"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time."
I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community.
20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.
The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:
1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere now.
We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech, design, etc.
I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is irritating.
To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks):
Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least:
1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.
2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the highlighted bar that represents where you want to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text and there's no more magnifying glass.
3. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you wait a beat before tapping again.
To paste (most to least reliable):
1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
2. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little bit, making a precise paste difficult.
Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)
Herein lies the problem: it doesn't matter how much 'better' or 'smoother' or 'consistent' the change is - or is not, in this case. It's a gross oversight to never inform end users of the change in any way.
How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of your users will need to discover it through trial and error? A relatively juvenile UX mistake for such a mature company, but seems to be their MO these days...
I'm guessing a large proportion of the feedback to the design and development teams comes from the people who obsess over everything Apple. It would explain why the engineers never thought to inform the larger population -- everyone giving feedback already knew it was there.
> How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of your users will need to discover it through trial and error?
I totally agree, but just want to point out that it may be 5% of developers who follow these. Of the general use base in total? I'd assume it's rather about 1/100 of one percent, or one in ten thousand people.
Dang! One in ten thousand?! That's crazy, thanks for the perspective. They should be easy to spot though - just look for the one dude zipping around using iOS 13.3's new hoverboard function ;)
It's not like I have any numbers, but we have to remember that everyone uses a smartphone these days and a large portion wouldn't be able to even say if they're using iOS or Android.
OTOH, we also have the problem where many a new feature launches a parade in its own honor, with notifcations and badges and and modal popups when the user is trying to do something else. Google/Android is much worse about this than iOS, though.
Yes indeed, if only they would "inform end users of the change".
Unfortunately that would require that end users a) read such information (given the truism that "users don't read"), I would ouputr this at a vanishingly small likelihood, and b) summoned such information to mind when using their device.
The only people who would read this sort of information are techies it closer techies. It's certainly not my aged mother.
The real solution is to stick with some time proven UI techniques. As the author says, like scroll bars.
Instead, we have form over functionality writ large.
While we're on the topic, those screen-masking "tutorials" you randomly get when apps push out an updated UI are annoying. I always skip past them. When I open an app, it's for a reason, and I want to start using it.
Then they try to cram the entire UI into that “tutorial”; as if you’re going to hold that all in your head after reading it once while trying to do something else. Then there’s no clear way to get back to it (if it’s even possible). And often if you accidentally click through one part you can’t even go back to that part.
Video games do this a lot, too. I’d play more games but it’s always a one-hour commitment to get started between opening videos and tutorials.
Some games manage to teach you most of what you need without an overt tutorial. See eg Hollow Knight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWiDS8SUvds&t=55s or the classic first level of Super Mario Bros.
In Hollow Knight, letting the player figure out how to 'pogo jump' is an interesting example. They don't hold your hand, but you need to learn eventually to progress.
And the one that kicks in after an iOS update? That installed overnight on your phone? That appears first thing in the morning, right when you're actually trying to check your mail, calendar, catch up on overnight notifications, in between getting ready for work and kicking kids out of the house... that tutorial is getting dismissed and will never be revisited.
Yeah, an overview of how things are laid out is great to have but let me go there after I've already looked around a bit, and don't make it an obstacle.
I'm one of the ones who watched the keynote, knew about the feature - and I still couldn't do it. Specifically the three finger "unpinch." However, this thread prompted me to retry, during which I realized it was a lot easier if I used two hands. We'll see if I can manage to use it regularly.
It's also in the Tips app, which prompts via notifications to learn about new features in iOS after an upgrade. You can ignore it, or you can let it walk you through the changes to your device.
yeah, but who has time? Tips will spend 5 mins walking you through how to change the preferred colour scheme for the Weather app, when what I want to do right now is answer the phone.
Then, 2 months later, I want to change the colour scheme in the Weather app. Can I remember how? Or even remember where I saw to do that? Or even find the right tip? Obviously not...
The grandparent asked if this was supposed to be discoverable and the answer is no, Apple does not expect you to discover it. If you want to learn about it, it’s in the Tips app (that they prompt you to use). Not wanting to use the Tips app seems like a personal issue.
If it is a personal issue, it's because it's a bad solution to the problem. It doesn't provide the information I need when I need it, and provides irrelevant information most of the time.
I'm the customer. If your customer has a personal issue with your product, that's your problem, not theirs.
Wow, yeah. I've been an iOS user since version 3, and consider myself a power user. But the parent comment explains a lot why I couldn't select words like before. WTF is Apple doing these days?!
The tips app is one attempt at feature discovery like this.
The problem is that modern UI's can do so much that some has to be hidden so the common use cases can be easier, but users never go into the tips app or online help books to find out what was hidden. Pushing notifications spams users who don't want to look there, so we instead have our current situation /shrug ️
Source: used to work on the iOS tips app and help.apple.com/$productname help books at apple.
>The problem is that modern UI's can do so much that some has to be hidden so the common use cases can be easier
Bollocks. The "modern UI" can't do anything that much more that Windows 95 wasn't doing already. Too bad the touchscreen became standard long after anyone cared about good UX, and so the UI paradigms are still struggling with this new kind of hardware.
There is no reason ever to hide the scrollbar, which is not only a control, but also an indicator.
The UI designers don't hide it for the sake of good UX, it's for the sake of being "brave" - leading to articles like this.
I was just thinking about this the other day. OS X, in its earlier days, as a marvel of usability. Every last thing was seemingly crafted with utmost attention to ergonomics (e.g. the omnipresent menu bar is on the edge of the screen so it's easier to hit with the cursor), consistency, and intuitive discoverability. Again, the menu bar is a good example of this: it's always there, actions are laid out in a way that you can browse them to look for functions, and each item has the associated keyboard shortcut shown. The old HIG document was pretty well thought out.
iOS, on the other hand, is a byzantine mess of nondiscoverable gestures, meaningless hieroglyphic buttons that you have to blindly press to see what they're supposed to do, and general UI antipatterns. This isn't the only post on HN today about modern UIs, prompted by phonisms, regressing functionality. There's one about scrollbars too, which is another area that Apple has lead the charge on messing up.
I mean, I'm personally strongly against showing scrollbars almost everywhere on mobile because any kind of visual noise makes the UI harder for me to parse, the scroll position is not relevant to me usually, and there is not enough screen real estate to make it an actual usable control. I understand this is a personal preference, but I assure you I am not alone and these ideas _were_ tested and debated because there aren't obvious solutions here. You have a much much bigger pointer closer to your face than on Windows 95 (which I remember as a usability nightmare personally to me as a child, I don't know if people have rose colored glasses or it is a generational thing). On desktop I don't have any good arguments, but at least it is an option to re-enable there.
I find the ones that are translucent and appear on touch to be very useful. This is mainly seen in the MacOS world I think, I know for sure I see it in VSCode.
Was it ever announced? How are new users supposed to figure anything out?
My C=64 came with a thick reference manual, with circuit schematics in the back. Every computer I've bought since then has had a smaller manual. I think my smartphone came with a small pamphlet with a couple screenshots.
It seems you're supposed to learn how to use electronics these days by having people say "oh, don't you know?"
I mean, ideally electronics are designed so that it’s impossible not to understand them if you’ve been raised in a more or less progressive civilization.
It’s just that often they are not, and both good and bad design comes without a decent manual.
It feels like we zoomed on straight past the highest point on that curve and we're regressing. As the other post mentioned, computers used to come with big thick manuals to tell you everything you needed to know, but over time, as software UIs improved, these got thinner and thinner. Until there was no physical manual to get any thinner - then the UIs started getting worse.
It feels to me like it happened around the time of the first iPad. That was such a usable device (and OS X was just about at its peak of perfection at the time) - I remember just opening the box, turning it on, and everything being intuitive. I’m 99% certain scroll bars were still present then, for example.
I don’t think we ever really made the transition from paper manuals to online help very well. Some apps need additional help, and some even make it available, but I rarely see people-in-need actually making use of it. Heck, they rarely even consider googling for help (the issue in the article can be worked around, at least, with a google search). At least with a physical manual, you knew how much help was available/necessary for a given app - that’s just not the case with 'software help' or help online.
Speaking of discoverability, as I was playing around with this I just discovered that there's another way to paste besides these two: if you just tap with three fingers, it brings up an undo menu that also has a paste option (different from the select menu).
> 1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement. They could've told me while I was painstakingly shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo ...... ing!
I'm gonna be publicly ridiculed for this one and I'm good with that.
I've been trying to get the show desktop gesture on my mac right for years. You know, the one that "windows-D" was doing so loyaly for ages.
My habit is to arbitrarily swipe as many fingers as I can find available from center of trackpad outwards. It used to take me ~10 trials to get it right.
And now, enlightened by this random thread, I suddenly figured out I actually need to swipe 3 fingers upwards and one downwards simultaneously. This is the greatest Epiphany HN had given me since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13651148
I had no idea what you meant with "swipe 3 fingers upwards and one downward", but the image and description at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895 made it much more clear.
> Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement.
How is that an improvement? I get that the shaking gesture is horrible, but this one is not better: a three finger swipe is unusual, impossible to discover, hard to do. I don’t get why swiping left, usually associated with going to the right (= forward in Western cultures), is here used to undo (= going backward).
yeah, I absolutely loath these gestures with a passion. Impossible to get right when you need them, and impossible to avoid doing by accident when you don't
People have the patience of learning the new tricks ONCE when they get a new phone. After that nothing major like this should change. I am sure this change would have created more than a few hundred WTF moments while someone was driving/cooking/whatever and texting (yes, I know it is bad, but everyone does it) and I wouldn't be surprised there are a few accidents.
> Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
FYI: Triple-tap is for sentences. Quadruple-tap is for paragraphs.
Text selection is the one area that the lack of 3D Touch affects me the most, and I am truly upset about it.
With last year's phone/iOS, you could 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard and enter a cursor-move mode. This was replaced with the spacebar thing, which is fine.
But then while moving your cursor around in the old version, you could 3D Touch again to select a word, again for a sentence, and again for the paragraph. I could select text so easily! This made deleting sections or copy/pasting bits of edited text sooooo much easier.
Now it's significantly worse. I can move the cursor fine, but then to select text I have to use my fingers to tap on the text directly and it's much more difficult to be precise. (Why? Because I can't see through my fingers, surprisingly. You can see through a cursor just fine.)
Sigh. I'm really disappointed in this change specifically.
Same here. I thought IOS was cool in 2007 when most people first got it, but then the constant forced-upgrades and forced-updates of the phone where it would randomly reboot the phone while sitting idle on your desk and where you would randomly lose functionality -- this was happening in 2007 -- made me really want to switch to something different. I always felt like Steve Jobs was in my pocket and I couldnt control the phone, it was controlling me.
It seems like the OS updates are part of the problem. In particular, updates are still delivered as a bundle of 'good stuff' whether its security patches, bug fixes, feature updates, or fundamental UI reimaginings. I know most 'normal' users don’t want to concern themselves with these details, but most 'normal' users just want to use their device to get something done, not have to relearn how to use it every six months. Even if that means it’s 'better'.
Classic car comparison: imagine every time you took your car in for a service, the mechanics not only fix any problems, fine-tune the workings, and give it a clean, but they also 'improve' the controls. Your automatic becomes a manual, you gain acceleration but lose top speed, and your indicators switch with your wipers. It would be an absolute nightmare, up with which no one would put!
1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
I sneered at the pinch/unpinch copy/paste gestures when I first read about them. But Apple's implementation, at least on the iPad, is stellar. I'm still not used to it, but when I remember to use it, it works flawlessly every time.
And there's even a little feedback bubble that pops up at the top of the screen letting you know you did something. That kind of feedback in invaluable, and desperately lacking in this era where programmers look down on feedback animation as superfluous.
There's a handle on the cursor, it has a pretty big area where you can grab it. Once you've grabbed it you get a magnified view of where the cursor is as you're dragging. I think it also scales down your dragging motion to make placing the cursor in the right spot less fiddly too, but I haven't got any real evidence of that other than feel.
FWIW, I recall being shown some of these new gestures (cut and paste, undo) in post-update iOS 13 splash screen of some kind.
By contrast, when I hardware swapped from XS to 11, nothing prepared me for the loss of formerly oh-so-intuitive 3D Touch. I’d read about it, didn’t realize how second nature it had become. I often saw others struggle with or unaware of 3D Touch, so my guess is Apple metrics showed it wasn’t as widely used as they’d hoped. The other positive is consistency, as I occasionally attempted 3D Touch on iPad or old phones and felt stymied.
With older iPhones with 3D touch, there used to be a fourth way:
4. Deep press anywhere on the keyboard to switch to cursor moving mode.
On my iPhone X, I used this all the time. With the iPhone 11, there is no substitute: you cannot long press on anything but the space bar to move the cursor. Also, a deep press was quicker to activate, a long press takes a fraction of a second longer. It's a bit annoying.
> 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.
Specifically, either long-touch the space bar or force-touch any letter. Just don't force-touch the left side of the screen, which will invoke the app switcher.
In fairness, iOS these days is wildly unintuitive, and I'm not yet thirty. It's positively littered with hidden gestures and features that you'd never discover during normal usage. Many of them are really slick once you learn about them! But discoverability is worse not only compared to previous Apple software, but even to other systems like Android. And from what I've read, iPadOS is even worse.
I switched from iOS to Android in the iPhone 4 days, and switched back last month.
The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything. Part of this is the obsession over gestures in place of buttons, the size of the screens and distance of the swipes also makes it difficult to use with one hand (I can't use my thumb to unlock the device), apps are completely unintuitive, and there seems to be an obsession with presenting new data at you rather than keeping the same pathways to find previous data giving me a sense of always being lost in every app.
The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.
I'm going to stick with Apple due to privacy concerns for the time being, but I'm really upset with my purchase.
> The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.
