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> Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve se
by petilon 7y ago
> Ive is, to state the obvious, preternaturally talented. But in the post-Jobs era, with all of Apple design, hardware and software, under his control, we’ve seen the software design decline and the hardware go wonky.
These two sentences don't make sense when read together. If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented. The moment iOS 7 was unveiled at WWDC I knew Emperor Ive is wearing no clothes. The number of basic design mistakes iOS 7 was astounding.
- coatol5 7y agoMind catching me up on what was wrong with iOS7?
- emsy 7y agoThe number one issue that's slowly getting fixed is not knowing which text is clickable or just a label. Then there were slow animations, arguably bad icons and inconsistent font usage. That's what I remember at least, I hope my memory's not failing me.
- sprafa 7y agoSome of the very early icons were so garish I remember being astonished by them.
- lonelappde 7y agoThe main thing was the horrific unreadable Helvetica Neue Ultralight system font.
- samstave 7y agoIf your memory is failing you, please make an appointment at the Genius Bar and someone will tell you why your memory is out of warranty and you just need to buy a new body. Simple! Also - you may try talking to Peter Thiel to inject your memory with more life essence... Oh wait, that may have been the Skeksis!!!
- petilon 7y agoThe most amazing writing on this topic (i.e., how Apple ruined iOS) is by Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace. Unfortunately he took down his blog. You can catch pieces of it on web archive though: https://web.archive.org/web/20130724000346/http://binarybonsai.com/blog https://web.archive.org/web/20130724000346/http://binarybons...
- dwaite 7y agoWhile there are good criticisms against iOS 7, it is a bit unfair to quote a criticism timed approximately against beta 1.
- UIZealot 7y agoObjectively, "bland", "confusing". Subjective, "ugly" comes to mind.
- brianpgordon 7y agoDisclaimer: I'm not a designer at all, and I have no design sense whatsoever. HN looks like something I'd design, except there would be no splash of color at the top. For me, the most striking change in iOS 7 was that the icons lost all of their character. I put together some before and after examples: https://i.imgur.com/hg8s50I.png https://i.imgur.com/hg8s50I.png The design was... sterilized. I specifically remember that when I updated my iPad and saw the new Safari icon, I said, out loud, "what the fuck is that?" Again, I don't know anything about usability or- well, I don't even know enough to have the vocabulary to describe what I don't know about design. But I thought the new icons were really dumb.
- corey_moncure 7y agoYou're right. The new icons were bad and they're still bad. The Photos and Game Center icons in particular don't communicate anything or make use of any visual metaphors at all. It's like something you'd expect from a second year art major. More to the point. Why did they need to be changed? What was so wrong with the way they were that a hundred million users needed to re-learn a user interface?
- mbrock 7y agoThe badness of the Photos icons is especially bad when it's used without a label, like in the text message composer.
- Ensorceled 7y agoTalent without vision. Jobs was focused on both esthetics and function. Ive was entirely esthetic driven and it shows in the lack of function.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThis 1000x. The battery had to be reduced in thickness, so it had to get wider and/or taller, and now we have iPad minis as phones. -edit ...and Jobs was not keen on the iPad minis.
- kamaal 7y agoMost people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs
- Spinfusor 7y agoiOS 7 was so much better than 6 it's not even funny. I'm so happy the skeuomorphic look was finally killed.
- Twisell 7y agoCan’t agree more iOS 7 design goal was to get rid of skeuomorphism. This goal was so overachieved than young readers probably will have to google the term.
- lonelappde 7y agoAnd now computer UIs are ugly as sin and impossible to find the interactive elements. Meanwhile in the physical world skeuomorphism is huge with Chinese factories pumping out all manner of products that just barely match the appearance of real objects made of quality materials, woods, and fabrics, when viewed in a store or just a photo in an online store.
- nvrspyx 7y agoIf you're going strictly based on going from skeuomorphic to flat, everyone is talking about the less intuitive and obvious UX design, not the aesthetic design of the UI. In other words, the function, not the form.
- scarface74 7y agoIt had to die for more practical reasons - a pixel perfect interface is impossible to maintain with difference screen sizes. At the time there was only the 3.5 inch iPhone and the iPad. Apple knew that various size iPhones were in the pipe.
