4 ms·

I'm a near 50s guy who grew up on Vic20s and hasn't stopped since. The UX of my son's iPad is almost enough to drive me insane. So many counter intuitive ways

I'm a near 50s guy who grew up on Vic20s and hasn't stopped since. The UX of my son's iPad is almost enough to drive me insane. So many counter intuitive ways to do things, such as completely invisible (ZERO freaking indicators) swipes needed to access extra info etc. My present favourite is how the current keypad for entering extra time on an app (yes I managed to set up parental guidelines for that POS) is cropped in half so that you have to rotate the screen in order to see the full keypad. Plenty of room on the lock screen that's displayed for this purpose, only showing the numbers keypad - they just made it so tiny you can't pick half the numbers some of which are in my parent pin. How they're selling this crap for billions of dollars is beyond me.

intergalplan 6y ago
iOS discoverability/usability tanked when iOS7 came out and hasn't recovered. It went from being the only OS I'd happily give to my 80-something can-barely-email grandma, to "um... well, shit, I guess we'll get you a Chromebook... but it's gonna suck." Too many ways to accidentally make crap pop up or get stuck in weird states on iOS, now. Even the old folder behavior, that "split open" the screen to reveal the folder, made it much, much clearer to navigate for non-tech-geeks. Lots of little things like that, plus tons of gesture-initiated overlays and switching-about.
- sundvor 6y ago
  Thanks, yes it's almost like a cult thing - you're supposed to stab and poke and just _discover_ the hidden features. One example to prove your point was that I needed to disable/restrict the fingerprint auth as he was using that to get himself more time; his old device that died didn't have one. Everything said yeah just go to "Face ID & Passcode" under settings. Except it wasn't there. An inordinate amount of effort later I learned there was a setting knee deep in Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions that would allow it to be displayed. Why TF not just display the Touch settings tab still and then a message saying its use is disabled in that part of their jungle hell? I mean that'd actually be user friendly. (Setting up Docker in WSL2 is a breeze compared to the guesswork that's becoming their new norm.)

intergalplan 6y ago

iOS discoverability/usability tanked when iOS7 came out and hasn't recovered. It went from being the only OS I'd happily give to my 80-something can-barely-email grandma, to "um... well, shit, I guess we'll get you a Chromebook... but it's gonna suck." Too many ways to accidentally make crap pop up or get stuck in weird states on iOS, now. Even the old folder behavior, that "split open" the screen to reveal the folder, made it much, much clearer to navigate for non-tech-geeks. Lots of little things like that, plus tons of gesture-initiated overlays and switching-about.

sundvor 6y ago
Thanks, yes it's almost like a cult thing - you're supposed to stab and poke and just _discover_ the hidden features. One example to prove your point was that I needed to disable/restrict the fingerprint auth as he was using that to get himself more time; his old device that died didn't have one. Everything said yeah just go to "Face ID & Passcode" under settings. Except it wasn't there. An inordinate amount of effort later I learned there was a setting knee deep in Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions that would allow it to be displayed. Why TF not just display the Touch settings tab still and then a message saying its use is disabled in that part of their jungle hell? I mean that'd actually be user friendly. (Setting up Docker in WSL2 is a breeze compared to the guesswork that's becoming their new norm.)