Every time I start an episode I immediately just to the nice "jump 15sec" button that's in the lower right so that I can skip the lead-in ads. But I've found that button to be terribly unreliable. As I find myself jamming it over and over trying to skip the ads that I'm hearing.
What I discovered is the contact patch for the button is actually quite small, so you have to just delicately tap it with the tip of your finger so that it doesn't register touch outside of it boundary. Super frustrating when the clear boundaries of buttons disappears back in the dawn of "all things flat".
Note this may have improved in iOS 13 but I have yet to upgrade.
I've gotten to where I really enjoy using it (for the most part: the notifications list stands out as feeling terrible compared to Android), but only after, like, reading guides on the internet. Which is the kind of thing Apple products have traditionally prided themselves on not requiring.
Is there a way to dismiss them with a single gesture like on Android? I haven't figured that part out, it's weird since swiping it right opens it, but so does tapping it, and swiping left opens a Manage | View | Clear All (x) menu.
If you keep swiping left past the Manage | View | Clear menu, Clear expands to fill the width of the notification. If you release your finger then, it’ll trigger Clear. It’s pretty hard to do reliably, though.
There’s a similar behavior with the swipe gestures throughout iOS. In the Phone app, swipe left on a voicemail to show a Delete option. Keep swiping, and Delete fills the whole cell. Release when it’s expanded to trigger Delete without an extra tap.
edit: it takes me about 2.5 seconds to dismiss a notification with that action. I don't know about y'all but I dismiss notifications way more often than open them. Seems like it should be just as quick to dismiss it as open it.
is there a list of features somewhere and are the two listed possible to be disabled? DSP-by-default is an anti-pattern for audio products and I don't want to install an app without seeing what it does...
Pretty much all I care about in an app is discovery (does it list related podcasts?), organization (does it keep my listening history), and playback ordering (does it support chronological | reverse chronological | custom playback ordering for episodes of the same podcast?).
> The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything
Meta comment. It's interesting to see the debate on HN between optimizing for power users versus lay users. For the latter, we cryptic settings and/or hidden functionality. For the latter, we get a limited set of communicated functions.
What's weird is that Apple products used to be for lay users (and still pretty much market themselves that way), but their UX design is now much more power-user-friendly. Personally I'm mostly fine with it, it's just a weird source of dissonance.
They end of the skeuomorphic interface was the end of usability. UI design went from functional for a wide audience to "looks good in a demo". This coincided with the rise of web apps because unlike desktop apps using native widget sets web apps are a "blank slate" as far as UI design goes.
I've been using computers religiously since I got my Vic20 at 9 or 10, after working for it for a year.
Almost every time I need to change something on son's aging iPad (2012 issue, updated to latest iOS but is before cut off point for iPad OS) it seriously risks defenestration.
Parental setup including App store restrictions is the absolute worst, followed closely by the scattered application settings.
If only there was an Android tablet that was as well physical engineered. Unfortunately they don't really come close.
So his iPad is for educational apps only, and I got him the newly issued Switch for gaming. The quality of the A grade titles is astounding, well worth paying; none of the ad ridden crap that's par of the course on the iPad. And even though I'm missing some granularity, their parental controls are a textbook case of fantastic UX work by comparison.
The companion Android app lets me easily define and monitor daily limits; it just works.
This is how it always was. They always have secret keyboard shortcuts that don't have a menu option. Still, to this day, it's hard to even find your hard drive folder by default in Finder. Apple's UX is incredible if all you need to do is look at photos.
"It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before."
To my mind this is becoming a BIG problem in tech and I'm really saddened to see Apple falling for it. I guess too many people in a position to change things that feel like they need to justify their positions. Either way, it needs to stop. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
The other day I opened a Vue project from 2-3 years ago and after installing deps with NPM it reported something like 50 critical vulnerabilities. Fine, I'll update dependencies. After doing that nothing worked anymore. The Webpack config didn't work, the Webpack loaders for Vue didn't work, etc. I had configured this project with an "old" version of Vue CLI and now everyone had moved on from that and changed their APIs.
I had a similar problem with an in-house Electron app from 3-4 years ago. A user reported a problem running the app on high Sierra. So I updated Electron to the latest version and compiled but then I got some new errors because Electron changed something and it broke Gulp. So I updated Gulp and turns out they changed their API too and I had to change the logic... I lost a day with this.
You can open an old jQuery project from 10 years ago change some stuff and everything just works, even after updating jQuery to the latest version.
Sadly, this is what happens when whoever is calling the shots doesn't care about stability and backward compatibility any more.
Combined with the current culture of "evergreen" software that is always connecting to online sources (even if it's installed locally), applies automatic updates, and doesn't support old versions in parallel with newer ones for extended periods, it's like we've regressed at least a decade in the quality of the software we use. Although next week it could be 13 years. And if you refuse to play, you don't get security or compatibility updates either.
The likes of Google, Apple and Mozilla bear great responsibility for actively promoting the evergreen and ratchet models: browsers, mobile operating systems and web and mobile apps have probably been the main drivers, and Apple has gone even further by weaponising its control of the app ecosystem via its App Store monopoly. However, it's not just web and mobile that are broken; more recently, it's been creeping into desktop applications and even desktop operating systems (Windows 10) as well.
Just as it's been the case with user-facing software, so it has also been the case with development tools. We seem to have trained an entire generation of young developers now who have no concept of maintaining stable APIs, using open standards for data formats and communications protocols, designing for compatibility and portability, and so on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is also much worse in the worlds of web and mobile development.
I don't disagree with your sentiment re: Js, it's a problem for sure. But a jQuery project from 10 years ago is completely different from a pseudo-native app (aka electron). I guarantee the jQuery project doesn't provide an iota of the functionality that the electron app does (and if this isn't the case, why use electron in the first place?!)
People were already building substantial web apps long before the current generation of popular libraries and frameworks were around. Some of those applications are in use to this day, jQuery and all, and still in active development. They can include a huge amount of functionality after that much work has gone into them.
Would a team choose the same tools if they were starting those apps with a blank canvas today? Probably not. Is anyone going to throw away a decade of working code to rewrite the apps that already exist? Also probably not.
I think it's partially due to stack ranking. You have to justify your position to your peers (most of whom don't even use the application) and show everyone metrics of people using your crap. If you don't make any "improvements" to the app, you can't get any promotions. If an app is already perfect, then these "improvements" can only ruin the application.
It should come as no surprise that if you ruin your UI, "engagement" goes up, because people are dicking around trying to figure out how the hell it works now. Unfortunately, statistics are hard, and nobody really knows what they're doing, so I don't think the organization is always aware of this kind of stuff.
Sure, that's the incentive. But then why aren't their managers laying off or reassigning the staff who have nothing to do but fiddle with things that were already fine? The problem goes right to the top of product development leadership.
Apple was one of the pioneers of it with it's always changing skeuomorphisms followed by its plane design trend. Their marketing has been mocking the stability of their competitors since forever, and only stopped when that stability went away.
That said, I'm peaceful with he fact that I can't access most of the features of my phones (I use Android, that while not being a pioneer has followed quite passionately). That also helps restricting my dependency on it so I have the option of not being spied on and avoid problems once the functionality goes away.
Apple design often prioritizes "slick, stylish and minimal" over straightforward, obvious and pragmatic utility. It's definitely gotten worse as demonstrated with the iPhone X, but they've always had things like hidden gestures and timed presses for basic functionality.
Android designers aren't doing much better though.
Agreed, on both accounts. I'd like to interject that 15-10 years ago, Apple was stellar at this, I only noticed their general UX/UI out-of-this-world-excellence slipping down (slightly, still among the best-in-class, just not the unrivaled best) as of 2014 or so for the very first "little things", and by 2016-17 it had become a true UX issue for me.
I frequently support my mother for all digital things, and everytime I need to fix something on her iPad (or formerly her iMac, since then I put her on Windows), I too often spend several frustrating hours with a 50/50 chance of success. Android for my SO is the same, my god, it's a misery of UX, the absence of thought into human cognitive flow reminds me of old Windows sometimes.
To be fair I think we're seeing one downside of an agile ecosystem where things are much less holistic, much more disjointed than with previous waterfall, major version box paradigm. It'll take time before we collectively learn how to address these issues under the (relatively) new DevOps model. Things are moving fast, faster than ever; UX requires time. There's a fundamental tension here, it's not an easy problem.
Ah, this would explain that. I seem to remember that he did not want to deal with software design, but pretty much had to to fill the gap after Jobs passed away. something along those lines. I'll cut him some slack for the monumental achievements in his career, but Apple as a company should re-think their UX strategy for the 2020's imho.
And thank you for a nice trip via MacOS 9 memory lane!
I think what really changed was the departure of Scott Forstall after the death of Jobs & the decision to put Tim Cook in charge.
Remove that someone who didn't just look at software as an
accoutrement to hardware -- but as a necessary, functional part of that hardware (skeuomorphism was the natural outcome of this worldview), then replace them with someone who reveres form over function and we end up where we are.
I too revere this man as far as design goes. It is my understanding that he's not the best at managing whole products the likes of what Apple sells; my intuition is that he should have joined Google —a true engineering temple of software-first, imho.
But apparently he's taking a (probably much-deserved) time off from tech, so more power to him.
That's tough. I think it's becoming more and more true these days; but I very much disagree if we look at a long story of best-in-class UX that truly set the tone for the entire industry and beyond.
Apple used to be much, much more than marketing; in fact the very smugness of their image and marketing comes from their unprecedented domination over computer-user satisfaction, superior design language that contributed as much to art as it did to tech, and so on and so forth. Even typography, one of Job's first huge intuitions and success, is a true user's benefit well beyond the looks.
I'm particularly harsh with Apple these days when I criticize their choices (UX, UI, manufacturing quality, product design, pricing, whatever), but that's because I hold one of the world's biggest company to much higher standards than what they're currently outputting; and I did not set those standards — they did for themselves over their own history. That has been their true gift to the world.
I remember "right clicking" with a long press back on Windows CE and Windows XP Tablets. If you had experienced this era of mobile devices, it is natural.
How to delete an app? Right click on the icon, delete. Kind of the same action on iOS as on Windows 95.
I just tried this on iPadOS. It’s not quite as simple as you suggest; the steps are:
1. Hold down (long press? 3D Touch? I’ve never quite understood the difference) on the icon until a context menu appears. This is analogous to right-click.
2. Select “Rearrange Apps” from the menu - you need to know/guess that deleting is a sub-action of rearranging.
3. Click the familiar close icon that now appears.
Step 2. is the new one, and it introduces quite a lot of friction.
On the other side of the analogy, I think there was an easier (more discoverable) alternative to the right-click in win95 - certainly OSX - which was to drag the application to the recycle bin / trashcan.
I liked the 3 dots because it was natural for me to associate it with "etc...". I don't know what the 3 horizontal lines are meant to represent, but I know that it's really difficult to explain to my parents and that they keep forgetting its meaning because they cannot associate the symbol with anything :(
Similar thing with the "back button"-icon ( https://icon-library.net/images/android-back-icon/android-ba... ): it's an equilateral triangle, maybe pointing to the left, or maybe to the top/bottom right corners, or maybe just a "triangle" (associate "triangle" with "back"?) depending on how you think. I'd prefer a less stylish but classical arrow ("<") than that.
The three horizontal lines ("hamburger") is meant to represent entries in a vertical menu. In situations where pressing the button doesn't reveal a vertical menu, it makes no sense whatsoever.
I'm not sold on the new volume and silent mode controls on iOS 13. I can see where the designers are coming from, but it's harder to see and use. The bigger issue is that there's no setting to go back - the new way is just supposed to be better, for everybody.
Have the controls changed? I've only noticed changes in how it gets displayed -- what is harder to see and use? I mostly use the switch and the volume buttons.
The only thing that I've noticed is that when I use Sonos, it hijacks the volume button (so that the volume on my phone controls the volume of the Sonos speaker), but when I stop using Sonos (like leaving the network or doing something else that uses sound), the Sonos setting is sticky. I usually have my volume muted, but after selecting a song on Sonos my local device volume is adjusted to match whatever the Sonos volume was.
Skype suffers the same problem. It's almost like Microsoft is paying these engineers to create new widgets and gimmicks that make the program clunkier, slower, and less secure. And then pays those engineers to "patch" those issues. I hate Skype so much, but I don't really have an alternative app to make prank phone calls to tattoo parlors and pastry shops in Ukraine.
I think change for the sake of a "fresh look" which is often advocated for by middle management and marketing yahoos with too much power over design would count as "just for fun".
>It is very unlikely that people are changing things just for fun.
Why is that very unlikely? Many of these changes are not objectively better: they're just different and sometimes arguably worse. If you and your team decide you don't have anything to do for the next release, guess what happens next.
Here's how I think about it. Let's take the example of changing how to move the cursor from having the magnifier to dragging the cursor directly & using the spacebar long press trackpad.
Scenario 1 is that Apple has enough money, time, and manpower that they are constantly doing user studies, in-person and via survey, to see how people currently use and learn to adopt the product.
They find out that moving the cursor is something that people want to do often, but that the current method has some problems. It is hard for new users to discover, and the tap and hold takes a long time if you're doing it frequently, like in a text revising workflow. The magnifier was useful for the old low-res screens, but less helpful now that everything is retina.
They implement a few different approaches, and measure them against the old method. In their previous tests, they've seen that one thing new users try is dragging the cursor directly, so they try making that work, which is more discoverable. It's faster because you don't have to wait for the long press. They add some feedbacks so you can see both where it's tracking your finger, and where the cursor will drop in the text. And if those feedbacks aren't precise enough, you can use the spacebar trackpad method. In their benchmarks, the combination of the methods is easier to discover, and a big speed improvement.
They know that some users will hate being forced to change, because nobody likes being forced to change, but they honestly think it's worth the improvements. They take their findings to management, who personally try out the new methods and approve the change.
