Guidelines from 30 years ago dont necessarily get to remain guidelines. Cos stuff changes. We've been using guis for 20 or 30 years now. We dont need to pretend they have shadows or include a realistic depiction of some related artifact in the icon. People just get it now without all that clutter.
> People just get it now without all that clutter.
That's certainly what the proponents of flat design contend. In terms of measuring usability, I'm not so sure that's true. I've seen people hunting for buttons that didn't quite look like buttons
It's not just the fact that "people can recognise a button even if it's flat" that is the issue (I often hear people making this argument) but that the differentiation between what is a button and what isn't (e.g. what is normal text) is reduced in flat design. It is possible to make 'non-buttons' work as buttons, but only if their function is clearly indicated via other means.
This is the beauty of the traditional, three-dimensional, consistently-styled buttons: you get a 'button' by default without having to hint that it's a button using other means.
The Stock-Android Contacts-app has a pretty big design-flaw like that. When you open up a contact, it shows you a list of the ways that you can talk to this person. So, either call them, write an SMS, write an e-mail etc.
And the Call-button is for whatever reason merged with the SMS-button.
It's just one big button of which 4/5 is for calling and 1/5 to the right opens up the SMS-app. There is an icon representing SMS in that 1/5 of the button, but nothing indicates that it's a separate button from the 4/5 on the left.
Really? That's odd. The iOS Contacts app merges Facetime and phone calls, but at least that's somewhat reasonable as that's still a call. CallKit in iOS 10 is standardizing it so all VOIP calls will be treated the same as FaceTime and phone calls.
iOS Contacts has a set of icons that look like the symbols on the app icons. That makes sense to me.
I get this argument and I appreciate clean flat GUIs but I also feel without the shadows on buttons they've lost a bit of the affordance and visibility that used to be promoted as important when I studied GUI design.
The classic example of good interface design, I was taught, was the "call lift or elevator" button. The theory goes that no one needs to be shown how to use a lift twice. You see it once and just know what every other lift button does even if they look slightly different.
I realise that that skeuomorphism needn't necessarily map to the computer world but _something_ seems to be forgotten in the current trend for flat, non-skeumorphic designs.
The thing is that aesthetically, the new OS X look is overall closer to the pre-colour MacOS from 30 years ago. That GUI http://www.businessinsider.com/mac-os-i-through-x-2012-7?op=... is clean, approachable, sometimes funny; but at the same time it's sober, and communicates self-respect and a respect for the user and his/her work on the computer. You can see how even the original System 7 colourisation http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4ffb37e469beddc9590... hurts that a little ... and then we reach Aqua, which is a fairground attraction in comparison. The new OS X look is an attempt to recapture the restraint of the old Finder in high-res colour. Which is not to say that it doesn't have issues with button visibility, something the old Finder went out of its way to achieve.
There isn't a binary choice between "flat design" and "skeumorphism". You can use lots of different visual cues to indicate things.
I loved hearing that Windows 10 was going to go 'authentically digital', but that emotion died when it became apparent that they decided that mean 'flat design'. Just because something is on a computer screen doesn't mean it has to be made of simple single-colour polygons.
It’s not that important a point, but legal pads are a very US phenomena. I’m German and I have never ever seen a yellow pad like that in person. The current notes icon (with white paper) is much more in line with the note pads you would encounter in Germany. Paper people write on to take notes is typically just white. Maybe bound with a spiral on the left or top (and perforated paper to tear off), maybe glued together at the top.
Maybe internationalization was a consideration here? Yellow paper doesn’t read as anything recognizable internationally. (Yellow sticky notes are probably internationally known, though.)
My overall point would also be that taste colors opinions in this case. Or taste at least leaks into them. I think it’s important to be very careful with that and to try and avoid to let taste color too much of what you think. (My taste is very different from that of the author and as such I think many of his points are just plain wrong-footed. There certainly are some good points in there, but taste plays too much of a role.)
