6 ms·

Lifting the lid on the iOS 7 UIPicker

133 points by theraven 13y ago

nwh 13y ago
It's another bit of the UI that has been shoved into being "flat", but the metaphor is just lost. If you hadn't seen the iOS6 one it makes absolutely no sense now. For more of this, see the Clock app with it's ridiculous circle buttons and half a blank screen.
- joe5150 13y ago
  I'm not sure I follow your criticism of the clock app. It looks the same to me, albeit "flatter".
  - nwh 13y ago
    I was referring to this, it looks a lot worse on devices with a longer screen — http://i.imgur.com/8kjaGQ6.png http://i.imgur.com/8kjaGQ6.png
    - joe5150 13y ago
      I guess it just doesn't look that bad to me. The buttons particularly seem fine, but you could reasonably say that they stand apart from the rest of the UI in some way. That the timer is still using a picker like this at all instead of a more reasonable input is my only real gripe, but that's sort of beyond the scope of this.
- buro9 13y ago
  I shouldn't worry, you should try Android's time picker. Consider a generation not used to the analogue wrist-watch, and give them a clock face with an outer 24-hour clock and an inner 12 hour clock, and then ask the user to select time using the tip of their finger, on a small phone screen, on the inner or outer circle to the hour and minute that they wish. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SK2ljlhHiCU/UaiEjF1lhGI/AAAAAAABJqs/0uWv7oMxdG4/s640/android-calendar-time-control-1.png http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SK2ljlhHiCU/UaiEjF1lhGI/AAAAAAABJq... Oh, and that top bit... the time that most people would read and want to change? Yeah, that's just display. Tapping that does nothing useful, just flips the mode from hours to minutes but you can't change the time that way. So: A modal interface, on a circular control, with small areas of touch, that you cannot navigate one-handed accurately, and that uses the least popular display of time.
  - CrazedGeek 13y ago
    Where are you seeing that UI? At least on Android 4.1, the normal time picker is similar to the iOS ones.
    - the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
      New in 4.3. I actually love that picker a lot. It's efficient when you use it with one hand it it's not nearly as confusing as the alarm clock one which would break down completely if you would have to target a specific date.
  - cheald 13y ago
    Which picker/app is that? Here's the time picker in the Clock app (for setting alarms) on 4.3 (CM 10.2): http://i.imgur.com/KhhHul5.png http://i.imgur.com/KhhHul5.png
    - turing 13y ago
      It's the time picker in the Calendar app. It was introduced in May: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-android-update/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-andro... Personally, I rather like the new time picker and have never experienced any usability problems. Also, the appearance depends on your time settings; the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time.
      - buro9 13y ago
        You know, it's the only time picker I see in Android. Such is my heavy use of Google Calendar.
      - masklinn 13y ago
        > the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time. Which is only the vast majority of the world (about half a dozen countries use 12h clocks as a standard in written form). (as it turns out, that means the vast majority of the world won't give a fig about the AM/PM selector being broken, the touch targets are a much bigger issue)
theraven 13y ago
The UIDatePicker has 322 subviews...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
RyanZAG 13y ago
> You’re also not able to tap the AM/PM or minute items to select them, which is completely inconsistent because you can tap the day and hour items! WAT Uh oh, that is a major red flag that the code behind this picker is one terrible mess. It implies that the code used for the time part of the picker is completely separate from the code for the date part.
- 10char 13y ago
  Hm, it's more likely that when you have a picker column with just a few elements (like only "AM" & "PM"), the tap boundaries aren't adjusted to fill the entire container. The bigger flag is how this wasn't picked up internally, given how prevalent UIDatePicker is in Apple's own apps. I'd be surprised if no one noticed, so am curious to see if this intentional and stays the same, or was truly accidental.
  - mullr 13y ago
    I don't know much about how Apple works, but any software of reasonable size simply has to ship with bugs. I'd bet there were more important problems being fixed up until the last minute.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    He lists that as a separate bug, so it seems the drag targets are too small and they don't respond to taps. I had some trouble myself interacting with an iOS7 time picker but it was about confusion of how wide the active areas where. I'm also dubious of the still skeomorphic toggle buttons. They look like something you could drag across to activate, but you need to start your drag on the toggle switch so they're basically buttons.
