7 ms·

Could you provide an example of the sort of thing you’re talking about? Because I’m the type of person the other commenter was talking about (I’ve been in the A

by ilinx 3y ago

Could you provide an example of the sort of thing you’re talking about? Because I’m the type of person the other commenter was talking about (I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for a very long time), and I feel I’m too close to it to have a reasonably objective viewpoint on it one way or the other.

claytongulick 3y ago
Window management on OSX.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
It’s getting harder and harder to see the good UX under a layer of bugs and minor issues Apple can’t be bothered to fix (mainly talking about macOS)
JohnFen 3y ago
Sure. iPhones and the Apple desktop OS. In both of them, I am lost as to how to accomplish anything but the most common stuff. The design of the OSes is such that it's not obvious how to do anything, and they provide very little guidance. You have to already know how to do what it is you're trying to do. This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to already have memorized. Skeuomorphism used to provide a small amount of relief, but since that's gone out of fashion, it eliminated even those clues. In short, I find Apple's user interfaces to be very opaque. In fairness to Apple, this is also true of Android, Windows, and Gnome. But in the case of Android, it feels intuitive to me simply because I've internalized how to do the stuff that it gives no hint as to how to do.
- trws 3y ago
  I’m actually curious about specifics here for macOS aside from things like hidden scroll bars. Mainly because I find it to be one of the most discoverable. If you go into the ‘help’ menu in any application, you get a search box that searches all the menus of the application, if a shortcut exists for the action it’s listed alongside it. Admittedly Qt and KDE can do this too, but only for QT apps, while on macOS it’s every app that actually provides menus. Nearly every application handles files and actions the same way, and take the same common shortcuts for things like preferences. If I want to see shortcuts for system actions, they’re all listed in the keyboard control panel, and arbitrary shortcuts for arbitrary applications can be added there. I can’t name another system that feels as integrated and discoverable in that sense, except possibly KDE or gnome running ONLY apps developed specifically for that toolkit. What system(s) do you find more discoverable, and how? I’m honestly curious because I love checking our new systems or window managers and it’s bugged me not to have some of this elsewhere for a while.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    How do you show hidden folders in Finder? You literally have to memorize a keyboard shortcut. How do you switch apps in full screen mode, you need to know trackpad gestures or keyboard shortcuts. Every post like 2004 addition to MacOS seems to be reliant on trackpad gestures to the point using the operating system with a mouse is a negative. The search bar in the menu is fine if there is a menu to search. IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
    - trws 3y ago
      The screenshot tool is pretty tightly coupled to shortcuts that’s certainly true. I actually didn’t know there was a keyboard shortcut for hidden files and folders, it can be toggled through the preference menu for finder, but again yeah that’s not as discoverable as it should be. Switching apps in full screen mode would be using the dock. I never do, but it works just fine and it’s the way you switch apps with a mouse, also using cams+tab works with the system set to follow space of selected application which is set by default. To your point about trackpads though, I agree. I can’t stand a mouse on macOS, it loses too much convenience, especially with BTT available. That said, is there any system today that you find more discoverable? I mean serenityOS actually fits that bill, and classics like older macOS or windows 98, but anything modern?
    - ttepasse 3y ago
      > How do you switch apps in full screen mode, you need to know trackpad gestures or keyboard shortcuts. The Dock also works, although you have to move the pointer downwars to show it. In a lot of ways Clicking on Icons is MacOS foundation mode and everything else is superfluous. I, as a Poweruser, forget that sometimes. > IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want. The Screenshot tool btw. is also an App under Applications → Utilities. If you use that, you’ll get a floating palette with different options including for different locations. Those options then get also used by the Poweruser ⇧⌘n shortcuts. (I don’t necessary disagree with you, there is too much invisible navigation.)