Scenario 2 is that Apple is such a large company that nobody really knows what other people or teams are doing, even management. There's nothing pressing for the UX teams to work on - I mean, aside from the AR HMD and the car. So, they decide to change up one of the core interactions of the company's most important product. They don't need to justify the change to upper management (all of whom use the product heavily), so it just sort of slips under the radar.
If you've got a more plausible scenario 2 I'd be interested to hear it, but yes, I think scenario 1 is more likely.
This particular iOS thing has also been annoying me since I upgraded to iOS 13 (which for the record, has otherwise been very positive for me). I really wish they had done some kind of "Here's what is new" tutorial.
Rearranging icons in folders is still a clusterf--k though - am I the only one that ends up fighting sometimes just to a) get the icon into the folder I want and b) actually keep it there without accidentally scrolling the screen, accidentally dragging it out of the edge of the folder because I'm trying to page it to a particular place?
What I'm noticing with iOS in particular is that lots of 'hidden' functionality is creeping in. This is something I remember Microsoft getting criticism for with Windows 8 -- non-obvious gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen to bring something up. Apple seems to have wandered down that same road.
god yes I fucking hate trying to rearrange my icons
oh look I accidentally moved this icon between two others and it reflowed everything and the last icon in THIS screen is the first on on the NEXT screen and this cascaded to the next few as well, now I get to move them all back, joy!
It's especially fun when you are trying to put an icon into a folder in the last slot in a screen and it slips to the next page instead. JOY. UNMTIGATED JOY AND DELIGHT.
And I still hate how you can't have any organization for your icons beyond "all of them crammed up towards the top left of the screen". I still miss that from Android and I still miss that from the days when there was a usable jailbreak.
Yeah, rearranging icons has always been inexplicably fiddly, but they somehow managed to actually make it worse in iOS 13.
It used to be possible to explain most of the mechanisms and concepts in iOS with about a ten minute tutorial. Now it feels like every time I see my parents I have to explain some new concept or procedure to them.
It is easier if you use two fingers--one to "pick up" the icon or icon you want to move (you can grab a whole stack of them) and the other to navigate to where you want to be.
I've gone the opposite direction (or just skipped ahead into second childhood?) - if I can't see the option I want I spend a minute or so monkey-slapping the screen in random directions with random numbers of fingers, because apparently this is what qualifies these days as "discoverable".
(A simple example I discovered before I devolved to this level - when looking at messages on an iphone, swipe and hold left to see the sent times. Did you know that? If so HOW DID YOU KNOW?)
I knew because it was in the tips app, that shows how to do new stuff with new releases. I got a notification from the tips app after I upgraded, offering to show me what’s new.
Somehow this doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Not sure if people just ignore the tips app notifications or if they don’t get them for some reason.
It’s a normal app you can run any time. I just looked and the cursor movement as well as peeking at the times of messages are both in there and demonstrated.
I ignore them because I'm typically trying to do something like right now and those get in my way. How about something more discoverable to begin with? When you hide all of the damn controls behind silly gestures this is what happens.
They give you an intro to everything you asked them to show you, it takes 20 seconds, it’s featured front and center after every upgrade. And if you ignored it because you are trying to do something like right now, you can even go back and look at it again. It’s really pretty handy and nicely produced.
Yet if it's needed only because they continue to change things around and make basic functions more obscure... why is that a good thing?
And I still don't want to spend 20s. You can call that silly, and you're not completely wrong, but watching some stupid iMessage tutorial in my prescious free time isn't exactly something I want to do.
Power users prefer increased functionality over discoverability. Similar to how the command line is foreign to most computer users. For iOS, you're on the "prefer discoverability" side of the spectrum; Apple seems to build more for "prefer advanced/invest time to learn".
For me I was always struggled to get the phone to do what I wanted. Either selecting or moving the cursor. It works better for me now. You drag to select, tap to place a cursor, or “pick up” the cursor for more precise placement. i still use the long touch on the spacebar though out of habit. And it’s where my fingers are naturally most of the time when I’m doing stuff with text.
The gestures became more single purpose.
I get it that we like the way things work and when they get changed it’s annoying.
But unless you think the phone has reached the perfect interface with no room for improvement, you should continue to expect things to change.
If you do think it’s perfect, well, good for you. Stop upgrading, and you will at least have a few years of stability.
A steering wheel is not the optimal steering device since we have cars with power steering, but changing that would make necessary for everyone to adapt to their vehicles again and would result in many accidents and many deaths.
Evolution is good, but the right pace is not always the fastest one. It can of course be faster for phone UIs than car UIs, but every change is still a potential hassle for all your users and should be carefully considered even if it is, objectively speaking, an improvement.
It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
I fired up my old launch day iPhone a few weeks ago. The phone works great, though some of the apps no longer have services to connect to (Weather, for example).
What struck me is how intuitive iOS 3 was to use. Everything seemed more (to use the parlance of our times) "discoverable."
Maybe part of it was just remembering how things work, but it seemed like a much better experience than iOS 13.
Also, as much as people on HN enjoy bashing skeuomorphism, the fact is that it works, it's intuitive, and is 9,385% more user-friendly than a bunch of identical Playskool-colored squares with no demonstrable function.
Even little things -- the slider to unlock on the main screen. Incredibly obvious even after a minute of playing with it (my toddler at the time had no difficulty with the concept, despite not being able to read).
And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.
Skeuomorphism and pixel perfect design where the interface was tightly tied to the screen resolution doesn’t work when you have multiple screen sizes. Back then developers only had to worry about the 320x480 iPhone screen and the 1024x768 iPad resolution.
> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
I had no idea you could move the cursor this way! Until I read your comment!
My wife had the same problem. I knew how to do it because the tips app showed me after I upgraded. Not sure if it didn’t show the same thing to everyone.
I think it works fine although I still generally prefer the haptic/long touch spacebar method.
I always had trouble with selection vs placing the cursor, and it irritated me to no end. The long touch spacebar works great though and I still prefer it.
If you aren’t familiar with the long touch spacebar, give it a try. It temporarily changes the keyboard to a touchpad for moving the cursor. It’s great.
There used to be a little magnifier, too, when I was moving the cursor around. I don't see it anymore, just the "caret" moves. I don't know if it's because I switched to the bigger size, or did they just drop that feature when moving the cursor.
At age 56, it's hard for me to see where the cursor/insertion point is, especially because it's blocked by my finger when I try to move it.
They dropped the magnifier between iOS 12 and 13. That's been bugging me quite a bit too as I was very used to using that to make cursor movement easier.
You can compensate a bit by grabbing the cursor from a lower spot in the I-bar, to the point where you can basically grab the cursor from entirely underneath (ie, touch the cursor as if it was a line below where it actually is), but discovering that was a lot of trial and effort on my part, and it's still not quite so useful as the magnifier was.
One of the hazards of working in this space is that as you develop sympathy for others, trying to “think like a normal user” you eventually succeed. Your own thinking starts to shift and pretty soon you suffer from the same class of problems.
I overheard several people talking about this when I first started thinking about UX and sure enough within a couple years I was making some of the same sorts of “mistakes”.
Having fallen into that thinking, at some point a few years back I realized that I was selling myself short by thinking that I should behave "like a normal user". And now I combat it with a secondary mindset of training some actions into muscle memory, as if I were learning martial arts techniques.
With a lot of hardware-only workflows, muscle memory training happens by default, which also means that they "get away with" really poor UX ideas at times. With software you can have some mixture of defaults/presets and technique. It's not worthwhile to try to customize all of it(good defaults are precious, early-binding forms are valuable) and technique usually suffices for covering the remainder. But technique is less discoverable than a settings menu, as well, and swipe-and-tap techniques are extremely so since they operate on many dimensions. Compare the new iOS gestures to chorded keystrokes - once you know that chording exists, you can learn any new one given some time.
Interestingly I did not know about it and only found out whilst complaining to a friend. Friend pointed me to this selection alternative, but it was not obvious.
Prior to iOS 13 I used this all the time to great success but now it seems like whenever I use it, it tries to select all the text beneath wherever I move the cursor instead of simply moving the cursor to where I want it.
Rofl, just yesterday I was teasing a ex apple employee about how I can do that very same trick in Android but apple can't do it unless you install the Google keyboard.... Even HE didn't know this trick was in the default some keyboard!
Yeah, it actually does work. Didn't know about it either til now. The trick is to swipe from space button in GBoard, then selection cursor moves. If I just hold my finger on spacebar it triggers language selection, so it's a bit tricky
Indeed there is, but not in the area of adding more cryptic, convention-breaking features offering little improvement in the user's experience, even when they do not actually degrade it.
I miss the cursor magnifying glass widget and will miss using 3D touch to open the cursor when my iphone 8 eventually dies. Disappointing. That used to be one of the major things separating iOS from Android. Holding the spacebar feels nowhere as smooth.
I found the 3D touch on the keyboard to be flakey compared to the spacebar -- if you moved your finger before 3D touch activated, then it lost context and wouldn't activate 3D touch, and then you'd have to delete the stupid 'j' that just got dropped in your email.
I was just trying to select all before giving up and manually moving the edges of the selection bar. Eventually I found out you can only select all when you have nothing selected and hold the cursor and release. And I'm 20...
My cynical view is that this is just more promotion-driven development for all those UX designers. The optimistic view is that this is necessary to integrate new features. The reality is probably somewhere in between.
> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
This 1000%. Working with text on iOS is such a pain now.
Hold on the space bar. They removed force touch on the whole keyboard, but this is an okay alternative. I find not having to hold my finger over what I'm selecting much easier to use.
They should let us re-enable holding anywhere on the keyboard. I used to always hold the middle of the keyboard, giving me lots of room to move in any direction. Now that we have to hold the spacebar, we have very limited room to move down. English doesn't use any special characters that requires me to hold down any letter on the keyboard, so I should be able to re-enable long touch on the whole keyboard for moving the cursor.
Or make it like iPad, where two fingers will move the cursor from anywhere on the keyboard and without any hold.
I don’t think the changes to selection and sharing in this update had any point.
Previously when I got an update I would think ‘oh, that tiny annoyance is finally gone!’, but now I just thought ‘why in fucks name did they find it necessary to change this’.
Yep - the biggest difference between older and younger people in a usability study is that older people remember things and younger people discover things. As much as I like iOS - it favors discovering over seeing and remembering.
I also can't find Select all for the text shown in the browser, when the cursor is anyway not visible before.
Btw (not iOS 13 specific) when I select the word in browser the hovering menu has more options behind a minuscule right arrow that I almost always manage to touch outside, making the menu disappear. And I need the "second part" often. Sad.
> It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
Companies hire too many designers, developers, project manager and product managers which means they must do something to occupy their time. Bug fixing is boring. Writing something new is sexy. Sexy > boring so you get a "new and improved" version.
I'm not really following the complaint here. I've been on iOS 13 for a few weeks, but honestly I don't recall that much of a change.
Now you can tap anywhere to more the cursor there. Before you had to do some sort of cursor grab I think.
You say "under your finger" but obviously you'd move your finger down or up so you can see where the cursor is going? There's no swiping gesture needed anywhere, not sure what's that about?
I do remember it being very annoying to move the cursor before. Now it seems much easier. I'm happy, that's one data point I guess. And yeah, I'm getting older. My father, now 70-something, says he likes it, too.
Re: 1), you also have to place the cursor before you can grab it and move it. You used to be able to place it precisely in one step using a long press to get the the magnifying glass, but now that selects the word under your finger instead.
If there’s no cursor yet, you have to 1) tap somewhere to get a cursor to appear, 2) drag it where you want it.
Super annoying to change such a basic, useful functionality.
i still can't figure out how to do screen splits on iPad, since it was introduced in OS 11? i watched videos on it, etc, and still couldn't get it to work. the only way i got it to work is to split screens for an app that's on my dock, which itself is very limited.
i ended up giving the ipad to my 5 year old as his toy and the other day it died completely.
For me and the whole family, sharing via WhatsApp has gone from being the first option to being hidden under a sub-menu. Naturally my mom has stopped sharing photos on WhatsApp since the iOS upgrade. Certainly there is local historical telemetry data so removing one of the most-used options during an upgrade seems careless.
Deep at the bottom of that submenu is a place where she can change the order of what's shown in the share menus, but the likelyhood of her ever finding this is of course nil.
one of the more challenging experiences in my adult life was my dad screaming about how upset he was that windows had forced some upgrade, and as a result (?) he'd lost genealogy work he'd been doing for years (eventually he found it).
he was furious, and crying, and shouting... "i don't want any f* upgrades! just leave my f* computer alone!! i never asked for any of this, i just want to do my work"
i dont' spend a lot of time at the house any more ... and i didn't know what to tell him, so i hugged him. later i brought up linux (again) and i think we'll get to that place soon, so that he has a chance to learn before age sets in too much further.
One reason I like to force touch the keyboard rather than using spacebar is that, when you force touch, you can force touch again with the cursor active, and it will select an entire word. Dragging on keyboard now expands the selection a word at a time. Force touch again (while keeping your thumb on the screen) and it selects a whole paragraph. One more force touch and it switches back to a plain cursor.
It doesn’t seem possible to do this using the long-touch spacebar approach.
I agree it was better before. One nice tip, though, is that you can press and hold the spacebar to turn the keyboard area into a trackpad of sorts to move the cursor. That’s totally undiscoverable but works well.
ITT: “The A/B test and creepy stalker analytics told us that everyone was doing other things more often so lets not show these less often tapped features”
It's charming how he goes out of his way not to step on any designer toes. "I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs."
No, yeah you do, you just said it in the previous paragraph: "And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below."
