me tap in the digits, something everything from the phone app to my microwave has trained me to do quickly, rather than confusing me with a one-of-a-kind UI element. Luckily, I don't have to care because I just use Siri to set and manage alarms.
Bartweiss 11y ago
At this point, a lot of decisions that were once skeuomorphic are now a matter of tradition and user expectation. For a whole generation, the image of a floppy means "save" not because of it's physical history but because that's the icon everyone else uses for "save". Abandoning choices like "button means clickable" and "colored and underlined means link" isn't just a move to flat design, it's an attempt to retrain users on software conventions that have transcended their physical origins.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Sure, the floppy doesn't communicate anything to anybody except as a cryptic artifact of the past. But other design language, like buttons and underlined links, communicate based on the necessity for some sort of language. Changing this language to something else should not occur unless there's some tangible benefit to the change. Language changes all the time, but normal language change happens in the course of two-way communication between people. UI language is more one-way, it's like a speech that's delivered to an audience. If a speaker delivers a speak using an entirely new language that the audience doesn't understand, there had better be 1) some benefit to the change of language, and 2) clear communication to the audience about what the new language is. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have failed on both points 1) and 2) in too many cases, IMHO. Languages are fashion, to some degree, but they are also functional. Flat UI has in too many cases placed the emphasis on looking cool and pushing "forward" over the primary point of a UI, which is to communicate to the user.
- stormbeta 11y ago
  This is a big part of why I've been reluctant to buy an iOS device. Originally it was because of the requirement to use the first-party keyboard software, but now it's because they've changed the design language in a way that conflicts with everything but iOS - and as a result, the UI feels remarkably unintuitive and confusing, even if it makes sense internally.
hyperion2010 11y ago
A lingering question of mine: "Has anyone _actually_ done UI research since the 70s or are all these 'innovations' just bullshit?"
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Even if they do research it's a vastly different context. <70s was niche and rich. Nowadays it's for the mainstream. I recently learned that Xerox GUI had an OO copy function. A generic one, for any object. When Jobs and Gates took the GUI, they mostly brought the metaphor, not the underlying ideas.
  - kps 11y ago
    Star also designed the mouse to be used with the keyboard, rather than instead of it. The generic object functions were arranged to the left of the alphanumeric section, to be used by the left hand to operate on the object selected by the mouse in the right. They had a column of wide keys for the main object operations (DELETE, COPY, MOVE, PROPERTIES) and a single-width column further to the left with secondary operations (AGAIN, FIND, SAME [copy properties], OPEN). They also did not have an invisible clipboard. COPY meant what today would be copy+paste, and MOVE, cut+paste. If you wanted a 'clipboard' document it would be manifest and direct like everything else, and you would COPY or MOVE things to and from it.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    What is the "OO copy function" you mean, and how was it different from the "copy" operation on the Edit menu in the Mac UI?
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      IIRC in a demo they were copying a UI element, a whole panel or a window. It felt like a live object playground. AFAIK other OSes where limited to semi-type strings.
      - 11y ago
matthewmacleod 11y ago
Bit over-the-top I think, with some misleading statements. Apple still publish the HIG. See the iOS version here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/ https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx... Contrary to what the article says, it does explain why various UI elements are designed as they are – not just thoughtless promotion of aesthetics over interaction. I think people often fall back on 'nobody thought about this and it's rubbish' arguments when the reality is often closer to 'they changed this and I don't like it' – the latter is a totally valid complaint, but it's also qualitatively different. In my personal experience, I've not seen computer-naïve users of iOS struggle to a greater degree with iOS 7+ than with any of the previous versions. YMMV of course, but I think the extent to which it's a problem is overstated. There are a couple of exceptions, of course – the reminders app has some stupid UI decisions that irritate me. But what software doesn't? How about that floating 'create a new document' button that was in Google Docs/Sheets/etc. until recently? Every single time I opened it, I had to hunt around for the button to create a new document because it wasn't where I expected it to be. But that doesn't mean Material is awful – it just means that it's a complex, long-term challenge to create a consistent UI applicable to a wide variety of applications. And I don't think modern UX is all that bad.
- acomjean 11y ago
  As someone who answered questions about ios 8 for people that have never used it. Its not as intuitive as people think. The "switch" icons (or described to me as two circles next to one another) seem to be a source of confusion. Which direction is on? Why?
  - ecopoesis 11y ago
    That's strange. The transition to the flat switches is one of the things I like most about the iOS 7 design. Previously, I could never figure out which way was on, but post flat design I have no trouble.
  - rikkus 11y ago
    Amusingly you can change something in accessibility that adds a 1 and a 0 to the switches. For some reason I'm still unclear... Does pressing it make it 1 because I can see the 1 to press, or is it now 1 (yes). Android by default has off and on displayed. No idea how they make this work in languages where the equivalent words are longer.
guelo 11y ago
I've had conclusive data that a 3D-looking button was converting significantly better but have been overruled because of the "sleek", "clean" bullshit that passes for design these days.
- woah 11y ago
  With that argument, at some point you're just advocating pop-up flashing neon banners.
  - paublyrne 11y ago
    That's a bit of a leap. There is nothing wrong with having your call to action pop, and a lot of thought is given by designers to position, colour, context, text, and texture, in order to ensure that it does. Maybe a button that doesn't look that much like a button doesn't entice us as much as one that does.
lips 11y ago