- kingnight 13y ago
  Perhaps the right side of the picker which is closer to your resting thumb (for right handed people) was preserved to allow you to continue to scroll up/down since it's now an inline control.
shurcooL 13y ago
Oh man, and now even Apple has come to a point where it's taking things that were done well and making them worse. So sad. It may be because it was rushed and hopefully they'll address it, but seeing the UI principles violated so badly is just painful to see. It's not even debatable, because it's not consistent. I like seeing progress and devices/software improve over time, so every time I see something get worse than a previous version is very upsetting.
- devx 13y ago
  Scott Forestall must be laughing his ass off. His style may have been "obsolete", but at least he did it right. The new UI is trying hard to be "flatter", but it looks like it's done by an amateur.
  - camus 13y ago
    His style was never obsolete. Soon designers will reject all that flat fad because of what it really is , hyped non sense that goes against basic usability.Then all flat UIs will look obsolete.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Oh man, and now even Apple has come to a point where it's taking things that were done well and making them worse. So sad. When was there a time that Apple didn't do that ocassionally? Even back at OS X 10.0, there were tons of nice OS 9 features that got lost in the transition. If it proves to be a major pain point they'll address it. Could even happen in a minor update. Such is the beauty of software.
weavie 13y ago
So, have Apple really cocked up this release, or is it just the bloggers going to town whenever they find some flaw and hacker news loves it when people find problems? Am genuinely curious - I've boon obsoleted with my iPod 4 so can't find out for myself..
- potatolicious 13y ago
  A bit of both. It's a massive redesign, not all of it is well executed, and there's substantial performance degradation in some parts. There are also a larger than usual number of major bugs that shipped with the final. None of it is the-sky-is-falling material though. There are some bugs that will drive devs up the wall (especially when they end up getting fixed later and break the workarounds), and the lack of optimization in some components will put limits on their use, but nothing particularly game-ending. In summary: not a disaster, but less polished in general than previous iOS releases at this stage. Side note: I noticed this time that there was a lot less Apple engineer engagement on the dev forums. Couple that with the number of polish bugs (see: the Sloppy UI blog from yesterday) and you'd get the impression that the iOS team was stretched severely to get this out the door. Hope they're all getting some much-needed downtime.
  - leoc 13y ago
    At a guess, this http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-china-smartphone-market-share-to-cheaper-models-1-.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-china-s... may have something to do with the rushed job this time.
- melange 13y ago
  Bloggers, for the most part. There are minor regressions that people are making a big deal out of, but usability overall has gone up dramatically. Anecdotally, my 65 year old mother in law and non-techie wife have had no problems with the new design, which to me indicates that it can't be a disaster.
taspeotis 13y ago
Date/time pickers seem to be hard to get right. Android's had its own problems [1]. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuously-missing-from-android-4-2s-people-app/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuousl...
- masklinn 13y ago
  The issue here is that it's a serious step back, the previous picker worked extremely well, and had worked extremely well since iOS1 IIRC.
  - kalleboo 13y ago
    While it looks cool, I personally find it WAY more efficient to just type in a few numbers on a keypad than to scroll back and forth, whoops, overshot it, scroll back...
    - masklinn 13y ago
      Thus completely missing the point.
soci 13y ago