- UIZealot 7y agoExcept it didn't have to be pixel perfect. Mac OS X was skeuomorphic and beautiful, yet it worked on various size displays, you could even resize a window, in real time, imagine that!
- TimTheTinker 7y ago> If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented. Sometimes it takes working with specific types of people to bring out someone's talent in the best way. I think Steve Jobs did that for Jony Ive in a unique way - it brought out the best in his work.
- sprafa 7y agoSteve thought of it as The Beatles model - the team should bring out the best in everyone around them. Look at how many people pushed back on him and made great things happen - the iTunes on Windows. The App Store on iOS. Etc etc
- steve19 7y agoMaybe Ive is an exceptionally talented designer but a poor senior executive. Steve kept Ive in check in a way Cook didn't appear to have done. Maybe its equally a failing of Cook. And I say this as someone who is terribly excited Ive is leaving and hoping for more funcional products.
- sprafa 7y agoConsidering all that I’ve had done, it might be hard to tamper him down. He might (wild speculation incoming) have thought of himself as equal to Steve and maybe he didn’t take it well to keep reporting to someone else. I mean he still speaks of Steve with a slightly absurd level of reverence.
- dwaite 7y agoIve was equal to Steve. That was part of the agreement they came to, and why he was given the CDO title. In his shoes and with his talent and ability to leave, I also would not have agreed to be in charge of all design only to have Steve Jobs keep veto power over me.
- errantspark 7y agoI gotta eyeroll pretty hard when some internet expert points out the basic design mistakes in something. None of those things were mistakes, they were choices made as a result of tradeoffs that people agonized over. I think it makes perfect sense to me, Ive seems like he's got a big personality and a laser focus on a set of things he has a deep deep understanding of. Without Jobs maybe there was nobody to challenge Ive and thus the balance was pulled too far toward his vision and the greater picture has suffered.
- sprafa 7y agoiOS had a ton of mistakes, not just trade offs. I understand that yeah, I didn’t figure them out myself, but just looking at the Nielsen Norman usability studies you could see there was a lot to be improved on (and they did, to their credit)
- petilon 7y agoLet's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 didn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction." And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed. Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr.) That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.
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- Reedx 7y agoThose sentences are entirely compatible. He could even be the most talented designer in history and still reside over disappointing results at the same time. There are many explanations for how this happens. It could be as simple as being burned out or being spread too thin. And significantly, we don't know what kind of internal constraints and forces were in play, which have massive implications on outcomes.
- breatheoften 7y agoI actually really agree with this — I didn’t hate the way ios7 looked, but I really did dislike how much it slowed me down in terms of figuring out how to read and use the interfaces that conformed to the new design style. At a fundamental level Ios7 relied on color instead of texture for visual segmentation — and I’m not sure about others but the texture processing hardware in my brain is about a million times more reliable at performing segmentation tasks than any subtle abstract color blend detection engine in my brain will ever be ... I hope that whatever new design mentality arises after this change is able to better improve the efficiency with which im able to use my devices - and that the devices are once again striving to meet me as an actual human rather than chasing some local optimum that might exist by imagining some 1 or 2D abstract idea of a human ...
- baddox 7y agoPreternaturally talented professional athletes have terrible seasons, even multi-year slumps. It's downright silly to point to some piece of output that is a "mistake" (never mind the fact that this claim is itself highly subjective) and use that to conclude that, regardless of the rest of the person's output, they're not preternaturally talented.
- jchanimal 7y agoThey aren’t mistakes, just designs for constraints we aren’t aware of yet.
- empath75 7y agoMcCartney never reached the heights he reached in the Beatles in his solo work, but he was probably one of the most talented musicians in history. You can can be an absolute genius as a collaborator but stumble a bit when working without someone around who can tell you ‘no’. There are a lot of brilliant writers who absolutely need a good editor.
- wwweston 7y ago> If Apple design -- hardware and software -- declined during Ive's rein that, to me, is evidence that Ive is not preternaturally talented. It's possible to be preternaturally talented and still either (a) make mistakes, especially balancing priorities (say, thinness vs utility) (b) get into situations that are beyond the range where talent is a guarantee of success.
- jinushaun 7y agoI’ve been saying this since iOS 7 was released! iOS 7 was littered with dozens of major design bugs that have slowly been fixed with every new release. People forgot how bad iOS 7 was because people either were so happy to be rid of iOS 6 or comfortable with iOS 12.
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