I'm not a designer so I might be missing some of the terminology here but I really dislike the move towards "buttons that don't look like buttons". Have a look at the old and new Notes app for example. In the old one it's very clear just visually where on the screen you can click to make an action like creating a new note or changing the font. In the new design all those actions just float in the top ribbon without any separation from the background or from each other. Seems worse to me.
I think the term is signifiers, I think coined by Don Norman (The Design of Everyday things), basically every object has affordances (the things you can do with it) and signifiers are the thing that communicate these affordances to the user. Apple has decided that usability is less important than making the whole bar one colour because they have totally lost the fucking plot. Apples whole design team should be fired into the sun.
I think this "highly polished" visual first - usability second approach has cognitive overload for the user. In my view desktop interface must be designed around mouse pointer interaction which is precise and demands clear separation of UI. Here we have clear focus on content area which is in harmony with touch based interaction. There are two options in my mind: 1. Design team follows marketing brief - do it like iDevices ASAP. 2. Apple will introduce touch as a part of desktop experience in near future. Personally I don't find this design appealing or easy on the eyes, but I am interface designer and obviously I have personal bias.
Amazing how far we have come from the decades of macosx where they all looked pretty obvious that a button was a button. This obsession with flatness and completely undiscoverable user interface components without wildly flailing around the UI just to get things to appear (scrollbars, delete buttons on lists in iOS) is so stupid and I hope will disappear soon! Windows 3.11 looks like a work of art by comparison where you had to learn one way of controlling the UI and it worked everywhere.
No wonder people who didn't grow up with computers (elderly grandparents) find touchscreen tablets so baffling from the plethora of bizarre swipes and gestures and not knowing that touching some undecorated piece of text is actually a button and has a side effect. It's stupid.
The plot is really clear to me: The road to iOS look and feel exact match.
There are millions of iOS users that now will look at macOS UI with more familiarity and confidence. And like any business goal, it is far more important for them than any usability perspective (not that they don't care, but...).
Apple Silicon will help break this barrier even further. The two OSes will also share the same apps.
This is also what Windows 8 and Chrome OS tried, even hard, and failed, more or less miserably.
Ironically, the new Finder looks a lot more like the Windows 10 file explorer to me.
> This kind of design has been validated on enumerable sites and app.
Has it been validated? It's certainly been adopted by innumerable sites and apps, but I seriously wonder how much A/B testing has shown that it increases or maintains usage of the features.
I agree with the idea that the content should be emphasised. Unfortunately the extreme UI padding goes in the opposite direction for me.
The fat toolbar in Safari is a good example. I care about the web content but now I have to give up part of my window real estate to the meta concern of the browser controls.
This used to bug me about Gnome 3 and it's sad to see macOS heading in the same direction.
I think that tweet is referring to a Windows-specific issue, where many windows have no visual border so that when one is on top of and offset from another, they run into each other. That makes it difficult to see or select a window.
In Big Sur the icons are visible. You just need to understand the design language that in a bar of icons, the icons are buttons.
My Windows 10 desktop at work drives me nuts, it’s extremely hard to identify the delineation between overlapping windows. There is a setting to highlight windows borders, but restrictions policy prevents you from selecting it.
This is the exact reason why I absolutely hate flat styled UIs. I find it difficult to see what the different types of elements are, what they do, what their state is, wether they're actual elements to begin with… It's a step backward.
Good point. In non-flat widget themes. the distinction between an "active" widget you can interact with and a background element is given precisely by the 3D look of active widgets. This is a simple and intuitive approach, whereas "flat" themes offer no real alternative.
I keep hearing this point brought up, but I haven't seen a good case for flat widget elements being confusing. In this very form I'm typing in, all the clickable elements (hyperlinks and submit button) are flat, but different styles immediately distinguish them from non-clickable elements, even if these styles vary between web pages and browsers. It's never been the case that GUIs consistently used 3D appearances to denote clickable widgets. 3D elements add a lot of visual clutter for complicated interfaces, which is why those "flat UI sucks" posts only show <10 GUI elements side-by-side. Google "Word 95" and "Word 98," both have a flat menu bar, though Word 98 has the addition of flat toolbars which helps readability.