I believe the Date Picker is something Apple will fix for sure. It's just not their style and culture to do things difficult for the user. However, there's one major pain I got with the new UI I'd like to share. The new passcode lock screen is also much different than before, and this for me was a BIG problem at the beginning. Surprisingly when I saw the passcode screen for the first time in iOS7 I absolutely forgot which was my code and therefore I could not unlock the phone. Try after try the phone puts it more difficult for you to enter new code combinations by not letting you try again after failed attempts. So I had an unusable phone for many hours in a row. I was in anger, how could I have forgot a that? I discovered that the passcode code was something I had buried in my subconscious. Before the upgrade, I could type the code even when I was completely asleep at 3AM in the morning without even thinking, never failed in all this years. Typing the code was a sort of reflex action for me. But the different lock screen UI made me absolutely impossible to perform it again. The code was not in my memory. After several tries, and several hours, I met with my wife and she told me my own code so I could finally regain access to my phone. Now the pin code is back to my memory and not my subconscious. Anyone else had this sort of problem?
- haydenchambers 13y ago
  The problem with the lock screen is the big button highlights on click. Its now really easy to look over someones shoulder in the tube/metro and know what they enter
lukeh 13y ago
Moreover, Reveal: amazing.
coldcode 13y ago
I like many of the improvements in iOS7 but I always hated the old picker and hate the new one even more now. Maybe it's a hard concept to get right.
pearjuice 13y ago
It is like they are deliberately pushing for features which require more processing and rendering power so the previous hardware instances can be rendered obsolete.
- Steko 13y ago
  There was some speculation that this was part of their actual strategy for differentiation e.g. the parallax animations.
abalone 13y ago
Super nitpicky. The huge improvement in this picker is that it's inline. The previous one was modal. That's fantastic. Who gives a shit you can't drag from below "PM" to scroll up? That's the worst you can say? As for the view hierarchy, cool viz but is it actually slow on old devices? I doubt it. Even an old GPU should handle those transforms no problem since they're the only thing animating.
- forrestthewoods 13y ago
  Yeah, who gives a shit about usability when designing UI!?
  - abalone 13y ago
    You've got to be kidding. Going from modal to inline is a huge leap forward in usability.
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      It's potentially a leap forward, if it's done right. This wasn't done right - it's harder to use than the old version.
    - ksk 13y ago
      >huge leap forward in usability. "huge leap" is quite the exaggeration given that such UI ideas well understood and are decades old. Most average programmers could create a similar iOS control over a lazy weekend.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Wasn't it up to the developer? I believe you could do the old one inline too if you wanted.
dennis_vartan 13y ago
The new picker looks nicer aesthetically, no doubt. But each time when setting an alarm, I find that I have to mentally focus to figure out which number is currently selected. Similar font sizes, similar colors, lack of negative space, and now the selected number and the numbers directly above and below are way too similar for comfort.
eknkc 13y ago
Usability aside, the view breakdown looks fantastic. I mean it can be overkill but whatever, that wireframe view shows some engineering.
m_mueller 13y ago
There is one more thing bothering me: The touch areas are not visually distinguishable. I was really surprised that touching just a little left of the minutes will scroll the hours, even though there is no line between them and there is a huge whitespace inbetween. I'm thinking that whole roll picker doesn't fit into flat design at all, since it's depicting a 3D object, which is the very opposite of what flat design is about - whether you like it or not. I do think that flat design done right can look great whilr offering the same usability, but it's much harder to get right.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I'm not an iOS user - has the date roll picker always been there? In WP7 (the exemplar of flat design on a phone) it uses the roll-like UI but without the 3D object metaphor. The behavior is the same, but flat. I'd rather just have a numpad, especially for time.
ksk 13y ago
I think the space on the right allows you to scroll down a uiview if the picker ends up being the bottom most UI control.
bnejad 13y ago
These sort of time pickers on both iPhone and Android(I have a HTC One X) are really the opposite of user friendly for me. When choose a time I don't want to scroll a wheel... Just let me type the numbers. And by the way, the Reveal App looks super impressive.
thom 13y ago
I remember when people would submit bug reports about things, instead of writing long blog posts about some philosophical strawman.
- gurkendoktor 13y ago
  I thought the view hierarchies were very interesting. Writing a blog post is completely orthogonal to submitting a bug. And how is it a philosophical strawman?

