If it is round, it isn't a checkbox, it is a checkhole. People see something round, "box" isn't the first word that comes to mind. In my previous history as a

If it is round, it isn't a checkbox, it is a checkhole. People see something round, "box" isn't the first word that comes to mind. In my previous history as a ... as a web person (I think that's both broad and vague enough to encompass the yes-I-did-that-too sense of things), I had an ever-growing disdain for the designers who were off on their own flights of fancy. Usable? Explainable? Accessible? Senior-friendly? Then, late to the party, I got this iPhone thing and I was astonished at how much the device expected me to know about how the interface worked, on a deep level. I tried to get my mother into an iPad and, frustratingly, could find no good cheat sheets on the "gestures," to the point where I made a laminated, color-coded and numbered set of sheet on gestures, screen, etc. I help out an even older senior with her computer and ... well, I think the i-UX people are frankly out in their own la-la land and their hubris is sustained only by Apple's inertia/network effect/market dominance. In a kinder, gentler world, these UX teams would be required to make a general style sheet document, which would be applied to various real-world applications, and then they would be forced to watch a senior citizen attempt to navigate their trash to, say, get a test result from the hospital. Should this not be accomplished in under five minutes, they are thrown into a hell of leather-clad demons who beat them with sticks while patiently explaining that their design, in fact, sucks. UX design has begun to resemble fashion in an Oscar Wilde manner, "so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." It's getting divorced from meaning and utility, and worse yet, constancy. Nobody wants to relearn UX for your crap app just so you can be cutting edge with sliders that resemble the phases of the moon.