> I'm not a designer so I might be missing some of the terminology here but I really dislike the move towards "buttons that don't look like buttons".
I wish people would put this common criticism in perspective though.
Maybe the buttons are a little harder to recognise in flat design but not a huge amount. And maybe it makes them look at little better.
Everything about software design is about tradeoffs and not everyone is optimising for the same thing. I don't think any commercial product is designed with 100% usability for every design choice, if that's even possible.
The actions bar redesign looks good to me. It's obvious they're buttons to me. It looks cleaner, more modern and less cluttered than before to me. Having the buttons not draw your eye too much can be good if they're rarely used because your focus is drawn to more important parts of the UI.
Not keen on the poor contrast white on mustard coloured button though.
What would you give out of the 10 for the design before and after? Is it really so bad or just a little worse for you?
It's also harder to know where you can drag. Which bits of the title bar can I use to move this window around? If I try that next to the expanding search field, will it work?
Without edges on the buttons, you no longer know where you can click. The affordances thus have shrank to the edge of the images themselves, reducing usability, especially for people who have motor control issues.
> Without edges on the buttons, you no longer know where you can click.
I don't see the issue. It's obvious to me by looking that they're buttons and users aim to click in the middle so if they miss by a little it's likely going to work if you mean that.
Even if it was an issue, it sounds like a very small one and a tradeoff for a cleaner look. Nothing is perfect.
It is sometimes not easy for those of us who are used to technology to see the struggles of others who are not. I know that my parents have had a hard time identifying flat design buttons such as these, not realizing that there are buttons until I pointed them out.
The buttons do highlight when you move over them, so it's entirely clear if you hit them if you would click. Or is that not what you mean by the 'affordances' of these buttons?
In the case of the tool buttons in macOS windows my feeling is that this is really is splitting hairs. Literally everything that is not the same color as the toolbar itself is clickable. The frustration or the supposed 'cognitive overload' is purely theoretical.
Ah then that would mitigate the issue a bit. It would obviously be better for pointe targeting purposes if the button edges are visible ahead of time so that users know where it's acceptable for their pointers to land, but having them show up when the pointer hovers over them would help some.
> The biggest news in Notes is that after years, the Skeuomorphic paper texture has finally been retired!
When reading things like this, I am always left wondering what was wrong with Skeumorphism in the first place. Is it as cynical as it seems, which that an arbitrary element of the UI was designated for elimination so that triumphant but meaningless changes could be introduced into wave after wave of new products?
(I am aware that I am likely the one who is out of touch, not Apple.)
Well, Apple made some horrible, horrible skeuomorphic UIs back in the day (See [0] for a very ancient example; or any stitched-leather UI from an iPhone before iOS 7).
Having said that, I could really use a little bit of skeuo these days. Buttons that look like buttons, sliders that resemble sliders, and the like.
I don’t understand the seemingly-universal hate for the stitched leather. It at least shows some personality and effort compared to just empty whitespace everywhere.
Real leather gives you a tactile feeling. Moreover, it reflects light differently than paper, whereas the light coming from pixels on a screen is equal in all but color.
IMHO skeuomorphism is not evil per se, but it must somehow boost usability to be justified (sliders are a good example of this). Otherwise, it's like the visual equivalent of purple prose.
This is how I feel about a healthy majority of flat UI design today (and almost the every example of neumorphism or widget with animations).
Eye candy happens when UI designers make something for a slide show demo and neither the designer or PM uses the UI while they iterate. Which is part and parcel to many areas of development today.
It was inconsistently awful mostly. Now we have replaced it with consistently awful. So the net gain is zero. I miss the bit between the two fads.
Really people need to just stop fucking around with user interfaces and breaking our workflows. The finest example recently being alt+tab broken in Windows 10 20H2
I've been a Mac user for 10 years and ever since Yosemite was released it looks like there was a downfall in both icon and UI design. Now with Big Sur a deal breaker for me has been the redesign of the menu bar. There's so much wasted space, menu bar is too much transparent with less contrast and the widgets are completely useless. The whole thing looks like a bad attempt at standardizing macos with the rest of the ipad/iphone echo system.