Here's a secret. Apple has never designed truly wonderful user interaction. But they have been unafraid to say "no," less horrible than most others, and opinionated. These discussions don't benefit from a false narrative of them falling from a grace they never held. (Mac owner from plus to pad)
zeveb 11y ago
Great, and true, article—but interestingly, he's guilty of a similar thing: his CSS makes it impossible to tell visited vs. never-visited links.
- ddagradi 11y ago
  "she" (or "they" if you're not certain) - the author is a woman.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    Whoops. I didn't see any information regarding her sex on the article, which is why I used—as is correct for English—'he.' I'd never use 'they.'
gress 11y ago
The author wasn't around when MacOS was new, otherwise she'd remember that the things she thinks are obvious are just conventions that people had to learn. Easier than a CLI, but something to learn just the same.
Pxtl 11y ago
Imho, the problem is that flat design is intensely restrictive. Suddenly things that used to be available to freely design with have become UI cues... the designer can no longer play with color and layout and let the buttons stand out by button-bevel and the like... now the color and layout are part of the UI language. Apple, being a design-oriented company, can't keep fiddling with individual app layouts, which means they can't work within the hyper-restrictive design language of flat. Microsoft actually does much better with flat, I find, because I think there are less cooks in the "design" kitchen there.
- RogtamBar 11y ago
  The 'flat' design is a complete abomination compared to what came before. I could not believe my eyes when my dad showed me W10. I despair about humanity. Idiots following fashion instead of utility.
  - pil4rin 11y ago
    http://bit.ly/1L6VTe8 http://bit.ly/1L6VTe8
    - kgermino 11y ago
      Please don't use shortened links - HN will shorten overly long links on it's own and bit.ly links hide the ultimate destination.
      - sbuk 11y ago
        OT, but there is a delightful irony to the linked image and your comment. http://memecrunch.com/meme/1JCJ5/lighten-up-francis/image.png?w=400&c=1 http://memecrunch.com/meme/1JCJ5/lighten-up-francis/image.pn...
  - matthewmacleod 11y ago
    Meanwhile, back in the 'I'm not superior to everybody else' mere mortal's world… Discarding flat design as 'abomination' by 'idiots' is rather missing some of the wider design context. Take a look back as Swiss design from the 50s, for example. Lots of use of minimalism, bold colour, simple typography (Helvetica, even!). It's remarkably similar in some senses; one of the reasons it became popular was because of the perception that design had become fussy and overburdened by ornamental detail. I think we saw the same process of design evolution with modern flat designs. There was certainly a perception among some designers that it was difficult to build modern interfaces in part due to the cruft which had been accumulated over the years. Look at an iOS 6 device, for example; even though it's been only a few year, it looks utterly baroque to my eyes now. Needless lines, textures, gradients and shadows that obviously served a functional purpose at one point, but with that purpose gradually diluted as the functionality and interaction patterns of software evolved. Building to modern requirements – with things like touch-oriented interfaces and responsive applications – can become much more complex with these constraints. The thing is, design approaches will evolve over time. Designers, developers and UX folk will continue to tweak and adjust designs to offer a better experience. It's not always going to be right, or even visually appealing, but it's also a field that experiences constant change. Look at Google's Material, for example – it's not simply flat, but involves the use of animation, subtle gradients and shadows.
rsp1984 11y ago
I could not agree more with this article. Human brains are hard-wired to infer 3D structure from shading. Taking away shading means taking away 3D structure, means taking away one of the most important visual cues there is to help humans grasp interfaces. Also, coming from all the print media, human brains are conditioned to detect and separate important/immediate from un-important/less immediate content by looking at overall page structure and relative weights. Deciding against bold or large fonts for the looks takes that away too. Finally there is a ton of research pointing to the fact that fonts with a healthy amount of thickness is more easy to read than thin fonts. The debate is still on about serifed fonts I guess but using Light Helvetica for kind of everything quite certainly is a step in the wrong direction.
- rikkus 11y ago
  Yes I have an ipod and changed the font to thick and turned off the swoopy animations. You can do this via accessibility
Silhouette 11y ago
Oh, man, I have never wished so much that I could upvote a submission more than once. I wish this article could be pinned at the top of every discussion site used by web and app designers for the next... forever. The only thing in the design world that I find more infuriating than the current trends, and the accompanying blandness and usability issues, is when people try to justify those trends as being somehow superior to what we had before using the worst kind of retro-fitted mumbo jumbo. At least let's be honest that most places have adopted flat design because it's cheap, easy, and quick. At the bottom end of the market, making UIs a commodity is in itself no bad thing. For web applications, you can implement flat design in pure CSS, cutting down the bandwidth required for images. More generally, typical flat design elements are nicely scalable and Retina-ready, because everything is all done with such trivial vector graphics that no real effort or creativity is needed. You can adapt the simple layouts more easily to small screens as well. In fact, why develop anything original or even hire anyone with design skills at all, when you can just slap Bootstrap on it and charge the client an extra 200% for making the site responsive? Unfortunately, for anything above the bottom end of the market, and particularly for promoting UIs that offer better usability and/or more distinctive styles, the current trends are awful for all the reasons this article sets out.
nemo44x 11y ago
Not that Apple has perfect UI's (The clock dial is awful) but I feel like the ideas expressed in this article are that a UI should be designed as if the user is always using it for the first time. And that simply isn't true. With such a small screen a lot of things need to be considered, such as how easy is it to press a button without moving the hand and if this means sacrificing some natural ease of use - so be it. The user will still quickly learn how the UI works and adapt quickly.
akamaka 11y ago