thunky 3y ago
My dad got an iPhone despite us being an Android family because word on the street was that they're easy to use. For the life of him he can't he can't look at a text message while in a phone call and then get back to the call menu. He unknowingly mutes notifications for contacts and has no chance of figuring out how to unmute them. He accidentally calls his contacts all the time.
- pmontra 3y ago
  I think it was about 10 years ago: a friend got a message on her iPhone while she was driving and asked me to reply. I had a Samsung back then. I couldn't find a way to reply. I had to ask her to guide me through the UI then I finally made it.
xp84 3y ago
How about iOS Settings? There are, counting now, 8 sections of settings before the ninth which is “all third-party apps alphabetically” (that last one is mainly where you can grant/deny a short list of entitlements for those such as location, cell data, etc.) Those 9 sections are all unlabeled for some insane reason (I suppose maybe this type of plain table view thing has never had a UI element to make headings?), so even the intent of the designer is unknown. If you want a certain setting, you just have to keep scrolling. There is Search in here, though the search is mediocre and it’s still hard to find things. Oh, and Settings has a junk drawer too called General, which seems to mostly mean “someone was forced to pull 15 or so items into a subfolder, and it also uses the “random groups without headings” method of organization. All of this seems low-effort and like the designers didn’t learn even basic lessons from 40 years of GUI design (or like the ones calling the shots are fine art majors more concerned with words like “uncluttered” and “elegant” than “usability” and “discoverable.”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
glimshe 3y ago
As a daily mac user at work (against my will), there is much to complain about mac's UX. The big problem here is that no way anyone is objective given that most UX becomes "good" after repeated use. I have many examples, but I'll just pick one. When having multiple instances of an app, the doc adds a "dot" by the app icon. This dot is present no matter whether I have 2 instances or 10 instances. Oftentimes I forget instances there (which can open due to many reasons, including for instance private browsing) because it's not easy to tell that I have 3, instead of my usual 2 instances. Additionally, switching instances is unnecessary slow and requires more clicks than the older Windows taskbar (which is hopefully coming back as MSFT imitated Apple's terrible UX). Maybe you love this but I objectively lose productivity with this UX decision.
- DragonStrength 3y ago
  This is a good example of typical UX complaints which boil down to "this is not the thing I learned on." I personally don't think the early 2000s were the peak of computer UX, but I understand that most people don't like change.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    The thing is that up to around the early 2000's, UX decisions were backed by actual research, not the aesthetic whims of an egocentric designer.
    - _rutinerad 3y ago
      Yeah, right
- jwells89 3y ago
  This may be a case of the mental model not matching the technical model. Under macOS, windows aren’t program instances, they’re just windows — they’re all hosted by the same single parent program instance. It’s technically possible to open a true second instance of a program using the Terminal, which spawns a second Dock icon, but few people do this on a regular basis. This is why open windows are represented on the second level, e.g. listed in the context menu that appears when you right click a dock icon. Programs and windows are not synonymous, and in fact windows belong to programs. Macs have used this model since they first gained multitasking decades ago.
flohofwoe 3y ago