I would just prefer a screen-size-dependent menu bar. It would be actually nice to have large menus on huge screens but they should waste little space on a small laptop.
Oddly they “sort of” had this in very early scaling experiments, back in the days before Retina where Quartz Debug could scale to many sizes (1.5x, etc.). When those modes were enabled, the menu bar and menus had nicely scaled-up sizes and fonts. Not sure why they never enabled that.
Safari’s minimalist UI was tight and perfect. Took up minimum space and let you get on with it. Absolutely no one said what would be great is if we could have Padding += 20 and nothing else changed. Job done boys. Commit to master and let’s hit the pub.
...until you add in the path bar, multiple tabs, etc. It only looks minimal with the minimum amount of UI features enabled. IMHO it looked way more cluttered than the current version with anything besides the basic, minimal set of things happening.
what metics did they speed up? Page paint time (and even load time) will be lower when more of the window is consumed by browser chrome, leaving less for the page itself.
One somewhat baffling design decision which isn't apparent in the screenshots is that some confirmation dialog boxes have the buttons stacked vertically (I'm seeing this in Xcode for instance). This makes a lot of sense on mobile phones (where the display is usually in portrait orientation and vertically stacked buttons are easier to reach with the thumb), but it doesn't make much sense on a big landscape display.
Some dialog boxes use a horizontal button arrangement though, so I guess the vertical arrangement is not hardwired (the "randomness" is puzzling though).
Other then that the new design has surprisingly quickly grown on me, even though I'm a bit of a "flat UI luddite".
Having used Big Sur for ~12 hours now, most of the changes feel fine.
BUT the one really irking me is the huge horizontal space in the menu bar now.
It's not so bad with the text menus, but all my installed utilities on the right side are "double-spaced". In fact, several of them have disappeared because they don't fit anymore (until I switch to an app with fewer text menus).
What the hell, Apple? At a minimum you could reduce the spacing if things don't fit, rather than just hiding them.
You may want to look at Bartender[1]. You most likely don’t actually use some or even many of those menu icons very often. You can hide the ones that are just clutter in a secondary menu/bar. I originally got it to keep the icons I do care about visible on a laptop screen, but I still use it even on my huge 4K@1x screen to hide distractions.
In my case I actually do use all the icons. ;) I do a lot of audiovisual work so they're utilities for setting color temperature, webcam settings, CPU usage, and the like, along with my VPN and file sync.
The new Control Center at least makes it possible to free up the space previously used by the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth icons though.
It’s kind of incredible that the Stickies app is still there, unchanged, with the same miniature Mac OS classic windows. And it still showcases the ability to “include graphics” with a pixelated icon of what could very well be a Macintosh 128K, complete with the colored Apple logo and a floppy drive.
It’s a little weird, isn’t it? They would have gone to the effort to compile it for 64-bit, at the very least. (I’ve not dug around in the app bundle, maybe it’s just the simplest possible Cocoa app, and it’s a trivial “just click the architecture button” compile thing.)
My pet theory: someone high up at Apple still uses this. I actually do know someone at work who still uses this.
I’m pretty amazed it’s still there at all. I think it’s probably some greybeard’s pet project, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s still mostly the same Classic/Carbon code adapted to newer APIs.
I think the Stickies app is intentionally left unchanged as a nod to the classic era of Mac OS. Similar to how the Dashboard (now gone) came with a sliding puzzle widget.
I think that would be a generous way to put it, since it’s been around virtually unchanged since the classic days. The OS X version was ported over before OS X got the Aqua design overhaul, so it looked right at home in the beginning with the Platinum-style windows. You can even see the exact same icon being used to tout the graphics support in screenshots from DP2: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2
Edit: I think the comment I replied to was edited? My response doesn’t quite make sense anymore.