I don't feel bad being critical of their UI choices, precisely because Apple was the company that made a big deal about UI and how far ahead of the poor hopeless gray conforming IBM Microsoft masses they were. And I mean, yeah I would've bought it, back then. Their stuff at its best was always a holy union of simple, functional and beautiful. But function came first, then simple, and beautiful arose from that, kind of in the Zen sense. Kind of like how a well-crafted hammer can be beautiful even though it's just a hammer. But at some point they went whole-hog into putting "beautiful" first, probably because that's where the money is. If you're not careful with that, you wind up being beautiful and stupid like the popular kids in high school. A beautiful hammer with no handle is just a crappy piece of shit. Even though it might be a great hammer(head), it's crippled by its lack of a proper UI.
Leave poor “beautiful” out of it! It’s innocent! Apple’s shit is beautiful because it is simple and functional, not the other way round.
I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture menus... it’s all kinda aimless and floaty. Let’s not even go into how they turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.
I'm with you on everything else (I'll be the first to admit that I love trashing Apple at every opportunity I get these days), but I find it weird that people criticize the dongle thing so heavily. Surely standardizing everything to USB-C would be an example of the exact thing you're talking about? (keeping it simple and functional). Somebody has to make the switch first, and if Apple didn't, wouldn't we all be using dongles anyway, just the other way round?
I'm happy to cop a bit of temporary pain in the pursuit of standardization. It's the one thing that actually isn't shitting me about my work Macbook.
Where is the USB C on my iphone? Why do I need a dongle to connect my brand new I phone to my brand new MacBook? Why do the headphones that came with my iPhone not work in my MacBook?
Why does my magic mouse not charge via USB C? My keyboard? It has been years now, why hasn't this happened within the company? Shouldn't Tim Cook be banging a pot and pan outside every team's door asking why they haven't gotten with the program?
I made a decision. I’m gonna upgrade my iPhone when Apple makes usb-c iPhone rather than lightning socket.
It’s really double spreak on their end. I don’t give a shit about the new fancy features. I just want Apple to simplify the gajillion cables and converters I need to carry around.
I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar (I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's recent leader.
I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard alone, but apparently the escape key was seen as an unimportant key.
I also like that volume and brightness are both sliders—I find the gesture of tapping the volume on the Touch Bar and dragging my finger up or down in the direction I want better than pressing a button a bunch of times until I’m at my desired volume. There are other things I like about it (and others I don’t).
I think it’s ok to like aspects of the Touch Bar and dislike others—it is possible to iterate to something better by being specific in one’s critique about what is good and what isn’t rather than just tossing the whole thing out (which is personally what I’d like to see...and maybe I’m in the vocal minority here).
I like the touchbar. I don't love it, but I like it and use it. For a Mac at least, if I were choosing between two otherwise-identical laptops, and one had the touchbar, and one didn't: I would choose the touchbar version.
I'm a longtime user of vi keys. I use them in Emacs Viper, vim in a pinch, and everything I can that uses readline. As such, I use the ESC constantly and I truly don't understand why people find it such a problem for ESC to be on the touchbar. It's just a slightly different feel but since it's a reach anyway, having a low-effort key there works for me. I don't know if I'd call it better but it's definitely fine. I've been using a touchbar Mac for all work for at least two years (I'm on my third--I don't remember when I got my first but it was around then) and it just isn't an issue for me.
On the other hand, since I use an alternate keyboard layout (Dvorak), it's quite nice to be able to put an input method switcher on the upper right of the touchbar that displays the current layout and allows me to toggle it. It was critical for years to be able to do this just to be able to practically use Yubikey hardware tokens, for example.
I also like having a screenshot button with an actual icon where I want it and to discard some of the control locations of the hardware function keys. Similarly having a lock screen button next to the fingerprint sensor is useful.
This makes the touchbar a bit better than function key buttons for me. Of course I could remap or reassign function key buttons; but for me function keys are infrequently used, so the icons and being able to create my familiar and preferred layout is a help. I use a different platform with function key buttons for a personal laptop, and while I have a button for ESC the rest of the function keys are comparatively less useful to me.
I found a way to learn to like it by using BetterTouchTool, which makes it more like a static customizable screen instead of the modal aware screen they marketed it as.
It gives me (always in the same place), currently playing song in Spotify with << || >> controls, weather tappable to see forecast for current location, a scrollable emoji keyboard, battery display, and standard brightness volume controls. Ctrl and Alt give me other modal contexts. All of those are nice for interacting with my host OS even if I'm, for example, working inside a VM at the moment.
Edit: it also prompted me to map escape to capslock, and now I wish that were default everywhere.
Edit2: having a scrollable emoji keyboard handy is honestly awesome, since I do most of my SMS messages through my computer.
I'm curious too. Anecdotally, I've never seen anyone use it for anything (I work in an office where Macbooks are standard issue). I think when I first got it I dicked around with it for 5 minutes, changing the colour of my terminal using the hue slider, and it was cool, but I haven't used it since. It just feels like a sales gimmick that serves no real purpose except to look fancy in an ad.
As a heavy vim user, I can’t live without escape key. One Of the fast way to alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don’t want to be tied to a certain specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.
I quite literally only used the function keys for volume and brightness. The touchbar has sliders for them so it makes it quite a bit nicer to use in my opinion.
The ESC key isn't that big of a deal to me, it can still be used while touch typing. I have maybe one miss per month or so.
Your first paragraph was precisely my point! But I guess now you're saying they've strayed from the beauty part recently too. I admit I don't know much about it, as I haven't used Apple stuff lately. (No particular reason on my part, just that the industry I'm in tends to keep pulling me toward Windows.)
I kind of hate the entire iOS 13 share sheet. Having the option to instantly send anything I happen to be looking at to my mom with an errant tap wasn't a feature I'd been missing.
On the flip side, the quick-send list is one of my favorite features of iOS 13. Instead of the arduous process to share something to my SO before (it was something like, share > Messages > type the first couple letters of her name and choose her contact from a list of names > send), it's much easier to just (share > tap her photo > send).
Honestly I rarely ever use any button in the "share sheet" except for Copy or Copy Link. Every time I open it I'm just searching for those Copy buttons. I'll "share" it myself with Paste. Idk how "sharing" ended up like this.
I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered.
This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.
For anyone else in my boat:
System Preferences -> General -> Show Scroll-bars -> Always
> people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.
Yes, it seems like the younger generation is conditioned to a different form of UI "discoverability" than those of us who learned computing in the desktop era. I look for visual indicators, even on touch user interfaces, so I am always missing functionality that is hidden behind a non-visual interaction. "Pull down to refresh" is something I would have probably never found in many applications if it had not been pointed out to me. iOS is especially notorious for hiding features behind odd/innovative UI behaviors such as press-extra-hard or shake.
I almost feel as if "just show me visual indicators of all functionality because I am old-fashioned" needs to be a new accessibility concept or setting.
I am 30 and I find this hidden scrollbar fad (aka try-to-swipe-every-screen) really frustrating, am I already so old that UX designers should build special accessibility settings for me?
Sure, when I see younger people trying some new GUI they basically touch and swipe everything to discover hidden options and functionalities, because someone decided that a flat rectangle looked "cooler" than a button, or that a greyed out textbox looked more "modern" than a standard white one... but isn't this just bad design? what happened with make things as simple as possible, but not simpler and don't make me think?
Or the "shake to undo" in Notes on iOS that is totally undiscoverable. Also, three fingers gestures, 4 key keyboard shortcuts and ton of UI that changes when alt is pressed, Apple OS are actually harder to use than Windows in some respect.
windows generally had better default keyboard shortcuts than macOS, because many multi-key shortcuts could still be done one-handed (e.g., mash 2 keys with thumb), and shortcuts were better grouped somehow. the specifics escape me now, but i still miss the higher efficiency of windows shortcuts (which i haven't used regularly in over 10 years).
Shake to undo applies to all text boxes on iOS. But I don't blame you if you didn't know that, I only knew about it from the iPhone OS 3(?) keynote that introduced it!
Go to Settings, scroll to the very top (beyond what shows as the top when you first open it). There's a search field (this is in a lot of other "list" styled interfaces like contacts as well). Type "undo" into the field. It'll bring up the location in settings to disable "shake to undo".
It's under the Accessibility settings if you want to just browse around for it.
navigation/gps? workout app? whats the difference between a workout app on my iphone compared to a dedicated device (e.g. garmin edge) in terms of safety?
You shouldn't be actively using, interacting with, and providing manual input to your device (be it a phone, garmin edge, or anything else) while cycling. An occasional glance at a navigation app (on a screen that is held by something other than your hand - a clip, stand, etc.) is probably fine - but taking your hand off a handlebar long enough to hold a device, and taking your concentration off your path long enough to interact with it, is asking for trouble.
a) the shaking feature turns on even if i don't type anything just by the virtue of the phone being active (shaking can mean 'undo', not just 'undo typing')
b) i have it mounted on a quadlock on my handle bar, no holding whatsoever.
c) i take the risk of asking for trouble while cycling on a cycling path with no other cyclists near me (within, say, 300m). I am not cycling between 2 double decker buses while texting...
take the risk of asking for trouble while cycling on a cycling path with no other cyclists near me (within, say, 300m).
You don't know. If you start looking at your screen and you are moving, you are a danger to others. I don't care what happens to you, but I care that you don't hurt others. And you may.
If there is such a great risk doing that, do you not think that sharing the road with a car would be even riskier?
I.e. if there is no trust i can glance at a screen when i am on a cycling path with nobody around without injuring someone else, how can I be trusted while sharing the road with cars/buses/trams?
Well, I actually learnt about it years ago then forgot it. So, not only its impossible to find, it’s also easy to forget because no visual clues remind it.
I've been thinking about adding this to the app I'm working on, as a sort of UI hint. Just something real subtle at each edge that is scrollable, to signal the user that they can scroll in that direction (maybe a transparent animated chevron or something).
It definitely does feel like something the browser should handle though. Having to work on stuff like that instead of actual functionality is painful, especially for startups that are trying to iterate fast.
It seems like much of the design rules that evolved by experience is being thrown away by designers because they don't think it's looks nice or is clean enough. Interfaces like Windows 95 that are neither too early nor too modern seem to be really excellent at conveying meaningful information to the user.
The Windows 95/98 scroll bars were vastly superior to those in Win10. No matter the size of the window or the scrollable content, you can tell what is the scroll bar and what isn't. On Win 10 it's sometimes ambiguous. Removing the scroll bar when you're not scrolling is the worst design decision.
Apple removed the scrollbar first, because they wanted the screen to look more beautiful and simpler. Instead you may not be able to tell that a page is scrollable, or maybe where you are on a page.
It's the definition of false simplicity.
Everyone followed suit because Apple Keynote events just made everything look so magical, and Mac/iPhone snobs were taken seriously by the dumbed-down press, and now Windows laptops and keyboards are like their previously-less-functional MacBook counterparts.
Hmm, idk, perhaps a midway between removal and hiding would be to collapse it to ~1px so you gain real estate but still see the position in the document?
Windows 95 users often had 640x480 screens. Somehow they managed to get work done while still displaying scrollbars at all times. I think we can manage on our modern, high-resolution displays.
I use that from time to time. Some applications and some desktop environments on Linux do that. It's horrible, might as well not have a visible scroll bar at all. I'm fine if they're a little more narrow than the traditional Windows 95 ones, and the color can certainly be improved (maybe translucent Windows task bar / color-adapting Android notification bar), but expanding or hidden scroll bars are both super annoying on desktops.
On mobile I'm fine with hidden ones. Since attempting to scroll down never has an unintended action (I'm sure someone on the Internet can name an exception, but I can't name a single one so it's not the common case) I always just try to scroll and notice when it doesn't go further.
Maybe for desktop, it might be solved by having a free spinning scroll wheel. Then you can flick like on mobile and nearly never need to actually drag the scroll bar. In the rare case that you do, you can still grab the one that appears on demand (like in many mobile apps), and by appearing on demand you have a visual indicator of how much more there is. (The home/end buttons also go a long way, but one doesn't always want to scroll to the end or use the keyboard.) But until we universally have such mice...
There's definitely a few exceptions, though they're mostly minor annoyances or caused by apps that expect you to be permanently online with a good connection.
The most frequent one I've seen on Android is swiping down while (almost) at the top, and the entire view refreshes. This is mostly in the browser, which simply reloads the page after a few seconds (resetting any text fields you may have modified) and in this case the gesture can be cancelled by reversing it. Unfortunately, if the browser or app has been open for a long time (say, I've left a news app open for three days), the view can be quite different once it finishes reloading, and can be impossible to get back to where I was previously.
Lazy-loading content can also cause issues when offline if the placeholders don't update (Materialistic, the app I'm using now, has both these issues).
Occasionally I'll find an app that likes to do annoying bouncy things with the view when overscrolling the bottom of a list, but that's fortunately rare.
Peak OSX / MacOS was Snow Leopard. From next version they hid scrollbars, swapped default scroll direction and started a steady move to make it seem everything should be hidden like iOS.
The success of phones and tablets appears to have made the desktop world afraid they were obsolete, so the trend since Snow Leopard and Windows 7 has been to make the desktop more like a phone or tablet. Windows 8 clearly went too far and provoked a revolt, so Microsoft improved things with Windows 10, but I think the Windows 7 UI is still better than Windows 10 in many ways.
I think that captures the why. Perhaps with a hope that a single UI between the two devices might be cheaper...
Windows 8 was a culture shock, but at least was clear in what it wanted to be. Personally I found it (and to a lesser extent the "mostly like a phone" UI of Win 10 and current MacOS) to be a mistake - I want a distinct and appropriate metaphor for a desktop rather than using it like a 27" tablet. People have dozens of apps and windows open, not one or two at a time.
Win 10, for me, is a mess. The whole flat thing went much, much too far, there's dozens of remnants of the Win 7 way of doing it in dialogues, settings, workflow etc. Win 7 is probably the nicest, and most coherent look Windows managed, but for workflow Win 2000 often had the edge! e.g. every version of Windows since 2000 has reduced the power of search, but made it increasingly obvious that it's there.