It's funny to read this, because I personally find iOS to have by far the best UI of any mobile OS, and I consider the flat design of iOS7 to be a big step forward. Other people feel differently, and they consider Android superior, so clearly there is a difference in taste. The conundrum is that nobody seems to be able to clearly articulate why this is, and this article doesn't really help. For example, it says the timepicker is "awkward, time-wasting, inaccurate". Compared to what? Has anyone been able to measure how much time it wastes and how innaccurate it is? In the end, this article takes a thousand words to say little more than "This doesn't feel quite right to me", and doesn't reveal any root causes. Do people prefer different UIs because of differences in finger size, manual dexerity, visual attention? Does Apple's UI cater to a specific minority of users? Do biological differences make it impossible to satisfy everyone?
- woebtz 11y ago
  Flat design looks nice, but provides less affordances. In practice, flat designs have less detail, so convey less information. This leads to uncertainty/doubt/cognitive load where there was none before. Compare flat to skeumorphic designs: * What gestures can I perform on this UI element? * Where is the button/what can I click on? -or better yet- * What state is the iOS keyboard's shift key in (activated, deactivated, capslocked)? Apple isn't the only culprit, Android/Material design is similarly flat and less usable.
  - norea-armozel 11y ago
    If you think iOS 7/8/9 are hard to use, try Windows Phone 8. I had a Lumia 620 for a while and it was pretty hard to understand what was going on for some applications (aside from the fact that their back button behavior was something that was completely confusing). It's odd too because some of the non-Microsoft WP8 apps were very easy to use by comparison, but the Microsoft designed apps were the worse in terms of usability for me. So, I'm not sure if its the design aesthetics at play here or maybe just that some developers are better are conveying what certain UI elements do and what to expect from them. Either way, I think there has to be a middle ground between removing clutter from UI and avoiding what amounts to snow blindness for computers. In my opinion, the Material Design spec by Google is closer to the sweet spot than what I've seen so far (I think it needs more UI hinting of some kind and less empty space which makes it harder for me to focus on what's going on in an app).
draw_down 11y ago
Yes, they are doomed. Doomed!!
ovatsug25 11y ago
My company does a lot of paperwork. It turns out people want to work on something that looks like "paper" or the final printed out result. The idea of an interface with buttons may be commonplace to us, but there are many people for whom this is equally impossible.
kps 11y ago
> Minimalism in software is achieved by simplifying feature sets, > not stripping away pixels. <rant> Simplifying feature sets should not mean reducing functionality. That is the lazy way. Simplicity should remove the extraneous, redundant, and inefficient; functionality is not that. Functionality with simplicity requires things generality, orthogonality, composability.... Good software engineers eventually learn to be able to do this for the code they produce (whether the business case allows it is a separate question). It should be possible for good UI designers to do likewise. </rant> Edit: I am not disagreeing with the article author here: > It’s not minimalism to rip away the very things your users need.
DasIch 11y ago
> There was never any evidence that a few decorative pixels hurt the user. Is there any evidence that removing them does? > The HIG wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about interaction. > It was based on research, not trends. It's not about interaction now? It's not about research now? In which ways isn't it? I believe skeumorphism is just about aesthetics and trends. Well, actually I don't, I'm not sure what I should think I'm not aware of any research and can't make a good argument either way. Unlike the author I don't pretend I can though. There might be a problem, it might just be a figment of the authors imagination. In either case articles like this one certainly are a problem.
devy 11y ago
"so apple legal call was not a threat. it was a request. b.c. jony ive was personally offended by our soundboard. what world do i live in?"[1] - by the author Amy Hoy [1]: https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400 https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400
joesmo 11y ago
Once a UI design is perfected, as is the case often, companies continue to look for ways to change it simply for the sake of changing it and so they can announce something new. This is true of both Apple and Google in the mobile phone space. Every single time, the new UI is worse because it hasn't been tested and no designer can think of everything. There was nothing wrong with UIs before the flat design. Flat design didn't solve anything. But once Apple implemented it, everyone had to have it. If you don't have it, your app is not "slick" and "cool." And yes, those subjective qualities matter way more than the quality of your app or really, anything else.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
While the old iOS look was getting a little cheesy by the time iOS 6 rolled around, it was indeed very clear for the most part. Wooden bookshelves in iBooks might not have had much function, but the shading and glassy look on controls certainly did. As an example, coming from the angle of an individual who'd never approached a smartphone in his life, the function of the iOS 6 picker/spinner was immediately obvious. The shading and glassy highlights made it look like a real spinner and practically begged the user to interact with it. Distinct section separators made it perfectly clear that each section can be spun separately. Compare this to the picker in iOS 7 and up. Not only is there no shading or highlights to suggest how to interact with it, but now there are no separators — even if one presumes that it can be spun, it looks like the whole thing would spin. To make things worse, oddly skeumorphic 3D perspective has been added into the mix, presumably to try to suggest spinnability, but without partner cues it's just confusing. With this design, so much is left unknown until the user attempts interaction. Reference screenshot: http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-on-ios-7s-uipicker/UIDatePickerComparison.jpg http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-o... I personally feel that Apple struck a nice balance between design modesty, usability, and aesthetics with Mavericks desktop, but that's gone with Yosemite. Interestingly though, El Capitan adds in subtle hints of shading and depth in a few places. I wonder if we'll see things start to tilt back in the other direction with OS X 10.12 and iOS 10.