(I think I did some writing fixup on my comment after posting, sorry about that! I certainly didn’t mean to snub you and I think your comment slots in fine!)
I really wish UIs were frozen, unless a particular feature required their modification. Having to learn slightly different UI placements and behaviors is a total waste of memory.
You're forgetting that "it looks better than before" or "it looks more modern" (for whatever definition of modern) have been selling points of many things (computers included) for the past 50 years. Same features, different looks, "new" product (for which you charge again).
A number of things are steps back. Scrollbars used to be easier to click, and would always tell you when you were somewhat far down a document. Now they disappear when you're not using them. Since we have SO MUCH more screen real estate these days, I don't even buy it as a practical measure. I believe this style is meant to reduce visual clutter from an aesthetic point of view, but not actually to improve the usage of the computer.
Agreed, it forces you to flail around the UI to make elements appear before you can use them. Combined with my MacBook's TouchBar that goes to sleep if you're thinking and not using the keyboard constantly whilst debugging, it drives me insane as you have to press a key to wake it up for no purpose, look down, find F6 or whatever for continue/step over because there's no physical keys and it's like pressing a ruler, and then flail around to get the scrollbars to appear.
It's such a regression in usability. Imagine if they did this in cars - simply wave your arms around for the steering wheel to appear when you need it!
Do you? I think it often feels old, because we associate it with a certain time period. But is what we currently have for desktops so much better than e.g. Windows 2000? At least it was easy to recognize interactive UI elements and there was not so much wasted space.
(I don’t think Big Sur is a regression compared to Catalina though.)
Something about the spacing and colours kind of reminds me of KDE Plasma. For example the first comparison of the about box [1]. The use of white for the titlebar looks jarring against a grey window background, almost like it's a mistake. The different shades make it still look layered in the Z direction but I can't decide whether the titlebar is in front or behind the window contents and it's kind of uncomfortable? And the text in the buttons isn't centered correctly.
This one is even worse [2], the padding towards the left of the window is generally twice that of elements towards the right of the window, and what is up with that 'save' button..
Overall it looks like they stole the excessive titlebar size of GNOME 3 and the bad spacing/padding/alignments of plasma.
It looks extremely linux-y to me, and not in a good way.
The system preferences menu is a good example...the icons are each doing its own thing, and they even seem to be from different eras. Some of them are the usual apple style, some others look like they're from windows vista or just have an unidentifiable style.
I feel like I'm using linux with one of those wannabe OSX themes, rather than the original macos.
I think there actually is a logic to the padding: on the left side, the left padding equals the top padding. On the right side, the right padding equals the top padding. The top padding differs between the two sides, hence the difference.
I guess there is a certain logic, but I still think it looks unbalanced. And look at the spacing/padding of each button in the white header. Two buttons with lots of padding, an ugly truncated title (despite removing the separate titlebar, the header is overall taller than the previous one and there is now no room for the title because the space it used has been traded for whitespace), the four evenly spaced buttons, then one button with irregular spacing that doesn't match any of the others, and then another button that is too close to the search box and looks like it's vertically aligned slighly lower compared to the others. Just looks like a mess to me.
They broke quicklook with Mojave too. You used to be able to press spacebar to get a preview of a file, then press shift and move to the previous file in a finder list, highlighting both of them but showing you a preview of the most recent item. That way, you could work through a list of files deciding which ones to delete or move to another folder whilst previewing them.
In Mojave they broke this and it only ever displayed the first item, making quicklook now incredibly useless for me.
This rung _so_ untrue that I just went and tested it on three different macs running various combinations of Big Sur beta and shipped, since I use Alfred and disable Spotlight's UI.
And predictably, it's simply not true. If you open the spotlight window and type "5+5", 10 appears immediately as the first result line. If you type "85lbs in kg" the first line immediately reveals it to be 38.56kg. In fact, I didn't even need to type the "in kg", since it did that by default.
So what precise regression are you talking about here?
It doesn’t show up on the right pane in a split (as it used to pre-Big Sur)
This difference is more noticeable when I’m looking up a word in the dictionary, looking up a contact etc, or searching for an email/file. Why do I have to press another key?!