The macOS 'application centric' window system model is an excellent example IMHO. Alt-Tab (erm... Cmd-Tab) switching through applications instead of windows (and then having a separate hotkey to tab through windows, but only within one application), and that mess combined with the fact that there can be UI applications that just have a menu bar but no open windows is just incredibly bizarre (and even though I'm now a primary Mac user for more than a decade it still feels incredibly clunky - at least there's this gesture-controlled 'exploded-desktop-view' as a workaround). ...and when it comes to the new stuff: - hiding the scroll bar, what a completely non-sensical decision from a UX point of view, I now need to wiggle the touchpad to see where I am in a document, and how much of the document I'm currently viewing (yes I know that this can be disabled, and that's the first thing I do on a new Mac, along with inverting the scrolling direction) - arranging buttons vertically in popup dialogs on macOS devices with landscape display orientation (arguably it makes sense on an iPhone with portrait display orientation, but in either case the vertical arrangement makes it a lot more likely to accidentally hit the wrong button) - the new settings panel is just a massive step back from the old one (which wasn't all that great either) - don't even get me started on iOS, if you don't know the 'magic gestures' nothing makes sense (same shit on Android though)
- catiopatio 3y ago
  I love the application centric model; I find the “window” centric model to be incredibly messy. I’m assuming you came to macOS from some years using Windows?
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    Basically Amiga => Windows (since ca 1998) => Mac + Windows + Linux (since ca 2010) ...but I was also exposed to 90's Macs somewhat. I remember that my switch from the Amiga UI to Windows was fairly smooth, but I never got quite used to the Mac UI (not that it matters all that much though because I mostly switched back to the command line anyway, that's the only way to keep sane when switching regularly between Mac, Windows and Linux).
  - jasomill 3y ago
leothecool 3y ago
A personal example for me is that on the iphone, the default view shows me 24 icons, which is way too many to be useful. Its so useless, in fact, that most tech savvy users simply swipe up and use the search feature. But there's no way to know that you can swipe up to get to the search feature, leaving most non-tech-savvy users to visually inspect pages of icons, one at a time, until they find the app they are looking for.
- tomp 3y ago
  I like the default view. I don’t find 24 icons overwhelming or confusing. The most frequently used ones, I remember where they are spacially.
amelius 3y ago
Like how are the "maximize window" and "minimize window" buttons even supposed to work? (That traffic light on top of your windows) Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys? Or why is the USB drive in the back of an Apple monitor? Or why is everything so opinionated? Or that mouse that could only be charged with the cable plugged into the bottom so you couldn't use it? Or in earlier versions of OSX, you had to upgrade the OS by starting iTunes (wtf?) ...
- phatskat 3y ago
  For this one > Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys? Copy: Cmd+c Paste: Cmd+v Undo: Cmd+z Redo: Cmd+Shift+z or maybe Cmd+y if the devs do windows stuff too
tourmalinetaco 3y ago
With me one example of poor UX with iOS 16 they’ve butchered “Do Not Disturb”. While I appreciate the added user control of Focus tabs, it has made DnD a much more annoying feature to use and access. Instead of a simple one-handed swipe up and press, I need to swipe up, click into the menu, and stretch my thumb while balancing my phone to enter DnD one-handed. For someone like me, who’s friends always seem to message at inopportune times and send 50 half sentences, its a rather common feature I enjoyed before that is now much worse to use. Also Apple just killed some of my app notifs with the update and despite all of my settings being proper some apps like Instagram just don’t work.
pmontra 3y ago
Mac's windows system was good on the original Macintosh 1984, with a very small screen. It was worse than Windows' one for the Macs of the 90s with screen sizes comparable to the ones of the PCs. It was clear to me that a single global menu stuck at the top of the screen was a bad choice. I never bought a Mac because of that. 20 years later, given an Android and an iPhone, they were equally difficult (or easy) to use. Furthermore, after having used Android for years finding stuff on an iPhone was definitely difficult. Probably the other way around is true.