133 points by theraven 13y ago

nwh 13y ago

It's another bit of the UI that has been shoved into being "flat", but the metaphor is just lost. If you hadn't seen the iOS6 one it makes absolutely no sense now. For more of this, see the Clock app with it's ridiculous circle buttons and half a blank screen.

joe5150 13y ago
I'm not sure I follow your criticism of the clock app. It looks the same to me, albeit "flatter".
- nwh 13y ago
  I was referring to this, it looks a lot worse on devices with a longer screen — http://i.imgur.com/8kjaGQ6.png http://i.imgur.com/8kjaGQ6.png
  - joe5150 13y ago
    I guess it just doesn't look that bad to me. The buttons particularly seem fine, but you could reasonably say that they stand apart from the rest of the UI in some way. That the timer is still using a picker like this at all instead of a more reasonable input is my only real gripe, but that's sort of beyond the scope of this.
buro9 13y ago
I shouldn't worry, you should try Android's time picker. Consider a generation not used to the analogue wrist-watch, and give them a clock face with an outer 24-hour clock and an inner 12 hour clock, and then ask the user to select time using the tip of their finger, on a small phone screen, on the inner or outer circle to the hour and minute that they wish. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SK2ljlhHiCU/UaiEjF1lhGI/AAAAAAABJqs/0uWv7oMxdG4/s640/android-calendar-time-control-1.png http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SK2ljlhHiCU/UaiEjF1lhGI/AAAAAAABJq... Oh, and that top bit... the time that most people would read and want to change? Yeah, that's just display. Tapping that does nothing useful, just flips the mode from hours to minutes but you can't change the time that way. So: A modal interface, on a circular control, with small areas of touch, that you cannot navigate one-handed accurately, and that uses the least popular display of time.
- CrazedGeek 13y ago
  Where are you seeing that UI? At least on Android 4.1, the normal time picker is similar to the iOS ones.
  - the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
    New in 4.3. I actually love that picker a lot. It's efficient when you use it with one hand it it's not nearly as confusing as the alarm clock one which would break down completely if you would have to target a specific date.
- cheald 13y ago
  Which picker/app is that? Here's the time picker in the Clock app (for setting alarms) on 4.3 (CM 10.2): http://i.imgur.com/KhhHul5.png http://i.imgur.com/KhhHul5.png
  - turing 13y ago
    It's the time picker in the Calendar app. It was introduced in May: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-android-update/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-andro... Personally, I rather like the new time picker and have never experienced any usability problems. Also, the appearance depends on your time settings; the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time.
    - buro9 13y ago
      You know, it's the only time picker I see in Android. Such is my heavy use of Google Calendar.
    - masklinn 13y ago
      > the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time. Which is only the vast majority of the world (about half a dozen countries use 12h clocks as a standard in written form). (as it turns out, that means the vast majority of the world won't give a fig about the AM/PM selector being broken, the touch targets are a much bigger issue)

theraven 13y ago

The UIDatePicker has 322 subviews...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

RyanZAG 13y ago

> You’re also not able to tap the AM/PM or minute items to select them, which is completely inconsistent because you can tap the day and hour items! WAT Uh oh, that is a major red flag that the code behind this picker is one terrible mess. It implies that the code used for the time part of the picker is completely separate from the code for the date part.