190 points by milen 11y ago

happyscrappy 11y ago

Not that Google has a legacy of great design, but don't all these points apply to Material as well?

epistasis 11y ago
Yes, and also to Microsoft's flat UIs these days as well. But that doesn't stop criticism of Apple's UIs from being relevant.
notjustanymike 11y ago
Actually no. Take a look at the Google clock app - it actually addresses a lot of the negatives in this article. The article argues that Apple is bad at UI design, not that flat & material are wrong.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  Hear, hear. In exactly the same way that some of the current bad design decisions were made as an overreaction to the worst excesses of skeuomorphism, people often exhibit an unwarranted negative reaction to 'flat design', just because some of it -as in Apple's case - is so awful. It is entirely possible to adhere to the concepts behind flat design, yet still differentiate between a label and a button. Just because Apple can't do it, doesn't mean it can't be done.
on_and_off 11y ago
More or less. Microsoft, Apple and Google are all pursuing variations of what can be called flat design. There are many variations in flat design though. In the small details, Google and Apple have as many similarities as differences. One of the differences is that Material relies heavily on shadows (one of the very few good design ideas from the first versions of Android). The most important buttons are usually elevated. Color is also used to inform the user. The accent color of the app is used to color clickable elements. I am currently in the process of implementing material design in a large scale mobile android app. So far it is going extremely well, the new design direction respond to many of our gripes with Holo and is good enough in order to be able to make a strong point with the product team in order to implement it instead of making a frankenmonster between iOS design & Holo like we did in the past. Time will tell how well it performs with our users.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  I'd argue that MS did a great job with flat design in Windows Phone 7 because they were willing to sacrifice aesthetics for consistency. Everything on WP7 was stark black backgrounds, which made it really obvious what was a button - a colored box was always clickable. The moment you let graphic designers in who care about making things look good, flat design falls apart because they want to change it up. Flat works if you let the designers construct the design language and then never let them near the actual individual UIs and get tempted to deviate from their original language.
tdkl 11y ago
Their material "whitespace" design is really functional. /s New Google app: http://imgur.com/HWZDjXK http://imgur.com/HWZDjXK Youtube redesign on an Android tablet: http://imgur.com/a/ciqgD http://imgur.com/a/ciqgD Youtube on a phone makes you realize why they're pushing 5.5"+ phones: https://i.imgur.com/2d0Neg2.png https://i.imgur.com/2d0Neg2.png (yes, that whole large card is an ad, while top 25% of the screen is static) Landscape is even worse: https://i.imgur.com/kEYoHyM.png https://i.imgur.com/kEYoHyM.png
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  Yeah, it's weird how non-vendor apps take their design cues from Apple, Google, and Microsoft but they tone down the obsession with empty/negative space separation which makes it wholly easier to use. Seriously, I don't know why but every time I use the Google Youtube App it's hard for me to focus on what I'm doing. I'm not sure if it's all the empty space or the lack of any explicit separator between items (videos and what not). But it's just harder to use the app than to just open the web browser and get the video that way. :/

epistasis 11y ago

I have found the flat design incredibly difficult to use. In particular, the new Apple Music app was almost completely undiscoverable for me. It wasn't until I was reading patch notes that I realized that it had a key feature that I had been searching the UI for more than a month. That feature was to show only the music available offline, and it's hidden behind a down arrow next to a heading label. (Rather than the ... that other menus have). Apple has never been perfect at UIs, but they've always been better than this in my experience. Deciding to hide key information and be as cryptic as possible works great for designers that already know the UI, but it works terribly for users that are still learning it. This type of elementary mistake, all too common by those who are deep in the act of creation, is best corrected by stepping back from the problem and approaching everything with the mind of a beginner. That or giving the device to an outsider and observing them, good old fashioned trials. That's what UX needs these days, not more fashionistas trying to remove data and UI cues. The industry needs a big wakeup call. Mobile and even the web (like Google Docs) are becoming a churn of bad experience.

roymurdock 11y ago
Agreed on the new iTunes and iPhone Music app. I had to re-learn how to shuffle songs, and how to pull up the album of the song that was playing the other day. Extremely non-intuitive and hidden behind 4-5 interactions. All for the sake of cramming in new paid features that I'll never use - "For You", "New", "Radio", and "Connect". Why Apple? You make enough money from iPhone sales already. Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?
- minthd 11y ago
  >> Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line? They will try to use radio in 2 way: 1. Make it unqiue and hard to copy, to add one more reason for people to use their device. 2. When making content deals, it's hard to get good deals if you come without a large crowd of subscribers.So apple plan to to use your radio subscription as content negotiation tool, and than upsell you a tv service - and there's a lot of money there.
- bluedino 11y ago

Shivetya 11y ago

the dramatic loss of color and warmth when the new look came about took me back to the days when I had a PS/2 50z with the VGA gray scale monitor. While everything can look well defined it does at times look a little too stark; if software could have a dystopian air to it compared to what came before they did well.