Pet peeve about using spotlight as a currency converter btw:
It can do popular currencies ("100 EUR in USD", CAD, JPY, GBP) and some minor ones (HKD, THB, SEK, NOK, HRK), but try lesser known ones (GEL, COP, PHP, KES), and it doesn't work.
Wonder where that list resides, and whether one could extend it.
One thing that strikes me from seeing all the discussion around the new macOS UI changes is that Windows 10 still falls back to far older UIs as soon as you get a few levels deep. I switch between them frequently for work and don't mind using either OS, but it blows me away how much more surface-level the Windows UI changes have been and how low the expectations are on Microsoft compared to Apple.
I’m less convinced that the Notification Center is easier to use though. Now it has no background, there is less to separate a list of notifications from my messy desktop!
Looking at the photos, holy shit, the new Notification Center aesthetic is basically... Dashboard widgets. Which I find hilarious given that one of the reasons I haven’t left Mojave for Catalina is that Catalina finally killed off the Dashboard.
I expect that in two or three years, the Notification Center will be able to fill the whole screen instead of being an awkward phone-width column at the side, and it will be hailed as new and innovative. Or at least I hope so because that is about when I expect to finally leave Mojave because I’m buying a new computer.
No, it's not. But a) for some reason, most vocal people are the one doesn't like any change at all (how many times we see posts and coments glorifying Windows 2000 ui as a pinnacle of UI design?) and b) this site become a copy of slashdot from the start of the century, just with reversed roles of Apple and Micro$$oft - it's just fashionable to dump at anything Apple related.
Not that Big Sur doesn't have it design problems (at least from the screenshots from the first beta onward, I didn't tried it yet). And to be honest, even without Jony Ive, my impression is that designers still more care how the product will look on screenshots than in real use. But it's hardly just an unusable piece of shit that majority of comments here implies.
That's untrue..? Windows 10 gets the most flack out of any operating system for its UI direction.
Truth is, design will always be a personal choice - some lean towards pragmatism over aesthetic and others lean the other way. Some people will like it, some people won't.
People are noticing Apple is choosing to go down Microsoft's and Google's direction in UI design with flat, big wasted lettering space, and contrasty icons. It's fair to complain about that as Windows users have for years.
Anyone who has rolled out a new version of an application or even a completely new app replacing an old one knows that in general people are reluctant to change. And the more reluctant they are, the more vocal they are about it.
I liked Win 7 the most although XP wasn't bad, but I hate flat design with a lot of white space. I am using a computer, not a phone so I can click on small icons with a mouse.
I assumed Big Sur was designed that way because Apple would finally merge iPads with Airs and get MacOs with a touch screen, which would have made the tradeof make sense. Alas, not so.
Lots of wasted space everywhere, for no good reason. And degraded usability in so many places.
Look at the Mail app for example, you could previously view “inboxes” at the top of the app (useful because you could then resize the app to take up far lesser horizontal space); and now you can’t – just because, … no reason really?
> White space or negative space is important for usability
Sure, I don’t deny it. However, just adding a ton of space doesn’t make a design good. Especially when you actively harm functionality while doing that.
From my limited experience doing design, I’ve realized that good contrast and active visual demarcations go a long way towards that goal (both things which the new UI is sorely missing).
Notice the breadcrumbs that you could use to conveniently use as favorite inboxes. Those are gone now, which means that you have to keep the left sidebar always exposed (thus taking up significantly more horizontal space). This was what I think is really good design, thoughtful and non-intrusive.
Not everyone is working on large screens. Adding a ton of padding to all UI elements doesn’t improve usability in the slightest, regardless of what you might say.
I've noticed even apart from this there are many people who have a strong emotional reaction against space, using almost moral language to describe their problems with it. It's as if the space is truly being wasted, squandered... that the space isn't being valued for the work it can do, but instead left open for aesthetics in a bourgeois obliviousness to the needs of the proletariat.