10char 13y ago
Hm, it's more likely that when you have a picker column with just a few elements (like only "AM" & "PM"), the tap boundaries aren't adjusted to fill the entire container. The bigger flag is how this wasn't picked up internally, given how prevalent UIDatePicker is in Apple's own apps. I'd be surprised if no one noticed, so am curious to see if this intentional and stays the same, or was truly accidental.
- mullr 13y ago
  I don't know much about how Apple works, but any software of reasonable size simply has to ship with bugs. I'd bet there were more important problems being fixed up until the last minute.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  He lists that as a separate bug, so it seems the drag targets are too small and they don't respond to taps. I had some trouble myself interacting with an iOS7 time picker but it was about confusion of how wide the active areas where. I'm also dubious of the still skeomorphic toggle buttons. They look like something you could drag across to activate, but you need to start your drag on the toggle switch so they're basically buttons.
kingnight 13y ago
Perhaps the right side of the picker which is closer to your resting thumb (for right handed people) was preserved to allow you to continue to scroll up/down since it's now an inline control.

shurcooL 13y ago

Oh man, and now even Apple has come to a point where it's taking things that were done well and making them worse. So sad. It may be because it was rushed and hopefully they'll address it, but seeing the UI principles violated so badly is just painful to see. It's not even debatable, because it's not consistent. I like seeing progress and devices/software improve over time, so every time I see something get worse than a previous version is very upsetting.

devx 13y ago
Scott Forestall must be laughing his ass off. His style may have been "obsolete", but at least he did it right. The new UI is trying hard to be "flatter", but it looks like it's done by an amateur.
- camus 13y ago
  His style was never obsolete. Soon designers will reject all that flat fad because of what it really is , hyped non sense that goes against basic usability.Then all flat UIs will look obsolete.
coldtea 13y ago
>Oh man, and now even Apple has come to a point where it's taking things that were done well and making them worse. So sad. When was there a time that Apple didn't do that ocassionally? Even back at OS X 10.0, there were tons of nice OS 9 features that got lost in the transition. If it proves to be a major pain point they'll address it. Could even happen in a minor update. Such is the beauty of software.

weavie 13y ago

So, have Apple really cocked up this release, or is it just the bloggers going to town whenever they find some flaw and hacker news loves it when people find problems? Am genuinely curious - I've boon obsoleted with my iPod 4 so can't find out for myself..

potatolicious 13y ago
A bit of both. It's a massive redesign, not all of it is well executed, and there's substantial performance degradation in some parts. There are also a larger than usual number of major bugs that shipped with the final. None of it is the-sky-is-falling material though. There are some bugs that will drive devs up the wall (especially when they end up getting fixed later and break the workarounds), and the lack of optimization in some components will put limits on their use, but nothing particularly game-ending. In summary: not a disaster, but less polished in general than previous iOS releases at this stage. Side note: I noticed this time that there was a lot less Apple engineer engagement on the dev forums. Couple that with the number of polish bugs (see: the Sloppy UI blog from yesterday) and you'd get the impression that the iOS team was stretched severely to get this out the door. Hope they're all getting some much-needed downtime.
- leoc 13y ago
  At a guess, this http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-china-smartphone-market-share-to-cheaper-models-1-.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-china-s... may have something to do with the rushed job this time.
melange 13y ago
Bloggers, for the most part. There are minor regressions that people are making a big deal out of, but usability overall has gone up dramatically. Anecdotally, my 65 year old mother in law and non-techie wife have had no problems with the new design, which to me indicates that it can't be a disaster.

taspeotis 13y ago

Date/time pickers seem to be hard to get right. Android's had its own problems [1]. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuously-missing-from-android-4-2s-people-app/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuousl...

masklinn 13y ago
The issue here is that it's a serious step back, the previous picker worked extremely well, and had worked extremely well since iOS1 IIRC.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  While it looks cool, I personally find it WAY more efficient to just type in a few numbers on a keypad than to scroll back and forth, whoops, overshot it, scroll back...
  - masklinn 13y ago
    Thus completely missing the point.