astrodust 11y ago

"Apple used to lead the world in interface design" does not mean their designs were without serious flaws. Nobody would get up and defend System 7 as the pinnacle of usability, it was downright quirky and strange in places, and by the time System 9 arrived it'd gotten downright surreal. Things only made sense in the context of history. The difference between Apple and other companies is not that Apple gets it right every time, but that Apple genuinely tries. Some other companies literally do not care how their products look, they just ship whatever the engineering team cobbles together with snippets from from Google Image Search. Microsoft's making similar efforts lately, so that's encouraging to see, and even Google is making strides in reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications.

cmiles74 11y ago
I would say that right now, Apple isn't really trying. Things have always varied from application to application, but right now it's a real hodge-podge. The tiny link targets in particular drive me nuts. I've been using the iPhone for years and sometimes I look at an app and I can't tell what is "click-able" and what's not.
- jcoby 11y ago
  Try turning on button shapes. It's been a major help for me. It may not be as clean as the stock setup but it's far more usable for me. Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Button Shapes.
  - Malic 11y ago
    I do think the loss of visual affordances was a mistake on Apple's part. But enabling Button Shapes does offset things quite a bit. However, I do suspect that not all developers test with Button Shapes enabled. The native Twitter client looked a little "broken" for the longest time with Button Shapes enabled. It took awhile but I think it has been fixed.
oconnore 11y ago
> reducing the amount of rampant ugly in their applications The fact that you are talking about "ugly" is the entire problem.

amelius 11y ago

> ... has produced some of the best industrial design in the history of consumer products. Like the completely non-ergonomic, design-over-function, keyboards?

jmduke 11y ago
The author is not claiming that all of Apple's hardware products are home runs (I certainly agree with your take on the keyboard, and can't stand the Magic Mouse), but that some of them have been absolutely world class. Do you disagree with that?
- amelius 11y ago
  Well the keyboard is the main device I interface with when I am actually using the product (besides the screen, which is just a flat panel). So one could hope that they could at least get that one right.
spike021 11y ago
I think everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Personally I see nothing wrong with the keyboards and actually prefer them to some regular keyboards. I can still type ~100+ wpm and the keys aren't particularly missing anything I need.
- mitchty 11y ago
  Count me as another lover of their keyboards. I've even bought extras for work just so I don't need to use any of the crazy things they have here. Long travel keyboards annoy me, I vastly prefer the chiclet style keyboards.
matthewmacleod 11y ago
That's a weak complaint – even if one of their products was not the best, it doesn't prevent the rest from being. That aside, Apple's keyboards aren't bad IMO. I'm pretty happy with them generally – they have decent durability, enough key travel, and are relatively quiet. Certainly better than the keyboards provided as standard by any other major computer manufacturer.

vinceguidry 11y ago

Software is harder than hardware. Both are incredibly hard, but software is harder. Software has to rely on the hardware, that's why any truly serious builder of software deeply understands the hardware and Apple understands that, with limited resources, hardware is more important to get right. You can always change software later. Hardware stays in the consumer's hands for years. Bad decisions there will go uncorrected, even if you take the extraordinary step of issuing a recall, not everyone will bring in their kit. This dynamic means that every company that has limited means, that is to say, every company, is going to have shitty software. Because hardware is more important, so it gets all the design attention. But software is harder. And if you're not doing hardware, like Microsoft, then your software is still going to be shitty because you don't understand hardware. It's why your VCR was famously hard to program, it's why the entertainment system in your car is horrible, it's why the old stuff that doesn't have any software at all is way more reliable than the new stuff that does. The answer here is not to criticize Apple, but to help them out by engineering better software. I used to hate texting on an iDevice because I loved using Swype and iOS didn't have it. Apple responded to the market with Smart Keyboards, they're not perfect but it beats the old way. Now they have an ad blocking API for browsers. Apple is the tech world's quality champion. No other company in the world can pump out quality like Apple. But again, software is really fucking hard. So let's work together here, folks. Show the world a new way.

cozzyd 11y ago
Perhaps in support of your point, Microsoft's hardware products (keyboards, Xboxes, the Surfaces) are excellent. Despite being an ardent Linux user, I always buy Microsoft keyboards.

gok 11y ago

The leading complaints about the "Edit Alarm" screen is kinda weird...unless "Apple’s new direction" means Apple's new direction post-2006. The new: https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374.png https://unicornfree.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_7374.... The old: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-Software-Update-Patch-Ready-for-Alarm-Bug-2.png http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Apple-iOS-S... There was always a "time-wasting dial." The labels were always "styled with more visual impact than the actual data." All four different types of data elements were always "styled the same, with the same visual weight."

WWKong 11y ago
Thanks for posting the images side by side. It was tremendously refreshing to see the previous interface. To me the affordance on that is way way higher than the new flat trend.
AlexandrB 11y ago
Yeah, the dials were always a questionable idea :( The one thing they're good at though is giving information on what's above/below the current option without having to click/tap (unlike a combo box). Is there a better interaction model for this kind of operation?
- inyorgroove 11y ago
  I think android has a nice UI for this takes tow taps: 1. Select hour: http://i.imgur.com/0SZGvUA.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/0SZGvUA.png?1 2. Select minutes http://i.imgur.com/UOj43B6.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/UOj43B6.png?1
  - comex 11y ago
    Urgh. At least in my case, when I set an alarm, I already know what time I want and really don't benefit from any kind of visualization - so just give me a keypad and let me tap in the digits, something everything from the phone app to my microwave has trained me to do quickly, rather than confusing me with a one-of-a-kind UI element. Luckily, I don't have to care because I just use Siri to set and manage alarms.