GNOME 3 has done a fine job of tweaking their UI for touch usability, and more recently for small screens - it's already quite usable on tablet hardware.
Does many third party programs seem faster than before to you?
Firefox seems noticeably faster to me. By "noticeably" I mean that when I started doing normal browsing after upgrading, not looking for or expecting any performance improvement, I found myself thinking "how did clicking that link display the new page so fast?".
Excel also seems a little snappier. I've got a spreadsheet that has a few worksheets, and one in particular seemed slow to switch to. It's responding quite a bit faster now.
Same. I like that it feels familiar when moving between my iPhone, iPad and macOS. It has some quirks, like all the UIs before it, but there isn't anything I'm going to rage over.
Change is always hard though. Some people will like it and some will hate it.
It's very jarring to say the least. My first impression playing with Big Sur under parallels was that everything on screen seemed to take up too much space. The corner radius change in particular is enough to really bug me. Though I did get used to it pretty quickly. I'm going to wait a while before upgrading a machine I regularly use.
This is always true, every time, 100%. The UIs that people here are wishing hadn't changed were absolutely hated when they were announced.
In a few months we'll be able to have a more measured discussion about the good and the bad, but this reaction now is par for the course. Every UI change I've ever gone through has sounded exactly like this on internet forums when it happened.
Nah I work with a lot of Mac users and I’ve not heard any complaints yet. This is just the internet effect I think, people like to complain about things.
Honestly I think it looks good over all. One complaint is really that on the light theme the top toolbar of a lot of windows (Like finder) seems to have low contrast and distinction between the buttons. Luckily I used the dark theme anyways and while there weren't many screenshots it looked fine.
Click the “+” symbol next to favourites and you can add back the unified Spam & Bin folders. But I agree with your sentiment what a weird regression to make. Just annoy your users for what purpose?
Everyday I find more things to do inside Emacs and stay there. macOS seems to be catching up on the difficult learning curve because you have to learn the hard way what you can or cannot click on. At least in Emacs its consistent because I know I shouldn't mouse around.
Are there any apps that you are aware of that don’t let you grab the area next to “stoplights”. That seems to be the “one place to grab it” all the time.
GNOME is easy because you can always grab on the window title area in the headerbar, which is reasonably intuitive. Yes, most headerbars include extra widgets but there's always a clear visual separation between those and the actual title.
On GNOME you can hold Super and click+drag any windows around. Very useful if you want to shove the top of the window off the screen then pull it back as well.
Looks like some icons objectively became harder to recognize: there used to be icons with a special shape which makes them stand out, the new ones are all square using color as filler. The brain's visual system uses both color and shape for decoding, now part of that is gone. They do look more uniform though, but I'm not sure if that is better. After all if you present a collection of buttons the end result should be the user finds the one needed as quickly as possible.
I am becoming at curmudgeon at my advanced age of 37, and I feel like macOS, for keyboard-and-mouse usage, hasn’t really improved since Mac OS 10.6.
Now, it sure has on a laptop; the touch gestures are nice for switching between desktops, for example. But for a desktop, or laptop acting as a desktop? Meh.
Feels like the second phase of moving away from the metal grey UIs. I like the split of the title bar with a left navigation column.
The title bar is a bit too big and hopefully the vertical padding is reduced a bit in the next release.
I had been debating whether to replace my 2013 MB Pro with another Mac or go with a ThinkPad. After seeing the UI comparison of Catalina and Big Sur, the decision is easy. My next laptop will be a ThinkPad.
I switched to Mac around 2001 when OS X was first released. I made the switch so that I could run OS X. I have witnessed a continual decline in it. I stopped my OS upgrades with Mojave because I didn't want to lose the ability to run Adobe PhotoShop CS4 and Microsoft Office 2011 (both 32-bit).
I can't stand washed-out (overly white) UIs. Add a bunch of unused real-estate and it's especially maddening. Throw in cartoonish icons and coloring and I'm out of here. The dumbing down of the OS has crossed my level of tolerance.
If it were possible to run alternate OSs on M1, I'd seriously consider it. I'm done with OSX/macOS.