soci 13y ago

I believe the Date Picker is something Apple will fix for sure. It's just not their style and culture to do things difficult for the user. However, there's one major pain I got with the new UI I'd like to share. The new passcode lock screen is also much different than before, and this for me was a BIG problem at the beginning. Surprisingly when I saw the passcode screen for the first time in iOS7 I absolutely forgot which was my code and therefore I could not unlock the phone. Try after try the phone puts it more difficult for you to enter new code combinations by not letting you try again after failed attempts. So I had an unusable phone for many hours in a row. I was in anger, how could I have forgot a that? I discovered that the passcode code was something I had buried in my subconscious. Before the upgrade, I could type the code even when I was completely asleep at 3AM in the morning without even thinking, never failed in all this years. Typing the code was a sort of reflex action for me. But the different lock screen UI made me absolutely impossible to perform it again. The code was not in my memory. After several tries, and several hours, I met with my wife and she told me my own code so I could finally regain access to my phone. Now the pin code is back to my memory and not my subconscious. Anyone else had this sort of problem?

haydenchambers 13y ago
The problem with the lock screen is the big button highlights on click. Its now really easy to look over someones shoulder in the tube/metro and know what they enter

lukeh 13y ago

Moreover, Reveal: amazing.

coldcode 13y ago

I like many of the improvements in iOS7 but I always hated the old picker and hate the new one even more now. Maybe it's a hard concept to get right.

pearjuice 13y ago

It is like they are deliberately pushing for features which require more processing and rendering power so the previous hardware instances can be rendered obsolete.

Steko 13y ago
There was some speculation that this was part of their actual strategy for differentiation e.g. the parallax animations.

abalone 13y ago

Super nitpicky. The huge improvement in this picker is that it's inline. The previous one was modal. That's fantastic. Who gives a shit you can't drag from below "PM" to scroll up? That's the worst you can say? As for the view hierarchy, cool viz but is it actually slow on old devices? I doubt it. Even an old GPU should handle those transforms no problem since they're the only thing animating.

forrestthewoods 13y ago
Yeah, who gives a shit about usability when designing UI!?
- abalone 13y ago
  You've got to be kidding. Going from modal to inline is a huge leap forward in usability.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    It's potentially a leap forward, if it's done right. This wasn't done right - it's harder to use than the old version.
  - ksk 13y ago
    >huge leap forward in usability. "huge leap" is quite the exaggeration given that such UI ideas well understood and are decades old. Most average programmers could create a similar iOS control over a lazy weekend.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Wasn't it up to the developer? I believe you could do the old one inline too if you wanted.

dennis_vartan 13y ago

The new picker looks nicer aesthetically, no doubt. But each time when setting an alarm, I find that I have to mentally focus to figure out which number is currently selected. Similar font sizes, similar colors, lack of negative space, and now the selected number and the numbers directly above and below are way too similar for comfort.

eknkc 13y ago

Usability aside, the view breakdown looks fantastic. I mean it can be overkill but whatever, that wireframe view shows some engineering.

m_mueller 13y ago

There is one more thing bothering me: The touch areas are not visually distinguishable. I was really surprised that touching just a little left of the minutes will scroll the hours, even though there is no line between them and there is a huge whitespace inbetween. I'm thinking that whole roll picker doesn't fit into flat design at all, since it's depicting a 3D object, which is the very opposite of what flat design is about - whether you like it or not. I do think that flat design done right can look great whilr offering the same usability, but it's much harder to get right.

Pxtl 13y ago
I'm not an iOS user - has the date roll picker always been there? In WP7 (the exemplar of flat design on a phone) it uses the roll-like UI but without the 3D object metaphor. The behavior is the same, but flat. I'd rather just have a numpad, especially for time.

ksk 13y ago

I think the space on the right allows you to scroll down a uiview if the picker ends up being the bottom most UI control.

bnejad 13y ago

These sort of time pickers on both iPhone and Android(I have a HTC One X) are really the opposite of user friendly for me. When choose a time I don't want to scroll a wheel... Just let me type the numbers. And by the way, the Reveal App looks super impressive.

thom 13y ago

I remember when people would submit bug reports about things, instead of writing long blog posts about some philosophical strawman.

gurkendoktor 13y ago
I thought the view hierarchies were very interesting. Writing a blog post is completely orthogonal to submitting a bug. And how is it a philosophical strawman?