Bartweiss 11y ago

At this point, a lot of decisions that were once skeuomorphic are now a matter of tradition and user expectation. For a whole generation, the image of a floppy means "save" not because of it's physical history but because that's the icon everyone else uses for "save". Abandoning choices like "button means clickable" and "colored and underlined means link" isn't just a move to flat design, it's an attempt to retrain users on software conventions that have transcended their physical origins.

epistasis 11y ago
Sure, the floppy doesn't communicate anything to anybody except as a cryptic artifact of the past. But other design language, like buttons and underlined links, communicate based on the necessity for some sort of language. Changing this language to something else should not occur unless there's some tangible benefit to the change. Language changes all the time, but normal language change happens in the course of two-way communication between people. UI language is more one-way, it's like a speech that's delivered to an audience. If a speaker delivers a speak using an entirely new language that the audience doesn't understand, there had better be 1) some benefit to the change of language, and 2) clear communication to the audience about what the new language is. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have failed on both points 1) and 2) in too many cases, IMHO. Languages are fashion, to some degree, but they are also functional. Flat UI has in too many cases placed the emphasis on looking cool and pushing "forward" over the primary point of a UI, which is to communicate to the user.
stormbeta 11y ago
This is a big part of why I've been reluctant to buy an iOS device. Originally it was because of the requirement to use the first-party keyboard software, but now it's because they've changed the design language in a way that conflicts with everything but iOS - and as a result, the UI feels remarkably unintuitive and confusing, even if it makes sense internally.

hyperion2010 11y ago

A lingering question of mine: "Has anyone _actually_ done UI research since the 70s or are all these 'innovations' just bullshit?"

agumonkey 11y ago
Even if they do research it's a vastly different context. <70s was niche and rich. Nowadays it's for the mainstream. I recently learned that Xerox GUI had an OO copy function. A generic one, for any object. When Jobs and Gates took the GUI, they mostly brought the metaphor, not the underlying ideas.
- kps 11y ago
  Star also designed the mouse to be used with the keyboard, rather than instead of it. The generic object functions were arranged to the left of the alphanumeric section, to be used by the left hand to operate on the object selected by the mouse in the right. They had a column of wide keys for the main object operations (DELETE, COPY, MOVE, PROPERTIES) and a single-width column further to the left with secondary operations (AGAIN, FIND, SAME [copy properties], OPEN). They also did not have an invisible clipboard. COPY meant what today would be copy+paste, and MOVE, cut+paste. If you wanted a 'clipboard' document it would be manifest and direct like everything else, and you would COPY or MOVE things to and from it.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  What is the "OO copy function" you mean, and how was it different from the "copy" operation on the Edit menu in the Mac UI?
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    IIRC in a demo they were copying a UI element, a whole panel or a window. It felt like a live object playground. AFAIK other OSes where limited to semi-type strings.
    - 11y ago

matthewmacleod 11y ago

Bit over-the-top I think, with some misleading statements. Apple still publish the HIG. See the iOS version here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/ https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx... Contrary to what the article says, it does explain why various UI elements are designed as they are – not just thoughtless promotion of aesthetics over interaction. I think people often fall back on 'nobody thought about this and it's rubbish' arguments when the reality is often closer to 'they changed this and I don't like it' – the latter is a totally valid complaint, but it's also qualitatively different. In my personal experience, I've not seen computer-naïve users of iOS struggle to a greater degree with iOS 7+ than with any of the previous versions. YMMV of course, but I think the extent to which it's a problem is overstated. There are a couple of exceptions, of course – the reminders app has some stupid UI decisions that irritate me. But what software doesn't? How about that floating 'create a new document' button that was in Google Docs/Sheets/etc. until recently? Every single time I opened it, I had to hunt around for the button to create a new document because it wasn't where I expected it to be. But that doesn't mean Material is awful – it just means that it's a complex, long-term challenge to create a consistent UI applicable to a wide variety of applications. And I don't think modern UX is all that bad.

acomjean 11y ago
As someone who answered questions about ios 8 for people that have never used it. Its not as intuitive as people think. The "switch" icons (or described to me as two circles next to one another) seem to be a source of confusion. Which direction is on? Why?
- ecopoesis 11y ago
  That's strange. The transition to the flat switches is one of the things I like most about the iOS 7 design. Previously, I could never figure out which way was on, but post flat design I have no trouble.
- rikkus 11y ago
  Amusingly you can change something in accessibility that adds a 1 and a 0 to the switches. For some reason I'm still unclear... Does pressing it make it 1 because I can see the 1 to press, or is it now 1 (yes). Android by default has off and on displayed. No idea how they make this work in languages where the equivalent words are longer.

guelo 11y ago

I've had conclusive data that a 3D-looking button was converting significantly better but have been overruled because of the "sleek", "clean" bullshit that passes for design these days.

woah 11y ago
With that argument, at some point you're just advocating pop-up flashing neon banners.
- paublyrne 11y ago
  That's a bit of a leap. There is nothing wrong with having your call to action pop, and a lot of thought is given by designers to position, colour, context, text, and texture, in order to ensure that it does. Maybe a button that doesn't look that much like a button doesn't entice us as much as one that does.

lips 11y ago

Here's a secret. Apple has never designed truly wonderful user interaction. But they have been unafraid to say "no," less horrible than most others, and opinionated. These discussions don't benefit from a false narrative of them falling from a grace they never held. (Mac owner from plus to pad)

zeveb 11y ago

Great, and true, article—but interestingly, he's guilty of a similar thing: his CSS makes it impossible to tell visited vs. never-visited links.

ddagradi 11y ago
"she" (or "they" if you're not certain) - the author is a woman.
- zeveb 11y ago
  Whoops. I didn't see any information regarding her sex on the article, which is why I used—as is correct for English—'he.' I'd never use 'they.'

gress 11y ago

The author wasn't around when MacOS was new, otherwise she'd remember that the things she thinks are obvious are just conventions that people had to learn. Easier than a CLI, but something to learn just the same.