I am convinced if MS hadn't removed the start button but kept everything else as it was that Windows 8 would have been a success.
It was in the betas which I enjoyed using. But when it was removed it made the entire OS feel unusable to me. Whoever decided Windows Server 2012 should follow suit deserves just as much scorn.
My favorite was an issue which plagued Chrome for a while. When you need a scrollbar to jump down a very long page: 1) wiggle the page with two fingers to make the scrollbar appear, 2) switch from two fingers to one finger and grab the scrollbar handle, 3) just kidding, they automatically hid the scrollbar before you had time to grab the handle.
I pretty much always use an external mouse on my Mac at work and at home. Plugging in a mouse automatically makes scrollbars always visible on a Mac and I didn't even realize that for a long while
Clearly, those of us who prefer a real mouse are too addled to use anything more sophisticated, so I suppose this, at least, is a +1 in the usability area.
I have usb mouse plugged into this mac and there was no scrollbar.
edit: I have a magic trackpad 2 also. It took when I turned that off and reloaded the page. Well that's annoying that I lose the scollbars with the trackpad.
I just yesterday found that you can scroll a whole iOS scroll area by scrolling a little then holding your finger over the now-visible scroll indicator bar to "grab it" and drag it around.
Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.
I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.
> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.
I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively without the slightest motor movement.
"Checking to see if something scrolls" means some form of finger or hand movement.
I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time. There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)
> I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.
That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might just decide not to scroll before they leave your content because the first page is so uninteresting to them. It's because scrolling requires interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab their attention.
A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.
I don't know if this is still done in grade schools or not, but long ago when I was in grade school, teachers would pass out strips of paper for reading - and as a bookmark. The idea that the student would hold it under the sentence in the paragraph they were reading so that they didn't get lost or lose their place.
I had been reading since before I started school; it was something I picked up early and that my parents encouraged in me greatly. So by the time I was in school and we were doing these reading exercises (which were mostly utterly boring to me at the time, because my favorite thing to read at home were my various science encyclopedia sets), I had no need for such a placeholder. Reading was natural to me, and I knew where I was in a paragraph, etc.
Of course, this upset the teachers, until they finally figured out that yes, I could read, and not only that, I could read well above my grade level (that said, my comprehension wasn't as great, unless it was geared toward topics of science).
I always figured that people who highlight text as they read on a screen do so for similar reasons; not that it's a stupid thing or anything - sometimes with long lines, small fonts, bad color/contrast choices, etc in text on a screen, you do need some kind of a marker to help you along...
I frequently highlight text while reading because the lines are too long and I end up loosing where I am when looking for the next line.
This is usually only a problem on desktop.
Are you actually checking every paragraph, section, list, etc? There may be additional content with overflow-y…
(This is a real-world issue: In a write-up, you may want to present detailed data, but don't want to have every user, interested in the details or not, to scroll over several pages of extensive data. So the logical choice is to present a small, illustrative sample and have more in the overflow. The same technique may be used – and has been historically extensively used by the Engelbart community – for outlined text content.)
> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.
This is the typical narrow minded view that these app designers (not you) have. There are other uses for the scroll bar. For instance, I used to be able to tell how long it would take to read an article by looking at the scroll bar. Now they are gone and to compensate every other article now as an indication of reading time. Which is of course a worse solution, because people's reading speeds differ and it also clutters screen estate, even is a more annoying way.
The well known xkcd[0] about breaking workflows does not only apply to features, but also to UI. Few designers seem to acknowledge that.
On my iPhone SE, it is also well-spaced and perfectly cropped, omitting the 'copy' row and perfectly finishing below the second line of icons.
(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions, which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)), went. Oh well...)
Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods. Then even the touchscreen will be removed, to be replaced by a LIDAR chip mounted around your belt buckle. The design of the Great Wizards of Old will have come to fruition, and men will call forth driving directions and Amazon orders using mystic incantations and vigorous, unnatural hand movements.
> Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods.
This function is already available (with the minor difference that it speaks to you using, you know, words and stuff). It's called VoiceOver. It's designed for blind users.
Eventually we'll be forced to have chips implanted in our brains as babies where we can communicate with the giant computer in the sky which can also regulate gland secretions.
On my SE I also have only two rows, no menu entries. (1)
I've also wondered where the functionality went.
Without this article I would never know that it's actually there but hidden.
Somehow I feel really bad about that.
-----
1) I don't remember if I've tried to adjust the font size. My pet peeve regarding that is the font in the Notes app which has a and o similar enough to allow false reading of anything that is not plain common words.
In design this is called “the illusion of completeness.”
“The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the viewable area.”[0]
It’s a designer’s job to create cues that ensure this never happens.
It's something I really miss about the height of Windows 8/Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8 design: the grids were specifically chosen to really to push that incompleteness feel: a few pixels from the next column over or the next row down always peaking through; big parallax landscape backgrounds that give a sense of background space that there's more to pan.
That feeling that not everything fits perfectly on the screen and things were almost always incomplete bugged a few people about those design patterns, but it did create a lot of nice, simple cues that things were scrollable without needing scroll bars or other indicators.
This happens all the time with news articles. There's an enormous ad and call-to-read-something-else in the middle of the article and you can't see below it to know the article didn't end. It's happening more and more.
Arguably, news articles have been written from the start (even in physical newspapers) so that the most important information is listed first, knowing that many readers won't bother to flip the pages to get to where the article is continued. Giant page-ending ads online just continue this tradition, they'd rather you click three more headlines than keep reading the mostly-redundant article body.
Our mainstream iOS app has tons of these kind of issues. Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things. I did UI design back in the 80's when it was actually a programmer duty more than an art thing. Of course back then were no phone sized screens and the UIs were much simpler in desktop apps. But the concept of making a UI usable for all sorts of people is still the same. Apple traditionally does not use user lab testing (which is not terrible in itself, often I've gotten mostly useless feedback when I watched them) but sometimes you work in an environment that has too many people who know the app too well to notice issues.
I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability in UI was with Windows 95 - and even that wasn't free from form-over-function issues. In Windows 3.0 it was meant that only elements you could interact with the mouse would have a beveled 3D appearance, so people would know just by looking at a screen what they would be able to interact with. However it wasn't fully followed - checkboxes, radio buttons and input boxes were flat. Instead of addressing that Windows 95 made everything 3D.
Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a Win95-styled UI.
Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these inconsistencies.
I miss good old fashioned menus. It's one reason I liked the PalmOS UX so much better than iOS and Android.
Menus are so wonderfully discoverable. The first thing I did when opening a new app (on PDA or desktop) was drop each one down to find out what tools I have available. Like a pilot looking over his cockpit or a craftsman laying out his toolbox.
It seems a lot of the last 10 years of UI "progress" has been about burying things in order to "simplify" (aka dumb down) interfaces for audiences developers think of as kindergartners.
Zen of Palm showed us streamlined, clutter-free minimalism is possible to achieve without making your app stupid.
You know, speaking of Bob, one thing I've been meaning to experiment with is a Minecraft-based desktop UI.
I'm completely serious. Minecraft is relatively intuitive, the space is completely malleable, human minds are already tuned to navigating such spaces...
There's even some precedent in Bob and PSDoom, among others.
A couple months ago, after 5-6 years of not playing it, I installed Minecraft again fiddled around for a week or so. It took me a good day or two to get a solid grasp on all the UI changes that had happened since I stopped playing. I had to get on Google just to figure out how to eat.
I agree that it's relatively intuitive. Emphasis on the "relatively" part - I'm thinking here that it's intuitive compared to the UX changes and kippleization that iOS, Google web apps, things like that have undergone over the same time period. That's not exactly a high bar to clear.
Themes are not enough (f.e. there isn't much you can do from a theme when it comes to an application using a header bar instead of a menu bar) and i wasn't talking about imitating Windows' style (as i said it is inconsistent).
The way i see it, things that can be interacted with the mouse should have specific styling rules (not necessarily 100% the same), things where you can input text with the keyboard should have their own styling rules that make them distinguishable and things that are static should also have their own rules. Things that group other things (group boxes, tabs, etc) should have their own rules, things that represent multiple options that are visible at the same time should have their own styling rules that clearly show the selected/unselected state. Some of these rules should not interfere with others since some elements may need to mix them (e.g. tabs can be interacted with the mouse, group elements and show multiple options that are visible at the same time). There also other cases that may be helpful, e.g., things that you can navigate to using the Tab key (buttons in a dialog) may be styled differently than things that you can only navigate via clicking (buttons in a toolbar). Similarly with shortcut keys - Windows made the Alt+<key> letter not be underlined unless you press alt, which i always found a bad idea. On the contrary, i'd like to see not just Alt+<key> be visible in a dialog but also other keys that would affect the dialog, like placing a small graphic for Return and Escape in buttons that are equivalent to these keys (nextstep had the return graphic, but AFAIK not the escape thing).
Of course i have not a clear idea of exactly what i'd do, these are just rough ideas. It is something i'd explore if i ever worked on such a thing :-). And yeah, some of it might be information overload and/or look ugly but i think it is better than the information underload we get with current looks-over-anything-else approach :-P.
I haven't really thought much about accessibility TBH, especially around KDE. At least not outside some basic stuff, like color schemes and the like.
I haven't used KDE much but from my little use i found it better than GNOME - mainly thanks to Qt - but still leans a bit too much into the flat trend (especially some newer things that use QML instead of Qt Widgets). Still, if i absolutely had to choose between the KDE and GNOME i'd choose KDE. Fortunately there are more choices and if i had to go with a desktop environment that currently exists (as opposed to my fantasy one :-P) i'd go with XFCE.
Though in practice i use Window Maker, but that is mainly out of habit as it doesn't exactly match what i'm talking about. But I do use Thunar as a file manager and Mousepad as my notepad-like text editor.
We, as an industry, used to do a lot of UX research. Today's designers ignore all of it because they don't like what it says. Spacial file managers? Global menu bars? 3D buttons? Ew. Let's just make shit up.
In reality, most design work these days is shifting to research and usability testing. Any designer who doesn't consider these things is just not a great designer and has much to learn.
Nearest I can figure, all the tuning is based on "engagement", which is a metric of how long a user spends on a thing. That's a useful metric to tune for if you only care about shoving ads at people, but is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you want if you're trying to help people get shit done.
Precisely. If modern touch user interfaces are the result of any carefully-gathered metrics (a premise I find suspicious, but let's run with it), the metrics themselves must be orthogonal to the user actually being able to complete tasks in as short a time as possible. Efficiency, speed, and accuracy were the sort of metrics used in legacy UI design.
But you are right, it's likely that modern metrics are things such as engagement, and whether the user is doing actions that are high-value for the company, such as sharing content with their social networks.
I think it's more that measuring engagement is cheap: just add some metrics to your app. Measuring usability is expensive: you need to give large groups of users your thing and be physically present to see how they try to interact with it.
I would be fairly surprised if startups regularly tested their UX the way e.g. Microsoft (used?) to test some of their products: give it to a room full of old people who have never touched your app and ask them to do something with it.
Well I can assure you that despite your experience, that is not generally considered good design methodology in the greater world of design. I don't doubt that it happens though.
This link is a great example of bad design, though. They don't even have to design for infinite viewport sides like you would on the web, there's a limited number of screen sizes this UI will appear on. In my work it's common practice to view your design at numerous different sizes and in the past issues like this were something we would specifically look out for when you have content of dynamic height that includes calls to action.
The solution is usually to programmatically ensure it is never perfectly cropped or, ideally, include hints there's more content or you can scroll.
There may be more R&D and UX testing. But there's a hell of a lot more design going on, much of it small and one-off. And the research doesn't seem to be filtering through.
Too, as noted, the UX metric is frequently "engagement", which is not the same as usability.
It is a serious decline - Apple was literally the best there was at this in the past.
I noticed their design attitudes towards affordances and contextual clues changing around the time Ives made some claim about how phone users have been educated about touch UI sufficiently to start dropping them. That seems to have become an general excuse to lean towards 'pretty' over 'functional'.
And worse are third party apps. They always have been more variable, of course, but the old HCI guidelines were actually really good, so much so that people followed them because they were convincing.
UI decay isn't the only reason I use my phone and Ipad less, but it is one of them. (Current Screen Time: 24 minutes a day. That's mostly checking email while standing in line and mashing 2FA buttons.) The dynamic lists of recent activities and such mean I have to stare for a while to see what the options are this time, and generally be careful not to make mistakes. I've turned off autocorrect, because it makes enough enough mistakes that it is slower (and really irritating) to use.
>Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things.
This stereotyping of a profession is becoming a cliché and is being rude towards a profession who has contributed so much to make technology accessible.
The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one. This is perhaps a good example of how 'fragmentation devil' is coming back to bite iOS now - which probably is not factored in Apple's product development process.
Designers deserve every bit of this stereotyping. There was a time when designers were taught to value fitness for use. Now "design" seems to be exclusively about aesthetics. This may be rooted in how designers are taught or simply in how they now practice. Or it could be that managers insist on aesthetics-only, in which case designers need to push back hard.
Whatever the cause it's a failure on the part of designers and their profession, and they deserve criticism for it.
> This may be rooted in how designers are taught or simply in how they now practice
No course or degree on interaction design - free online to ivy leagues across the world - teaches 'design for aesthetics' and neither do designers in design departments of startups or of big corporates have design sprints where designs are shortlisted because one is more beautiful than others.
Infact 'Design Sprint' [0] 'Design Thinking' [1] are things because design is about problem solving. I understand majority in HN are engineers/developers but that is no reason to make this is a tech echo chamber.
I'll take your word for that, and I'm also encouraged by your comments. Nevertheless it's clear from their products that Apple in recent years became infected with an "aesthetics is all that matters" approach to design. So maybe my general complaint should be narrowed from "modern designers" to simply "Jony Ive and those who emulate him" while still admiring designers who carry on the traditions exemplified by e.g. Raymond Loewy, Ray Eames, and Herman Miller.
