4 ms·

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 forw

by 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).

by akamaka 11y ago

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).