Pxtl 11y ago

Imho, the problem is that flat design is intensely restrictive. Suddenly things that used to be available to freely design with have become UI cues... the designer can no longer play with color and layout and let the buttons stand out by button-bevel and the like... now the color and layout are part of the UI language. Apple, being a design-oriented company, can't keep fiddling with individual app layouts, which means they can't work within the hyper-restrictive design language of flat. Microsoft actually does much better with flat, I find, because I think there are less cooks in the "design" kitchen there.

RogtamBar 11y ago
The 'flat' design is a complete abomination compared to what came before. I could not believe my eyes when my dad showed me W10. I despair about humanity. Idiots following fashion instead of utility.
- pil4rin 11y ago
  http://bit.ly/1L6VTe8 http://bit.ly/1L6VTe8
  - kgermino 11y ago
    Please don't use shortened links - HN will shorten overly long links on it's own and bit.ly links hide the ultimate destination.
    - sbuk 11y ago
      OT, but there is a delightful irony to the linked image and your comment. http://memecrunch.com/meme/1JCJ5/lighten-up-francis/image.png?w=400&c=1 http://memecrunch.com/meme/1JCJ5/lighten-up-francis/image.pn...
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  Meanwhile, back in the 'I'm not superior to everybody else' mere mortal's world… Discarding flat design as 'abomination' by 'idiots' is rather missing some of the wider design context. Take a look back as Swiss design from the 50s, for example. Lots of use of minimalism, bold colour, simple typography (Helvetica, even!). It's remarkably similar in some senses; one of the reasons it became popular was because of the perception that design had become fussy and overburdened by ornamental detail. I think we saw the same process of design evolution with modern flat designs. There was certainly a perception among some designers that it was difficult to build modern interfaces in part due to the cruft which had been accumulated over the years. Look at an iOS 6 device, for example; even though it's been only a few year, it looks utterly baroque to my eyes now. Needless lines, textures, gradients and shadows that obviously served a functional purpose at one point, but with that purpose gradually diluted as the functionality and interaction patterns of software evolved. Building to modern requirements – with things like touch-oriented interfaces and responsive applications – can become much more complex with these constraints. The thing is, design approaches will evolve over time. Designers, developers and UX folk will continue to tweak and adjust designs to offer a better experience. It's not always going to be right, or even visually appealing, but it's also a field that experiences constant change. Look at Google's Material, for example – it's not simply flat, but involves the use of animation, subtle gradients and shadows.

rsp1984 11y ago

I could not agree more with this article. Human brains are hard-wired to infer 3D structure from shading. Taking away shading means taking away 3D structure, means taking away one of the most important visual cues there is to help humans grasp interfaces. Also, coming from all the print media, human brains are conditioned to detect and separate important/immediate from un-important/less immediate content by looking at overall page structure and relative weights. Deciding against bold or large fonts for the looks takes that away too. Finally there is a ton of research pointing to the fact that fonts with a healthy amount of thickness is more easy to read than thin fonts. The debate is still on about serifed fonts I guess but using Light Helvetica for kind of everything quite certainly is a step in the wrong direction.

rikkus 11y ago
Yes I have an ipod and changed the font to thick and turned off the swoopy animations. You can do this via accessibility

Silhouette 11y ago

Oh, man, I have never wished so much that I could upvote a submission more than once. I wish this article could be pinned at the top of every discussion site used by web and app designers for the next... forever. The only thing in the design world that I find more infuriating than the current trends, and the accompanying blandness and usability issues, is when people try to justify those trends as being somehow superior to what we had before using the worst kind of retro-fitted mumbo jumbo. At least let's be honest that most places have adopted flat design because it's cheap, easy, and quick. At the bottom end of the market, making UIs a commodity is in itself no bad thing. For web applications, you can implement flat design in pure CSS, cutting down the bandwidth required for images. More generally, typical flat design elements are nicely scalable and Retina-ready, because everything is all done with such trivial vector graphics that no real effort or creativity is needed. You can adapt the simple layouts more easily to small screens as well. In fact, why develop anything original or even hire anyone with design skills at all, when you can just slap Bootstrap on it and charge the client an extra 200% for making the site responsive? Unfortunately, for anything above the bottom end of the market, and particularly for promoting UIs that offer better usability and/or more distinctive styles, the current trends are awful for all the reasons this article sets out.

nemo44x 11y ago

Not that Apple has perfect UI's (The clock dial is awful) but I feel like the ideas expressed in this article are that a UI should be designed as if the user is always using it for the first time. And that simply isn't true. With such a small screen a lot of things need to be considered, such as how easy is it to press a button without moving the hand and if this means sacrificing some natural ease of use - so be it. The user will still quickly learn how the UI works and adapt quickly.