> There was a time when designers were taught to value fitness for use.
I've worked with designers who I saw specifically laying elements out so as to avoid the issue the article author's wife ran into.
There is a problem though. Phone screens are of variable height, and user's can change their font settings. While this issue shouldn't happen with default settings with OEM apps or UX elements, it is not possible to avoid it completely given the exact wrong set of circumstances lining up.
Of course, not hiding the scroll bar would be best, and ideal is having multiple affordances, such as partially clipped content and a scroll bar.
> The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one.
Strong disagree with this point. The device from the example is an older one (iPhone 8), and this is a brand-new OS. This was not existing software that's being applied to a new screen size -- it's the other way around.
The design spec should have taken the older device into account -- there are still millions of devices with this screen size out there* -- and noted exceptions or adjustments from the iPhone X/11 size.
---
*And still being sold. And never mind the SE, another screen size which was still being sold just 12 months ago.
I don't understand your point. Shouldn't designers design the interfaces for all devices and screen sizes? If a designer fails to account for the specific sizes of an actually supported device then it is the designer's fault; perhaps just an oversight but nevertheless a fault. If the designer thinks it is fine to only design for iPhone X and above and let older devices suffer from inattention, it is most definitely the designer's fault that has made technology inaccessible to users that might not be affluent enough to afford newer devices.
Exactly. It's the same concept with buttons that give no visual indication they've been pressed, then 3 seconds later something happens. But depressed button state looks so dated!
I've learned to just wait. That list that appeared to have rendered completely is going to refresh half a second later causing you to click the wrong item. That button did something, you just don't know it yet.
When programmers get too distract by having their own fun, we get hard to maintain complex code base. But hand designers do it, it directly harms users.
I switched to Android around the time iPhone 5 came out.
Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and confusing.
The poor design described in the article is really bad.
But
> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.
Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).
I use both and am now a current iPhone user. Certain things on iPhone (like muting all notifications with "Do Not Disturb" are much more unintuitive on the iPhone)
I’m genuinely curious, how do you turn on Do Not Disturb in Android? On iOS, you swipe the top right corner to open the control panel and then tap the moon icon for enabling Do Not Disturb. I won’t argue that magically knowing the control panel is in the top right corner or that moon == Do Not Disturb is intuitive, but I am curious how android does it that is significantly better?
Android 9/10: Pull from the top to open your "tray" where you can turn on/off things like wifi, flashlight, airplane mode, do not disturb, etc. You can re-order and enable/disable those items too, I forget what it looks like stock but mine is right at the top.
I think it's very device dependent sincem ost OEMs ship some kind of non-native shit UI on top, but my Android phone has a slider (hardware) on the side of the phone like an iPhone to toggle between this.
While not playing media, the volume buttons control ringer volume. If you turn the volume all the way down and then press the volume button one more time it enabled Do Not Disturb. When you press the volume button again at any time, the volume indicator drops down from the top to show it is in Do Not Disturb. You can cancel Do Not Disturb by pressing the volume up button one more time or pressing the "Turn Off Now" link in the menu that shows the Do Not Disturb setting.
You can also Settings > Sound > Do not Disturb where you can change automatic settings, allow priority notifications which break through, etc.
> Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn.
Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears.
It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back.
Of course users can also arrange apps on their home screen however they want and ignore the launcher altogether.
> Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it!
I haven't witnessed this, but anecdotes are useless! I've had to show iOS users how to force kill misbehaving apps. Back in the days of 1 button knowing the right sequence of taps / holds to activate any of the button's many features was, well, the exact opposite of intuitive. Not that the modern practice of various arbitrary swipes around the screen to do stuff is much better.
On stock Android, one button is switch task, one button is go home, one button is go back. Three of the most common things users want to do, all right there.
A quick access menu + notifications can be pulled down from the top. Pull down once to get notifications and common shortcuts (Wi-Fi, flashlight, rotate, Do Not disturb, shortcut to settings), pull down again to get less commonly used options (Airplane Mode, BT Toggle, manual brightness adjustment)
Media playback stuff is done in the same UI as notifications, media playback apps pin a card to the top of the notifications list. No separate UI to learn, everything is in one place.
Don't get me wrong, Android used to be terrible. It was slow, buggy, and background apps had free rein to thrash the system to the point of it being unusable. But now days it is pretty good.
Also I can set my own animated wallpapers, so that is pretty nifty.
(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
>(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
Was that the one with all the floating "tiles" on the screen? IIRC it was influenced by the Zune UX. I remember when my father purchased a Windows phone as his first smartphone. It had already been announced they'd stop supporting them, but the Verizon guy didn't tell him that. I actually rather liked the UX and OS; the thing about Android's "desktop" that I dislike is its "pagination" - i.e. you can fit 12 icons on one page, and have to flip through them. So I have my calendar on one page, 8 icons or so there, my work email on one, my personal email on the next. I can navigate it quite quickly, but compared to the Windows tiles it seems antiquated for some reason.
The iPhones have degraded in every respect as far as I can tell. When I got my first Android phone about 4 years ago I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I was surprised at how expensive the iPhone was but after using a friends phone I understood that it was a higher quality product and you got what you paid for.
But my girlfriend recently got the latest one (11?) and I was shocked at how bad it is. It feels absolutely massive for a start. Has weird software. But it has a huge design flaw that I really struggle to believe actually exists. I've pinched myself several times and I'm now convinced that it's true. Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface. The cameras bulge out of the back such the whole thing rocks like a table with a short leg when you use it. If anyone can explain how that is considered OK I'd love to know.
Bugs me too (iPhone SE is the last good phone anyone made), but I think the assumption at this point is that it’s a $1000 phone and everyone puts a case on it, so as long as the case is as thick as the camera bump it’ll sit flat.
The iPad is worse. Camera bump sticks out so that it doesn’t sit flat, and no one should be using a 13” tablet as a camera so I’m not sure why they thought adding a good camera was important enough to make it not sit flat on a table.
On pictures, iPhone looks sleek, easy to brag about.
In spec sheets, iPhone is impressively thin.
In real life, iPhone is expectedly fragile, so people put protective covers on it. It also solves the problem of uneven shape.
In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this at no expense to Apple, which can continue to pretend they don't exist.
> In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this [...]
Absolutely. I'd go one further and say many owners don't want Apple to "solve" it. The cover can be more than utility, for some it's an expression of themselves. Plain covers. Sports team covers. Franchise covers. Utility covers with e.g. battery packs also say something about you. Covers are a feature, and I'm glad there's a healthy 3rd party market Apple doesn't control.
Agreed on phone cases, it's nice to have all the options, and if people are all using them anyway then the camera bump isn't as big a deal.
For iPads though, the only reason mine has a hard case on the back (instead of just a folding screen cover) is the stupid camera bump. I've literally never dropped it once, it doesn't need a case except for the fact that it's not flat. And I don't think people treat tablets as quite as much of a personal expression as their phones, there's really no good reason for most people to need an iPad case.
Maybe the USA is different but here in Japan the odds of seeing an iPhone without either a case or a ring are probably 1 in 1000. Problem solved. Further, there rows and rows and rows and rows of cases for sale.
I'm not saying the phone shouldn't sit flat (though I personally don't care). But just in looking around most people seem to want to customize their phone by adding a case so at least in Japan it's a non-issue.
I used my iPhone X un-cased for nearly two years based on that reasoning. My replacement is cased.
And I've realized: regardless of how thick the phone is, people are likely to drop them, and give the materials nature of these things, a case is going to be required. So I'd rather start with something as thin as possible, given that I'm going to add a case either way. The end result is therefore as thin as possible.
Because you can't buy something for a thick phone to make it thinner. Each person can make their own decision on the thickness/other concerns trade-off.
Because the thinness is a design decision unilaterally made for you and whose potential downside comes at your expense.
I always get thick, rubberized cases. The high friction makes phones easy to hold, and they've never been damaged from drops (like I'm sure OEMs, especially Apple, would like for repair/replacement $$$). :3
Because you can put a decent case on a thin phone and get a reasonably sized brick that can fit in a pocket and doesn't feel too awkward to hold in your hand. When you put a case on a not-so thin phone, it becomes way to large for most people.
No idea about the USA either, but I wouldn't like to imagine how big that thing is with an added case. Good grief. The phone comes in multiple colours. If it has to be used with a case it should come with a case. Otherwise it's like selling a car without seats.
You can't use a car without seats, but you can use a phone with or without case.
Case gives you options to personalize your phone too. If you want your phone to be as small as possible, don't use a case. Some people actually love large heavily stylized cases. To each their own.
Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface
That's a feature, not a bug.
When placed on a surface, the phone becomes a tripod, so that any hard dirt or crumbs can't scratch the majority of the surface. It reduces the potential surface area and the parts of the phone that will most likely be scratched by being placed on a dirty surface are confined to the bottom edge and the edge of the lens protrusion.
I have a Xiaomi that copied the camera bulge from the iPhone X/XS. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I literally never ever tried to use a phone flat on the table. Why would I ever need to use it like that?! I always pick it up.
For some reason this always accidentally triggers when I’m using the ‘Mail’ app. After opening an email, it offers me the opportunity to ‘Undo Read’. It means ‘leave the email you just read marked as unread for now’, but somehow instead the displayed confirmation modal implies that iOS can reach into my brain and take back the information imparted by the email.
Ha, yep I feel like an absolute idiot doing that in public. My genuinely favourite hidden/unintuitive feature is the force-touch on the on-screen keyboard to see a little cursor you can scroll around the text field you are using. I hate that it's so unintuitive, but it's incredibly useful
and i hate that they removed it in the latest generation! i know you can do the hold down on space instead, and i know that you can then tap with a second finger, but there’s so much more you could do much quicker with the force touch keyboard!
On many Android keyboards you can hold and drag on the space bar to do the same. You can also drag back on backspace to delete whole words/sentences. Similarly unintuitive though, I only know about it because I saw someone else mention it on the Internet.
The visual cue that one exists is, let me check my notes, oh here it is "go fuck yourself."
The #1 thing that drives me crazy with phone UI is the huge amount of hidden functionality that you'll only ever discover if you find an article online or just randomly tap and swipe everything in the app until things happen. And then you have to remember that all in your head because there are no reminders anywhere about the functionality.
And what do they do with all of the space they save by not having indicators? Absolutely nothing at all. Tons of whitespace is added to the app so you are always scrolling around anyway.
They replaced/depreciated it in iOS 13 with some crazy three finger swipe thing that for the life of me I can’t remember, so I still shake my iPad or just hold down backspace.
They need to rebuild their software development team.
iOS 13 just added a delightful feature where long press on a web browser link it opens on Safari, even if you are in Firefox, and even if you are in private browsing. It pops up a split screen window that has no close-window button. The only way to close the pop up window is to exit your browser and go Home, and then go to Safari to clean up.
I too found that annoying. If I understand correctly what you’re referring to, if you notice closely, there is a “Hide Preview” on the top right of that Safari popup. Tap that once and you’ll be back to just seeing a nice menu of what to do with the link and no more opening the link in a Safari popup.
Just keep shaking until you see the popup appear. The phone also "thumps" (with the vibration motor) to let you know it felt what you were trying to do.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to posit that this is a better way.
The best user interfaces (which include some video games) have great discoverability for new users, while rewarding the user with greater speed and efficiency after learning the app after a time.
With all the things mentioned in this thread so far, how are you supposed to discover them if you are a new user?
I managed to lock myself out of the office earlier this year on a work from home day, so no one I worked with was there and my phone / keys were at my desk.
We're in an office park, so I could still get into the building, just not into our office.
Wandered around a while hoping to find someone that would let me use their computer. Eventually found someone I'd seen a couple times before. Told them I was locked out and asked if I could use their computer to contact someone who could come let me in.
Instead of their computer, they handed me their iPhone and said they'd be back in a few minutes. I had absolutely zero idea what the heck was going on. Eventually did manage to find a browser. Took probably a minute to figure out how to open a new tab.
Finally managed to navigate to the Slack page and sign in, only to be greeted by a notice that I couldn't actually use Slack from the website, I had to download the app for "optimal experience". I wasn't about to install an app on some random person's phone, so instead I just accepted defeat.
Handed the phone back when they came to check. Told them no luck but I'd figure something out. Ended up just walking two miles to the coffee shop I was planning to meet my wife at for lunch and waiting.
You will note that I did solve the problem. I met my wife where I was planning to meet her anyway, and from there used her phone to make the needed connections.
All told I lost maybe an hour of my day. Not really a big deal.
Sorry, didn't mean to be critical. Just trying to be funny. Many folks nowadays (my sister included) won't ever resort to voice calls; she won't even answer them.
Hahaha, funny, I feel the exact same way about Android whenever I pick one up. Not saying one is better or worse, just different enough to be unintuitive and confusing to an outsider.
If it's a X/Xs/11. It's on the initial lock screen. The bottom left of 2 buttons has a flashlight icon. You just touch the phone to wake it up then click the flashlight.
Thank God that setting does not persist through reboots!
Seriously though, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the control center will appear, a button to turn the flashlight on or off should be there.
Dunno about iOS but on android, one of the first things I do on a new phone is set all animations to twice the speed. I can't stand these sluggish animations.
This is a very common issue. The best and most common solution (besides visual indicators for scroll) is to make sure you are always cropping some elements. Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.
This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like 3.1-3.2 elements.
I used to use that about 5-6 years ago, you have to be very delicate with it because it can look extremely cheap, but if you make it too subtle it's impossible to see.
What's worse is that if there's enough of a bottom boundary to the last visible bit of content in the viewport, it doesn't look like there's anything below it at all, which puts you in the same position.
> Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.
In this case it's not in a fluid container. All of the elements shown are of a fixed size—the photo, the row of contacts, the row of apps, and then the actions. (Well, the list of actions is fluid, but those are mostly off-screen).
