6 ms·

I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop. I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer

• robbies 9mo ago
  I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described
  • kristopolous 9mo ago
    I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds. It's kinda the rule for programmes too. The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd. The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers. Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
    • deltaburnt 9mo ago
      This is a pretty discriminatory comment that I’ve honestly seen zero hint of in reality. And this is coming from someone who didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I honestly rarely even find out what school my colleagues went to school. But the ones I know who did go to those prestigious schools are beyond humble.
      • kristopolous 9mo ago
        Not really. That's bad faith. I've worked at lots of places, probably hired about 200 engineers over my career so far and have noticed this pattern. I stopped looking at the educational background years ago in a fear that it would influence my bias either way. We shouldn't base someone's suitability at 40 upon what opportunities they were afforded at 17. I do have a somewhat prestigious pedigree btw. I removed it from my resume around 2010 and never looked back
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • crena 9mo ago
      Apple designers used to build interactive demos in Macromedia Director, so I'm assuming they knew a bit about scripting. That probably helped them think in a way that really clicks with software development. I've worked with some younger designers who couldn't even put together a consistent click-dummy once the client wanted to see flows outside the happy path. To be fair, all they really had to go on was their education and Figma's panels.
• gedy 9mo ago
  I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.
  • al_borland 9mo ago
    Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there as the final quality filter.
    • drob518 9mo ago
      Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.
  • acdha 9mo ago
    That’s not a bad thing (user experience is important) but remember that Liquid Glass was designed by someone without a UI background. Alan Dye designed the boxes iPhones come in and was installed by Jony Ive, an industrial designer. Neither of them had training or experience in usability, and all of the UX people I know are basically complaining non-stop about how many basic UX principles the 26 releases violate.
• torben-friis 9mo ago
  >I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop. Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.
  • valleyer 9mo ago
    The point is that Apple's own design team was.
    • skdjejdjwjdj 9mo ago
      [dead]
• ValentineC 9mo ago
  > I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop. > I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason. Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
  • postalcoder 9mo ago
    The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.
    • wolvoleo 9mo ago
      True, if they'd kept the function keys and just added the touch bar above it it would have been great. Weird thing is there was more than enough space for both so I don't understand why they didn't do that.
      • vanviegen 9mo ago
        Or replace them with physical keys with tiny LCDs screen on them to indicate their meaning in the current context.
        • wolvoleo 9mo ago
          Yeah but still, function keys for me are so important I don't like switching them for any reason. Even the Fn+ functions for like volume etc I don't really like, I would much rather have additional buttons for that. In that sense a touch bar in addition to function keys would be very nice, because it's a much smoother way to adjust volume.
          • vanviegen 9mo ago
• cratermoon 9mo ago
  In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems. It's a throwback to BDUF.
  • lurking_swe 9mo ago
    that’s a lot of words to say “bad at their job”. If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent. Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
  • ncruces 9mo ago
    That's a bit like software developers iterating until all unit tests pass, and then considering all user feedback dumb.
• drob518 9mo ago
  Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
  • halapro 9mo ago
    The worst part here is that the style works decently on mobile but they shoehorned it onto a 25-year-old UI and shipped it.
    • grishka 9mo ago
      Because they absolutely can't have disparate visual styles in their product lines, practicality be damned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • Klaster_1 9mo ago
        "Consistency".
        • yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago
          Consistency is the absolute fucking worst design principle.
          • drob518 9mo ago
            I’d tweak it to say that a foolish consistency is the absolute worst design principle. All things being equal, consistency is a good thing, but it sometimes gets prioritized to the point of absurdity and becomes counterproductive.
          • thfuran 9mo ago
            It definitely isn’t. It’s good in many contexts, but zealous adherence to some pithy design principle without consideration is bad engineering and bad design.
• darkhorse222 9mo ago
  >I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason. I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
  • leptons 9mo ago
    Of course it's not "a conspiracy", but it is a major, gigantic, huge, alarming failure by Apple. Resizing a window is just about the most basic and useful thing a window system can do after opening a window, and Apple totally messed it up. It's like they've never worked with a window before, but TBH though, their window system has always sucked.
• fatih-erikli-cg 9mo ago
  [dead]
• clnhlzmn 9mo ago
  Seems like you could make the corners round (not making a judgement on that in any way) and still give the resize handle a more sensible size/shape/location right? As in this isn't a visual design problem.
  • Arainach 9mo ago
    It's tricky because you're now cropping into rectangular apps which may actually use all the pixels they get and want hit testing in them. When Windows went to a 1 pixel border and shadow effects, it still had hit testing in a region around the window to account for that. No idea what they're doing with rounded corners in Win11.
• Perepiska 9mo ago
  I worked for a company with a large website. The designers were elite and worked in a darkroom on expensive Apple equipment. At some point, it turned out that users couldn't see a certain color on the website because it could be seen on an Apple monitor, but not on a mass-market laptop's TFT screen.
  • disgruntledphd2 9mo ago
    I worked at a really large social media company, and there was a design which looked beautiful on all of the employee's high-res screens and monitors but used too much space and just didn't work for most of the users. It never got launched, which feels like what should have happened here.
  • frumplestlatz 9mo ago
    To be fair to those designers, color reproduction is a really hard problem, and shitty monitors have terrible color reproduction. You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons, but they should be testing their work on shitty monitors, too.
    • nosianu 9mo ago
      > You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons I don't know, I conclude the opposite. If you need accurate color reproduction when you publish online, you are doing something wrong. I used to co-own a small digital printing business, so I'm aware of what all of it means, and I had an appropriate monitor myself and a paid Adobe Design Suite subscription. But for the web, when our setup is too good it's actually a detriment. It is predictable that you end up publishing things that require your quality setup. There is a good reason not to bother with a high quality monitor usable for serious publishing and photo/video editing when you only do web thing. Which is exactly why when I bought my last monitor, which is for business work and coding and web browsing and other mundane things, I deliberately ignored all the very high quality displays, even though the company would have paid whatever I chose. It is not an advantage for that use case.
    • Perepiska 9mo ago
• mihaaly 9mo ago
  I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it. Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes). The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion. Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).
• JoachimS 9mo ago
  Your comment reminded of these fantastic sketch. The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
  • ezst 9mo ago
    I need evidence that sufficiently large organisations don't eventually devolve into… whatever that is. And then, names, so I can apply there, while there's still some work ethics left in me.
• concinds 9mo ago
  I want OS vendors to stop prioritizing "design" above performance. Opening a Finder window used to be instant, now it takes 0.3s-1s. Opening Safari used to be instant, now it takes seconds. Even menus in the menu bar take a few dozen milliseconds too long, which becomes obvious when you compare it to apps with custom truly-instant hamburger menus. Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.
• tantalor 9mo ago
  > fixing an obviously broken spec Going off spec is not the correct way to deal with this, and I could see how that might get you in trouble. It's counter productive. Better choice is to escalate, but at some point you have to simply disagree and commit.