by ilinx 3y ago

claytongulick 3y ago

Window management on OSX.

ffgjgf1 3y ago

It’s getting harder and harder to see the good UX under a layer of bugs and minor issues Apple can’t be bothered to fix (mainly talking about macOS)

JohnFen 3y ago

Sure. iPhones and the Apple desktop OS. In both of them, I am lost as to how to accomplish anything but the most common stuff. The design of the OSes is such that it's not obvious how to do anything, and they provide very little guidance. You have to already know how to do what it is you're trying to do. This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to already have memorized. Skeuomorphism used to provide a small amount of relief, but since that's gone out of fashion, it eliminated even those clues. In short, I find Apple's user interfaces to be very opaque. In fairness to Apple, this is also true of Android, Windows, and Gnome. But in the case of Android, it feels intuitive to me simply because I've internalized how to do the stuff that it gives no hint as to how to do.

trws 3y ago
I’m actually curious about specifics here for macOS aside from things like hidden scroll bars. Mainly because I find it to be one of the most discoverable. If you go into the ‘help’ menu in any application, you get a search box that searches all the menus of the application, if a shortcut exists for the action it’s listed alongside it. Admittedly Qt and KDE can do this too, but only for QT apps, while on macOS it’s every app that actually provides menus. Nearly every application handles files and actions the same way, and take the same common shortcuts for things like preferences. If I want to see shortcuts for system actions, they’re all listed in the keyboard control panel, and arbitrary shortcuts for arbitrary applications can be added there. I can’t name another system that feels as integrated and discoverable in that sense, except possibly KDE or gnome running ONLY apps developed specifically for that toolkit. What system(s) do you find more discoverable, and how? I’m honestly curious because I love checking our new systems or window managers and it’s bugged me not to have some of this elsewhere for a while.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  How do you show hidden folders in Finder? You literally have to memorize a keyboard shortcut. How do you switch apps in full screen mode, you need to know trackpad gestures or keyboard shortcuts. Every post like 2004 addition to MacOS seems to be reliant on trackpad gestures to the point using the operating system with a mouse is a negative. The search bar in the menu is fine if there is a menu to search. IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
  - trws 3y ago
    The screenshot tool is pretty tightly coupled to shortcuts that’s certainly true. I actually didn’t know there was a keyboard shortcut for hidden files and folders, it can be toggled through the preference menu for finder, but again yeah that’s not as discoverable as it should be. Switching apps in full screen mode would be using the dock. I never do, but it works just fine and it’s the way you switch apps with a mouse, also using cams+tab works with the system set to follow space of selected application which is set by default. To your point about trackpads though, I agree. I can’t stand a mouse on macOS, it loses too much convenience, especially with BTT available. That said, is there any system today that you find more discoverable? I mean serenityOS actually fits that bill, and classics like older macOS or windows 98, but anything modern?
  - ttepasse 3y ago
    > How do you switch apps in full screen mode, you need to know trackpad gestures or keyboard shortcuts. The Dock also works, although you have to move the pointer downwars to show it. In a lot of ways Clicking on Icons is MacOS foundation mode and everything else is superfluous. I, as a Poweruser, forget that sometimes. > IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want. The Screenshot tool btw. is also an App under Applications → Utilities. If you use that, you’ll get a floating palette with different options including for different locations. Those options then get also used by the Poweruser ⇧⌘n shortcuts. (I don’t necessary disagree with you, there is too much invisible navigation.)

thunky 3y ago

My dad got an iPhone despite us being an Android family because word on the street was that they're easy to use. For the life of him he can't he can't look at a text message while in a phone call and then get back to the call menu. He unknowingly mutes notifications for contacts and has no chance of figuring out how to unmute them. He accidentally calls his contacts all the time.

pmontra 3y ago
I think it was about 10 years ago: a friend got a message on her iPhone while she was driving and asked me to reply. I had a Samsung back then. I couldn't find a way to reply. I had to ask her to guide me through the UI then I finally made it.

xp84 3y ago

How about iOS Settings? There are, counting now, 8 sections of settings before the ninth which is “all third-party apps alphabetically” (that last one is mainly where you can grant/deny a short list of entitlements for those such as location, cell data, etc.) Those 9 sections are all unlabeled for some insane reason (I suppose maybe this type of plain table view thing has never had a UI element to make headings?), so even the intent of the designer is unknown. If you want a certain setting, you just have to keep scrolling. There is Search in here, though the search is mediocre and it’s still hard to find things. Oh, and Settings has a junk drawer too called General, which seems to mostly mean “someone was forced to pull 15 or so items into a subfolder, and it also uses the “random groups without headings” method of organization. All of this seems low-effort and like the designers didn’t learn even basic lessons from 40 years of GUI design (or like the ones calling the shots are fine art majors more concerned with words like “uncluttered” and “elegant” than “usability” and “discoverable.”

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

glimshe 3y ago

As a daily mac user at work (against my will), there is much to complain about mac's UX. The big problem here is that no way anyone is objective given that most UX becomes "good" after repeated use. I have many examples, but I'll just pick one. When having multiple instances of an app, the doc adds a "dot" by the app icon. This dot is present no matter whether I have 2 instances or 10 instances. Oftentimes I forget instances there (which can open due to many reasons, including for instance private browsing) because it's not easy to tell that I have 3, instead of my usual 2 instances. Additionally, switching instances is unnecessary slow and requires more clicks than the older Windows taskbar (which is hopefully coming back as MSFT imitated Apple's terrible UX). Maybe you love this but I objectively lose productivity with this UX decision.