Plus, one of Apple's advantages is that they have a small set of possible screen dimensions, because there are only a few phones. This should absolutely have gotten caught.
> This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance.
I just did some testing:
• Play Store uses scroll-snapping for the horizontal scrolling
• Play Store doesn't use scroll-snapping for the vertical scrolling (they should adjust white space to ensure you see 0.1 of an item at the bottom). Fiddling with text size and display size in the display settings can cause vertical items to exact fit (unobvious that vertical scrolling is available).
I thought about this and while it does work, there's not enough screen real estate on a phone for this to be efficient. Phone screens are already very narrow and vertical. So either the scroll bar would be too narrow to be useful or too large.
Keep in mind that this "scroll bar" would only have to indicate that there is more content, or at most, which part of the content you are looking at. It doesn't have to be interactive (tap/drag to scroll) because you can still scroll by swiping. So a few pixels would be enough if the color stands out enough.
In general I'd much prefer a scroll indicator to a scroll bar on mobile. Google Play Music gets this precisely wrong: the album list lets you click a play button on the album cover as a shortcut, but the button is so close to the edge of the screen that it's very difficult to avoid hitting the scroll bar area and scrolling to a random section of the list instead of hitting play. So you have to seek to the album you want again, and, because you are optimistic beyond rationality, you try again, and whoops! Did it again...
This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.
I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.
I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI.
I've reluctantly upgraded iOS here and there, mostly because my bank app requires it. Other than that, I've hated upgrading because there's always new UIs that are more confusing than before. Yes, there's sometimes some nice newer features (the call handoff thing is kinda nice at times), but... I'm also on an SE (just bought a new one in Feb) and much of the new stuff assumes newer/bigger phones too. I'd like security updates on previous iOS versions for earlier devices, but I'm also aware of the logistical problems that would create.
My non techie friend experienced the same thing, upgraded to iOS 13, went to see him and he started cursing about "how the f do I save a photo from my messages why the f does Apple got to remove something like that WTF!!!!"
I immediately thought no way they would remove that he must be mistaken, I just upgraded too and hand't tried to do that action. Looked at his phone and sure enough it was gone, tried all sorts of things finally Googled it and oh wow you got to be kidding me scroll down but no indicator you can, that's bad, there is going to be a lot of confused people, why would they do that?
I am pretty sure that was one of the first things I tried and nothing happened. Just tried on my iPhone X and the long pressed showed that menu, is there any difference there between models, he has like a 6 or 7?
Either way long press has the same non discoverability issue especially for not techie people who are used to it working a certain way before.
I already mis-swipe in my Reddit app and downvote instead of upvote... the "small" vs "large" swipe option feels like something that gets mis-input a lot. Okay for something inconsequential like votes, but I can't imagine deleting something I wanted to save because of it.
This is great, thank you for posting this. It seems like a good counterpart for Dark Patterns [1], though these examples are simply very confusing design choices rather than outright malicious ones. Anyway I'm happy to see Telegram's (and I believe Whatsapp's) decision to put archived chats at the top of the normal chat list here, that has always been totally inexplicable to me. I want these chats to go away, but not to fully delete them... on top of the chat list seems like the worst place to put them!
Hey grumpy - awesome site, but I thought "Cancel Subscription? - YES / CANCEL" was the title of the post and spent sometime wondering why it had nothing to do with subscriptions:
I have a lot of tabs open on safari on my iPhone. Both because I continuously open in new tab and forget to close the old one and also as a low tech “read later” list. Today I went through cleaning up tabs, and while going through the list pressing the x on some tabs, a pop up came up and asked me something (didn’t have time to see what) and as I was on semi autopilot pressing x’es to close tabs I accidentally hit the option Saying something About “1 day“. I figured it had something to do with cleaning up tabs (which I don’t want) so I go to the settings for safari and sure enough it’s now set to clean up old tabs after one day
So when I went back to safari all of my tabs had been cleaned up
I always browse in private mode (because why not?) so I lost a ton of “bookmarks”
Semi-related: My biggest UX gripe with iOS is that the option to hide a picture in the Photos app is part of the share menu.
Those are such diametrically opposed interactions, I really don't understand the thought process that went into that. Usually sharing is the last thing you want to do with a photo you're trying to hide, and with the share dialog open it always feels like you're just one mistap away from sending it to whoever.
I guess with the "Duplicate" / "Slideshow" / … options the share menu has become more of a general action menu, but if that's the idea, they should really change the icon imo.
The name “Share” is probably just a holdover from older iOS versions when it actually was purely a share feature.
It ought to be renamed to something else now, like “Actions” or something to reflect the fact that that one button is how you: open the file in a specific app, run automations on it, share it with friends, save or bookmark the thing, etc.
I'm personally torn on the new share sheet. It's actually fast now, which is nice, and I like the fact that it (supposedly) can put contacts in the top bar that I talk to frequently (which I guess no app has added support for yet?) But it's still a bit confusing how it's organized, and now it has two planes of scrolling and sometimes apps disappear off of them unless I pin them in "Favorites" or something like that and the list only has a limited number of items unless I go into the "More" option. But more on point, I don't get why it doesn't flash scroll indicators…isn't that the standard way that iOS has hinted at scrollable content for years?
Had the same issue the first time I was using Uber, around 1.5 year ago. Uber is not available in my region, and I was in the States, wanting to catch a ride with my colleagues to the airport, so that was my first time in the app. We were going long-haul and had a lot of luggage. First car that comes in is a Corolla in which there is no way we could fit. The guy (in poor English) tells us to choose a bigger car. We try to tap around, just to get a Jetta.
At the end we asked a guy in a shop near the spot we were waiting, for him just to swipe the ride type right to left. Felt like an idiot, because the three types available at were perfectly centered and aligned.
> Oh my god! This is just like the dumb new Music app. I didn’t even know I could scroll down!
I went a long time--months?--thinking Apple had simply removed support for "repeat song" because of this exact same issue. When someone told me to "scroll down" it was like someone said "just open that wall, the peanut butter is inside" and I'm staring at a blank wall wondering who is insane.
> And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below.
> I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs.
Isn't it obvious? The solution is to not get rid of visual affordances like scroll indicators just because some designer thinks it looks "cleaner" that way. It may surprise some, but they actually serve a purpose.
That still looks better, in my opinion, than the mobile operating of today. A proper dark theme many years ago, and an elegant (IMO), simple, touch-oriented UI. It avoided the "play skool/AOL" aesthetic that really rankles me with more popular UIs: rounded corners, circles that should be squares, etc.
All that said, I agree with the article's point that UIs that do not more clearly reveal the totality of their user interface actions are frustrating. I've often found iOS to be especially bad at this for outsiders like myself, especially with respect to hardware features outsiders are completely unfamiliar with such as "press harder than usual."
Windows Phone's aesthetic was certainly a welcome, effective change compared to iPhone's dominant paradigm. I suspect you'll pry rounded corners from Jony Ive's cold, dead hands.
I agree that iOS's "discoverability" is awful. I wish Apple had some head of UX like Android has with Matias Duarte. Instead, they put Ive in charge of software UX and it's clearly not something he cared about.
Me too! Until reading this article, I hadn't found the other commands. I had been missing "Save image" and "Set as wallpaper" and wondered why they had become so difficult to access. FYI, it's also possible to save a photo in iMessages by long-pressing it.
Wow...this is TOO weird. I was helping my mom the other day with her iPhone (I use Android so I'm not all that familiar), and I could NOT figure out how to save the image. Now I know why...
A friend of mine got bit by this sort of thing when setting up their Amazon Echo on their iPhone. When they got to the page where they were supposed to choose a wifi connection, it was perfectly cropped and showed no indication of being scrollable, so they thought those were all the networks it could see and there must be something stopping it from seeing theirs. Being a curious person, I walked through the process with them and when we got to this screen I was also confused, but I tried touching and dragging the list and sure enough it scrolled. Surprise!
I don't how many options I've missed or hours I've wasted trying to figure out for myself or others how to do certain things because there were no visual indicators of those options... and I've even had people become disconcerted with me or devices or tech people in general because of difficult-to-decipher interfaces, sometimes to the point of someone panicking and making things worse or getting angry and argumentative.
The false simplicity and "freshness" factor designers and developers are doing to change or add interfaces that cause confusion just for the sake of trying to get attention or change how something looks is a minor change for a major disfunction.
If the change doesn't improve something's usability, DON'T DO IT. I just noticed today iOS changed how some buttons look and menus operate, completely unnecessarily, throwing off recognizability and flow. Totally disruptive to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Just stop, make interfaces that are easy to understand, figure out, operate, and remember. It's much easier to leave something as is than to change it unnecessarily.
With the proliferation of different screen sizes and zoom factors, these kinds of usability problems will continue to happen. The only way I see around this is by re-introducing the 'obvious scroll bar' element, or alternatively a different kind of indicator that advertises where the current view is in relation to the entire content.
User interfaces are testable. There's a whole field of practice on this. Considering how sloppy this is (and Apple's recent trends in slop) I bet they didn't test it on all their screen sizes
> Like a tiny down triangle in the corner? This stuff is super not hard.
That's also what I suggested in my answer to onion2k below. I agree, it's not hard. But it does require their design team to overcome some instinctive minimalism.
You mean Apple excuses? That's a Steve Jobs quote. Linux UX is rough in parts and the answer is "it's a $0 volunteer group project, we need your help to make it better."
No, it's definitely a Linux thing too. Linux Desktop community in general doesn't care what anyone's experience is except their own, and if you're not a C programmer who's willing to fork the code to make the change you want (because they almost certainly won't accept your patch), then screw you.
Common phrases heard on Linux Desktop software issue trackers and forums:
"Why would you want that?"
"You don't want to do that, do it <the way I do it>."
"Works on my machine."
"PRs are welcome."
"We've rejected your PR because there isn't any demand for this."
This is the community that thinks .desktop files are a good idea and largely uses the GUI as a really fancy tmux. They're hopeless.
The user doesn't need to know where they are on the page. They just need to know they're not at the bottom. A line along the bottom of the page when there's more content available would work. You could have the same at the top too.
It's debatable whether it's bad that the user knows where exactly they are.
The problem with just showing a bar at the bottom is that iOS already uses a bar at the bottom to invoke the app switcher. Maybe a small triangle in the corner would help.
The user probably wants to know where they are in a list while scrolling, but otherwise it shouldn't be a problem to reclaim that screen space by hiding the scroll bar when they're done.
That reflects how things work on macOS and iOS right now, the scroll bar disappears when you stop scrolling. However, that does not apply to "pop-in" elements like the share pane. It operates like a slidable component on-top of the current app, it does not even have a scroll bar in theory, because from its point of view there is nothing to scroll. Whether that's a good choice to begin with is open to debate, but I assume Apple's design team would be averse to showing a positioning indicator due to the fact that it would break their skeuomorphism.
I hear you except that apple controls all the screen sizes and zoom factors. They know right off the bat what it's gonna look like on all the screens in the world because they have every screen this will show on... also if you forget zoom it's still only like 5 screen sizes: SE, 6, X, XS Plus, and XR.
How did they not test this on 5 different screen sizes, of which two it's entirely un-intuitive?
> The only way I see around this is by re-introducing the 'obvious scroll bar' element...
Or Apple could do the right thing and go back to a 3.5" screen size on all their phones, no exceptions. Even a 4" screen size would be better than these clown-phone monstrosities. IOS could then just dead-pixel all pixels outside of the center 3.5" screen on all existing clown-phones for backwards compatibility.
Personally I hate the big phones, but I would prefer to have a dumb phone with physical buttons if I didn't need all the two factor apps, public transportation ticket apps, car apps and whatnot.
Right now I am looking at the Sony Xperia 1 as it seems to be the best "smallish" phone now a days.
Nope. A few years ago I used to really want a large-screened phone. Then I got one with a 5" screen and found out its clunky and awful to carry around. Standardizing the screen back to 4" or 3.5" would greatly improve my tolerance for carrying it around and, if the resolution were also standardized, would greatly simplify UX design.
An easy fix would be to do the gravity/pointmass type deal that Messages does for the message bubbles, so when the sheet "shoots up", you see that they're movable.
It's not just iOS, it's the web too -- buttons and error messages that are off-screen with no indication.
A banking site I use commonly has a "next" button that is inexplicably about 3/4 of a screen's worth after the main page content which is only a few lines long, with just blank white space in between -- so just below the fold. For weeks I thought the site had a bug where there was no way to get to the next stage of the operation.
Similarly, it happens regularly in a shopping checkout site that I'll click "Complete order" at the bottom of a long form and... nothing happens. Click again and again... still nothing. Finally think to scroll up to the top of the page and there's a tiny message in red that I didn't fill out the "state" field or something like that.
Off-screen indicators/functionality is a problem everywhere.
So many UI issues like this could be fixed if we just brought back the bloody scroll bar!
All those hidden scrollbars result in undiscoverable UI elements. They would only need to be a few pixels in width and it wouls be easy to tell that things are scrollable.
The iCloud authentication issues are the real nightmare for me. I can't tell you how many times I've been rejected using the correct email and password, and how many times I've had to use the reset function only to have it mess up again immediately after.
Now, on one machine I just habitually click to dismiss the iCloud window. On another, I've just moved it as far into the bottom corner of the screen as I can get it tucked away to just ignore it.
I'm also working on moving my web development setup over to Windows (with their new Linux support, which is excellent) so my next machine won't have this problem.
I was a MacOS user since system 9. Every one of my computers was a Mac and I never used windows for anything except the occasional game. A year ago I had to use Windows for my dev environment at work (a dotnet core shop), and I've since bought a Windows workstation for my personal dev environment and stopped using my macs completely. It's absolutely mind boggling to me that windows is now arguably a better dev environment than MacOS now that WSL is a thing, but here we are! I haven't regretted the switch at all and having access to the ocean of software for Windows has been great (minus a few things like Sketch that are Mac only).