akamaka 11y ago

It's funny to read this, because I personally find iOS to have by far the best UI of any mobile OS, and I consider the flat design of iOS7 to be a big step forward. Other people feel differently, and they consider Android superior, so clearly there is a difference in taste. The conundrum is that nobody seems to be able to clearly articulate why this is, and this article doesn't really help. For example, it says the timepicker is "awkward, time-wasting, inaccurate". Compared to what? Has anyone been able to measure how much time it wastes and how innaccurate it is? In the end, this article takes a thousand words to say little more than "This doesn't feel quite right to me", and doesn't reveal any root causes. Do people prefer different UIs because of differences in finger size, manual dexerity, visual attention? Does Apple's UI cater to a specific minority of users? Do biological differences make it impossible to satisfy everyone?

woebtz 11y ago
Flat design looks nice, but provides less affordances. In practice, flat designs have less detail, so convey less information. This leads to uncertainty/doubt/cognitive load where there was none before. Compare flat to skeumorphic designs: * What gestures can I perform on this UI element? * Where is the button/what can I click on? -or better yet- * What state is the iOS keyboard's shift key in (activated, deactivated, capslocked)? Apple isn't the only culprit, Android/Material design is similarly flat and less usable.
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  If you think iOS 7/8/9 are hard to use, try Windows Phone 8. I had a Lumia 620 for a while and it was pretty hard to understand what was going on for some applications (aside from the fact that their back button behavior was something that was completely confusing). It's odd too because some of the non-Microsoft WP8 apps were very easy to use by comparison, but the Microsoft designed apps were the worse in terms of usability for me. So, I'm not sure if its the design aesthetics at play here or maybe just that some developers are better are conveying what certain UI elements do and what to expect from them. Either way, I think there has to be a middle ground between removing clutter from UI and avoiding what amounts to snow blindness for computers. In my opinion, the Material Design spec by Google is closer to the sweet spot than what I've seen so far (I think it needs more UI hinting of some kind and less empty space which makes it harder for me to focus on what's going on in an app).

draw_down 11y ago

Yes, they are doomed. Doomed!!

ovatsug25 11y ago

My company does a lot of paperwork. It turns out people want to work on something that looks like "paper" or the final printed out result. The idea of an interface with buttons may be commonplace to us, but there are many people for whom this is equally impossible.

kps 11y ago

> Minimalism in software is achieved by simplifying feature sets, > not stripping away pixels. <rant> Simplifying feature sets should not mean reducing functionality. That is the lazy way. Simplicity should remove the extraneous, redundant, and inefficient; functionality is not that. Functionality with simplicity requires things generality, orthogonality, composability.... Good software engineers eventually learn to be able to do this for the code they produce (whether the business case allows it is a separate question). It should be possible for good UI designers to do likewise. </rant> Edit: I am not disagreeing with the article author here: > It’s not minimalism to rip away the very things your users need.

DasIch 11y ago

> There was never any evidence that a few decorative pixels hurt the user. Is there any evidence that removing them does? > The HIG wasn’t about aesthetics, it was about interaction. > It was based on research, not trends. It's not about interaction now? It's not about research now? In which ways isn't it? I believe skeumorphism is just about aesthetics and trends. Well, actually I don't, I'm not sure what I should think I'm not aware of any research and can't make a good argument either way. Unlike the author I don't pretend I can though. There might be a problem, it might just be a figment of the authors imagination. In either case articles like this one certainly are a problem.

devy 11y ago

"so apple legal call was not a threat. it was a request. b.c. jony ive was personally offended by our soundboard. what world do i live in?"[1] - by the author Amy Hoy [1]: https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400 https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/642446087802982400

joesmo 11y ago

Once a UI design is perfected, as is the case often, companies continue to look for ways to change it simply for the sake of changing it and so they can announce something new. This is true of both Apple and Google in the mobile phone space. Every single time, the new UI is worse because it hasn't been tested and no designer can think of everything. There was nothing wrong with UIs before the flat design. Flat design didn't solve anything. But once Apple implemented it, everyone had to have it. If you don't have it, your app is not "slick" and "cool." And yes, those subjective qualities matter way more than the quality of your app or really, anything else.

kitsunesoba 11y ago

While the old iOS look was getting a little cheesy by the time iOS 6 rolled around, it was indeed very clear for the most part. Wooden bookshelves in iBooks might not have had much function, but the shading and glassy look on controls certainly did. As an example, coming from the angle of an individual who'd never approached a smartphone in his life, the function of the iOS 6 picker/spinner was immediately obvious. The shading and glassy highlights made it look like a real spinner and practically begged the user to interact with it. Distinct section separators made it perfectly clear that each section can be spun separately. Compare this to the picker in iOS 7 and up. Not only is there no shading or highlights to suggest how to interact with it, but now there are no separators — even if one presumes that it can be spun, it looks like the whole thing would spin. To make things worse, oddly skeumorphic 3D perspective has been added into the mix, presumably to try to suggest spinnability, but without partner cues it's just confusing. With this design, so much is left unknown until the user attempts interaction. Reference screenshot: http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-on-ios-7s-uipicker/UIDatePickerComparison.jpg http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/images/posts/lifting-the-lid-o... I personally feel that Apple struck a nice balance between design modesty, usability, and aesthetics with Mavericks desktop, but that's gone with Yosemite. Interestingly though, El Capitan adds in subtle hints of shading and depth in a few places. I wonder if we'll see things start to tilt back in the other direction with OS X 10.12 and iOS 10.