DragonStrength 3y ago
This is a good example of typical UX complaints which boil down to "this is not the thing I learned on." I personally don't think the early 2000s were the peak of computer UX, but I understand that most people don't like change.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  The thing is that up to around the early 2000's, UX decisions were backed by actual research, not the aesthetic whims of an egocentric designer.
  - _rutinerad 3y ago
    Yeah, right
jwells89 3y ago
This may be a case of the mental model not matching the technical model. Under macOS, windows aren’t program instances, they’re just windows — they’re all hosted by the same single parent program instance. It’s technically possible to open a true second instance of a program using the Terminal, which spawns a second Dock icon, but few people do this on a regular basis. This is why open windows are represented on the second level, e.g. listed in the context menu that appears when you right click a dock icon. Programs and windows are not synonymous, and in fact windows belong to programs. Macs have used this model since they first gained multitasking decades ago.

flohofwoe 3y ago

The macOS 'application centric' window system model is an excellent example IMHO. Alt-Tab (erm... Cmd-Tab) switching through applications instead of windows (and then having a separate hotkey to tab through windows, but only within one application), and that mess combined with the fact that there can be UI applications that just have a menu bar but no open windows is just incredibly bizarre (and even though I'm now a primary Mac user for more than a decade it still feels incredibly clunky - at least there's this gesture-controlled 'exploded-desktop-view' as a workaround). ...and when it comes to the new stuff: - hiding the scroll bar, what a completely non-sensical decision from a UX point of view, I now need to wiggle the touchpad to see where I am in a document, and how much of the document I'm currently viewing (yes I know that this can be disabled, and that's the first thing I do on a new Mac, along with inverting the scrolling direction) - arranging buttons vertically in popup dialogs on macOS devices with landscape display orientation (arguably it makes sense on an iPhone with portrait display orientation, but in either case the vertical arrangement makes it a lot more likely to accidentally hit the wrong button) - the new settings panel is just a massive step back from the old one (which wasn't all that great either) - don't even get me started on iOS, if you don't know the 'magic gestures' nothing makes sense (same shit on Android though)

catiopatio 3y ago
I love the application centric model; I find the “window” centric model to be incredibly messy. I’m assuming you came to macOS from some years using Windows?
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Basically Amiga => Windows (since ca 1998) => Mac + Windows + Linux (since ca 2010) ...but I was also exposed to 90's Macs somewhat. I remember that my switch from the Amiga UI to Windows was fairly smooth, but I never got quite used to the Mac UI (not that it matters all that much though because I mostly switched back to the command line anyway, that's the only way to keep sane when switching regularly between Mac, Windows and Linux).
- jasomill 3y ago

leothecool 3y ago

A personal example for me is that on the iphone, the default view shows me 24 icons, which is way too many to be useful. Its so useless, in fact, that most tech savvy users simply swipe up and use the search feature. But there's no way to know that you can swipe up to get to the search feature, leaving most non-tech-savvy users to visually inspect pages of icons, one at a time, until they find the app they are looking for.

tomp 3y ago
I like the default view. I don’t find 24 icons overwhelming or confusing. The most frequently used ones, I remember where they are spacially.

amelius 3y ago

Like how are the "maximize window" and "minimize window" buttons even supposed to work? (That traffic light on top of your windows) Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys? Or why is the USB drive in the back of an Apple monitor? Or why is everything so opinionated? Or that mouse that could only be charged with the cable plugged into the bottom so you couldn't use it? Or in earlier versions of OSX, you had to upgrade the OS by starting iTunes (wtf?) ...

phatskat 3y ago
For this one > Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys? Copy: Cmd+c Paste: Cmd+v Undo: Cmd+z Redo: Cmd+Shift+z or maybe Cmd+y if the devs do windows stuff too

tourmalinetaco 3y ago

With me one example of poor UX with iOS 16 they’ve butchered “Do Not Disturb”. While I appreciate the added user control of Focus tabs, it has made DnD a much more annoying feature to use and access. Instead of a simple one-handed swipe up and press, I need to swipe up, click into the menu, and stretch my thumb while balancing my phone to enter DnD one-handed. For someone like me, who’s friends always seem to message at inopportune times and send 50 half sentences, its a rather common feature I enjoyed before that is now much worse to use. Also Apple just killed some of my app notifs with the update and despite all of my settings being proper some apps like Instagram just don’t work.

pmontra 3y ago

Mac's windows system was good on the original Macintosh 1984, with a very small screen. It was worse than Windows' one for the Macs of the 90s with screen sizes comparable to the ones of the PCs. It was clear to me that a single global menu stuck at the top of the screen was a bad choice. I never bought a Mac because of that. 20 years later, given an Android and an iPhone, they were equally difficult (or easy) to use. Furthermore, after having used Android for years finding stuff on an iPhone was definitely difficult. Probably the other way around is true.