Edit: To preempt the "why not linix" comments, I have used linux on and off through the years, but I didn't enjoy spending a large fraction of my time fiddling with the OS instead of getting work done.
Similar story to mine! I started on System 7 at my first industry job back in 1999. Used Linux exclusively on servers, and needed a personal laptop with a usable command line. Mac was pretty much my only option, since I wasn't interested in fighting with Linux's weak hardware compatiblity back then. Bought my first MBP in 2000 or 2001 and I'm still on one now.
But since I also do a lot of VR development these days, I also have a PC both at work and home dedicated to that. VR obviously dictates my platform choice pretty heavily, so moving to Windows for web stuff makes everything simpler. WSL pretty much sealed the deal, although I wish there were more VR-capable laptops that didn't look like an army tank...
Ugh... it’s the same in Apple Music (as tfa mentions). Biggest iOS 13 complaint: going from a a song on a list to it either at the beginning or end of your queue used to be:
Toich and hold on song, move finger to “play next” or “play later” button, release.
Now, it’s: touch and hold on song, release when menu comes up. Scroll menu up. Tap button.
Sounds small, but it’s such a usability setback for no gain. I want a full screen modal, that’s why I’m going into the song options. Why would I press and hold on the song, then only want half of its options?
Testing on older devices is something many (any it appears iOS) doesn't do well enough.
I ran into this with an apps verification system. Because of the positioning on an iPhone 7 you couldn't perform verification. When I contacted them I learned they don't test on iPhone 7's because they are too old. This was prior to the 11 coming out.
I've also had to help someone with this problem on their older device.
A casualty of always chasing new is design and QA for older devices.
This issue confused me too, on my iPhone SE. The top action is copy and is partially cut off on the screen, and I didn't know save image was below it. At least it being cut off eventually led me to scroll down. Apple has destroyed UI intuitiveness by going too far in the minimalist direction. Sometimes we need some damn scrollbars or indicators.
However, it appears this changes based on the app? If I long press an image to save it from the browser or from the Toot! (mastodon) app, I get the regular save image dialog that I've always gotten on iOS.
If I long press an image to save it from Twitterific, I get the share sheet.
Ugh. The share sheet annoys me too. I get the convenience of having "most common" contacts at the top to send things to, but most of the time this is in the way for me and I'd prefer it completely off and as expected with Apple's "features" they rarely provide options to turn them off.
While I prefer iOS over Android, it's stuff like this that I realize is a big trade-off for me.
Edit: Looks like I can at least re-order so "Save Image" is the top option... but it's still buried beneath the contacts and apps
This article focuses on the crop issue, but there's another issue with the UI that is more important: broken hierarchy. Saving the image is almost as important as texting it, but texting is given 90% of the share sheet. Meanwhile emailing, airdropping, tasks(!) and copying(!) are all given more importance than saving.
I've struggled with the update to the iOS Music app in iOS 13. Mainly the shuffle button. I'll leave it on quite often but then want to turn it off sometimes when I want to listen to a complete album. Couldn't find the location for the longest time. It was easy before. Now it's 2 clicks away,
I had a similar issue in SQL Server Management studio when importing a database from a backup file. The window was unnecessarily large and spacious and couldn't be properly resized, and the 'OK' button was perfectly situated just off my corporate laptop's piddling small screen.
For quite a while I had no idea what was happening, there was a verify/test type option which was passing and I thought would prompt me to continue but I didn't. Only after looking for tutorials online did I realise my buttons were missing.
I think I fixed it by trying to resize the window. It didn't actually resize, but did jumble around the UI elements just enough to get 2 pixels of the top of the button to click on.
I don't doubt that Apple has big teams of people who do nothing but try to perfect the UX. Maybe this shows how difficult it is to get it right more than any inherent problem at the company.
Aside from that, I don't really care much for iOS any more than anyone else. Mostly because Safari is now buggy and once every day or so I have to kill & reload it to get a page to display. And the new gesture implementation has me going forward & back when I am just trying to get a page to scroll left & right. And the touch-and-hold popup activates too easily. And ...
Well, I hope they are still tuning it. I admit to holding iOS to a much higher standard than I do Android, but I can't help that.
It took me a long time to figure out in the first place that I had to “share” to do actions that are not sharing, like saving to my photos. I was also surprised by this new wrinkle on the iPhone SE. I’d use android if I had a phone in this form factor.
> "My wife typically only charges her phone when she’s at her desk during the day. She doesn’t leave it plugged in overnight, which means iOS’s software update never happens automatically for her. So, she just recently upgraded to iOS 13 a few days ago."
About 3 months ago, I _finally_ got rid of my landline at home. I had it just for emergencies, and I had a wired POTS phone on my nightstand.
So now I keep my iPhone on my nightstand. It's in the charger all day at work.
And I, too, stopped getting updates automatically! I just looked at my phone and saw that there's been an alert up for a few days that I need to update to the latest 13.1.3.
WOW. Ok I had no idea you could scroll that menu. wtf. I was also confounded by the new iOS 13 update not being able to save photos, but I got around by tapping on the pic from the conversation thread and getting a save action sheet.
My mom had the same issue the other day. Even I didn't realize the save option was concealed below the fold. My workaround was having her long press the photo in iMessage, which reveals a prompt with an option to save.
Usability is getting harder, not easier. I thought there as a bug in iOS 13 that I couldn't turn the torch on or access the camera on the home screen.
I press the button, nothing happens. Go to my control center, and it works fine there.
Is it a bug. Nope. It's user error.
It looks like a button. It animated when I press it like a button. It has only one primary action like a button. But nope, you have to _long press it_ for it to work.
The contacts in the share sheet annoy me.
Pixel also has this “direct share” that can’t be disabled and simply uses up real estate while being a privacy issue for me.
Samsung has an option in settings to remove it.
The simplest solution would be to group the Copy and Save buttons into the group thingy that's been common on iOS since forever. So that the Copy's bottom corners wouldn't be rounded.
My primary complaint of the share sheet is that it’s suggesting I share things with people I either never text or texted once for a specific purpose with no reason to communicate with ever again.
half of the UI stuff we know would have been called "Easter eggs" in a previous generation. I dropped out of gaming around the time of Pitfall! - when controllers got more than one button, that was it for me. But I saw my brothers and friends all geeking out of "left up down down left A B A BB A down up left" and finding cool shit in their games. It sort of feels like ios/mobile stuff has become that.
"3 finger long press, swipe down, dbl tap - oh sweet, I can save the picture you sent me!"
In e.g. Windows 95, there would often be a box around the text. Since the bottom of that box would not be visible, it would indicate that something is missing in that direction. Now that boxes (and other visual indicators) are gone, this kind of thing can happen.
I've always considered this a tradeoff, but I also get the feeling that some people did not even consider that the old designs had an actual reason in usability (for boxes, the second big reason is preattentive recognition in the human brain).
Maybe we could bounce all scrollable areas along their scroll direction when you open an app so you can see they're hiding a control. Like a 0.5 second tutorial.
Apple could do something smart with the Tips app – if the phone 'notices' someone not able to position the cursor, or doesn't know about the hidden gesture. They can send a quick how-to via Tips. They can even do an overlay on the screen to get people started.
This is only for things like keyboard. Even the OS won't understand that somone wants to save a photo and isn't able to discover the save button.
I only figured out these new menus because I knew already that the top action used to be in the horizontally-scrolling menu, and that some other things that used to be in the latter no longer were.
For the record: overall I think this new structure makes more sense; it was always weird having "Share to [App]" intermingled with random other actions.
But Apple has definitely gotten worse at designing things holistically to be intuitive.
> I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs.
The solution is right there in his screenshot. The list of contacts and apps indicate that you can scroll along the X axis by showing a partial icon that extends off the screen.
The fact that Apple didn't do this on the Y axis is an issue in this particular UI that should be fixed.
I'm not one of those aging parents, but it definitely bothered me when I could not find the other actions besides copy and share on my phone, then realized one must scroll to reveal additional options. WTF, the first is "flat UI", then this. Our UX is totally dictated by those no-talent ass clown designers. Seriosuly why do they keep changing the UI when it is perfectly fine?
It’s not realistic that iPhones could have had the same screen size forever, but this kind of thing and many others like it show that sticking to 3.5/4 inch screens for so long was not necessarily misguided. Consistency counts. As well as not diluting your design, development, and testing efforts across a plethora of configurations.
Is there a solution to this in DOM+CSS? I had always wondered, we have the same issue in some of our UIs and I'm never sure if there's some pseudo-class that I haven't discovered that can style overflow without Javascript. Never got to the point of researching it in-depth but quick looks didn't find anything for me.
Seems to have already changed, because that's not how it looks on mine. There's no whitespace between the buttons in the list, so (on iPhone X) the first two and a tiny bit of the third are visible. I'm assuming their view would now be the first and a small piece of the second.
Crazy something like that was ever released though.
If you're ditching the scroll bar, maybe just add a dark triangle to the lower left corner of the screen, just a few pixels, as a "continued below" indicator. Have it disappear when you're at the bottom.
That's the most minimal UI element I can think of that would people if they're at the end of a screen or not.
The new iOS update would disable scrolling on Safari - but only on some websites, and only about halfway through the page. You had to quit and reopen to fix the effect. This bug was remedied in 13.0.1, but I have to wonder: Did no one try opening Facebook in Safari with an iPhone XR? Seems like shoddy testing to me.
Hmm. I’m on iOS 13 and I just clicked a picture in a message and my screen looks slightly different. I see more options and I can tell from the design there is more. What I can’t tell is if I’m the edge case or his wife is, but for all the iOS 13 hating people enjoy doing, I’m not convinced this is a real issue.
My favourite Apple UI 'enhancement' was to remove pinch-to-close from 'Books'. You now have to fiddle around with a perfect touch in the right part of the top of the screen to get the top menu to appear, to then press a tiny 'back' button. Before, pinch anywhere on the screen.
Is OS X / iOS trying to be more like Windows? In mobile Safari, the icon in the address bar used to go straight to Reader view, now it goes to a menu with four items. It's a running theme; formerly concise, direct functions are replaced with overloaded menus like the Microsoft world.
Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in today's UX culture. Hide all the things, make them indistinguishable, it might not be usable but at least it meets some designer's arbitrary definition of "beautiful".
Fuck. Every day I grow to hate technology more and more.
This same bug hit me when I upgraded. I literally thought they removed the feature. Then I thought surely not, and went back and tried again. Took me a solid 2 minutes (which felt like way too long) of poking around to realize to scroll like your wife.
I had the same issue with my mother in law. She said she isn’t able to share to an iCloud group. She was used to the fact that the iCloud option was part of the upper rows. And having an iPhone 6s she was also left with any indication to scroll down.
One way to design UI to make this discoverable without scrollbars would be to do a transparency 100% to 0% gradient at the bottom. That way the copy button would be semi-transparent/vanishing which might trigger the user to scroll down.
It has always been an iOS best practice to keep object sizes so that half an item visible if an area is scrollable, so to let the user know there’s more below the fold.
Since the first iPhone I never found them breaking this guideline. Not so badly at least.
There’s also some really bad “ML” that reorders everything in very unpredictable ways across different Apps / UI contexts that are very similar.
It’s not the worst, but it’s definitely not reminding me of a simple Apple experience
How many iOS NN Beta users are on the ‘old phones’? I think this is a serious problem because then you don’t catch the problem before the iOS is out of Beta.
Same at Microsoft (in Norway) where every developer is eligible for a new PC every year.
You can see the solution on that same screenshot. Make a sliver of the subsequent button visible. Hard to do with all the variable resolutions, but theyre smart people, im sure they can figure it out.
Or, and hear me out on this, they could have a widget off to the right that signals to the user when content could be scrolled down. Heck, you could even get _really_ crazy and have it display _where you are_ within the scroll content.
On second through, nah, the world isn't ready for that kind of idea.
I have an ipad at work we can't sign into, since we changed the email address on the iCloud account (months ago), and the old address is on a domain we don't use any more...
This is yet another product of magical thinking around scrum and agile. WE NEED TO SLOW DOWN. Bar none, business needs to totally readjust their velocity gauge, its totally broken.
iOS 13 also completely butchered the screenshot editing interface.
It's approximately 4 times slower than the old one. The markup button is hidden in the 3-dot menu in the far upper-right (such a strain to reach this!). Oh and the "full page" safari screenshot feature? It only saves PDFs. What a joke.
It's not clear to me that free software is any more essential to a free society than libraries are. Which is to say, it's a clear public good but that's not a compelling reason to position it as a requirement for a free society. I would very much appreciate if you could expand on why it is childish to believe otherwise.
Look, there's free software that I absolutely love like Vim, but unless things have drastically changed in the past 12 months many open source "alternatives" trail their paid alternatives in features and ease of use. I would choose open source applications if they could demonstrate a superior experience, but I'm unwilling to jump over hurdles for promises of quality that have yet to materialize.
For instance, I agree that Adobe's model is just awful, but Procreate is miles ahead of Gimp so I'd rather give those devs thirty bucks as a one time fee over using free software that is less enjoyable or expedient for my work. That's the crux of it really: for most people computing is a means to an end so it makes sense that users optimize their choices around results rather than ideals about the future of computing.
Also, what you've described doesn't sound like a better economy at all from where I'm sitting. I love not being a sole proprietor or part of a small dev shop. It's great being able to go home on a Friday and know that if anything comes up over the weekend that someone else will handle it. It's equally great knowing that I have the resources of a large company and the combined expertise of a massive pool of employees. I would certainly be less happy as a consultant, independent developer, or entrepreneur.
I very much agree. Valid point, bad presentation. Embedding screenshots of dialogues and Twitter threads is something I'd really prefer not to get widespread.
I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community.
20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.
The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:
1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere now.
We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech, design, etc.
I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is irritating.