I'm German as well, and I also feel that only Stickies are commonly yellow. But Stickies.app on OS X 10.11 has retained its yellow icon, and it actually makes it easier to tell Notes.app and Stickies.app apart now. (Yes, Stickies.app still has its fans :P)
I think the bigger issue with the new Notes icon is the weak branding. Previously, you could tell Notes and Reminders apart by just looking at the colours. This was really important when you told Siri to "remind me to buy milk tomorrow" - you would either see a bright-yellow note[1], or a black-red-white reminder[2]. Now, everything is "almost white", making it really hard to tell what content lives in which app. (Notes and Reminders have a lot of conceptual overlap, especially now that Notes supports checklists.)
For me the old yellow colour implies that the notes taken within the app are for easy disposal and will be poorly organised - just like how yellow paper is used primarily for quick throw-away notes and scribbles in reality (at least here in the UK).
The Notes app is far better than that, the white it uses now implies a more permanent organised feel which better reflects the app. The texts I store within it are important to me, they're not final documents but something I'd treat better than a disposable scribble on a yellow-pad. With the app's formatting, cloud and folder abilities this seems a good fit.
The only yellow paper I remember seeing was when I did a dunning cycle application for accounts dept. Depending on the age of the debt, it would either be white, fluorescent yellow or florescent orange. I remember thinking this was a clever way to get your invoice noticed.
I've not had a yellow notebook for a long time, but in my view right now I have 5 stacks of yellow sticky-pads (aka post-it notes), some of which are A5, notebook sized.
When I buy cheap recycled-paper notebooks the paper is often off-white and has a yellow look to it. At least to me; yellow implies disposability or cheapness.
Paper was normally made out of linen, rags, cotton, or other plant fibers. Asian-style papers are made from the core of tall grasses (bast fibers) and Western-style papers are made from 100% undyed cotton and linen rags or cast-off fibers from spinning. After being picked or washed clean of impurities, the long fibers that are left are pure cellulose, which is actually colorless, but reflects light opaquely and we see the color white. It wouldn't be until the mid-19th century when paper was made out of wood fiber.
In 1844-45, two individuals invented the wood paper-making process. A Canadian, Charles Fenerty, and a German, Friedrich Gottlob Keller, both involved in lumber industries and recognized the cost and durability that wood pulp provided over cotton. Within thirty years, wood pulp paper was all the rage on both sides of the pond. While wood pulp paper was cheaper and just as durable as cotton or other linen papers, there were drawbacks. Most significantly, wood pulp paper is much more prone to being effected by oxygen and sunlight.
Wood is primarily made up of two polymer substances – cellulose and lignin. Cellulose is the most abundant organic material in nature. It is also technically colorless and reflects light extremely well rather than absorbs it (which makes it opaque); therefore humans see cellulose as white. However, cellulose is also somewhat susceptible to oxidation, although not nearly as much as lignin. Oxidation causes a loss of electron(s) and weakens the material. In the case of cellulose, this can result in some light being absorbed, making the material (in this case, wood pulp) appear duller and less white (some describe it as "warmer"), but this isn't what causes the bulk of the yellowing in aged paper.
Lignin is the other prominent substance found in paper, newspaper in particular. Lignin is a compound found in wood that actually makes the wood stronger and harder. Lignin is a dark color naturally (think brown-paper bags or brown cardboard boxes, where much of the lignin is left in for added strength, while also resulting in the bags/boxes being cheaper due to less processing needed in their creation). Lignin is also highly susceptible to oxidation. Exposure to oxygen (especially when combined with sunlight) alters the molecular structure of lignin, causing a change in how the compound absorbs and reflects light, resulting in the substance containing oxidized lignin turning a yellow-brown color in the human visual spectrum.
Since the paper used in newspapers tends to be made with a less intensive and more cost-efficient process (since a lot of the wood pulp paper is needed), there tends to be significantly more lignin in newspapers than in, say, paper made for books, where a bleaching process is used to remove much of the lignin. The net result is that, as newspapers get older and are exposed to more oxygen, they turn a yellowish-brown color relatively quickly.
As for books, since the paper used tends to be higher grade (among other things, meaning more lignin is removed along with a much more intensive bleaching process), the discolorization doesn't happen as quickly. However, the chemicals used in the bleaching process to make white paper can result in the cellulose being more susceptible to oxidation than it would otherwise be, contributing slightly to the discolorization of the pages in the long run.
Today, to combat this, many important documents are now written on acid-free paper with a limited amount of lignin, to prevent it from deteriorating as quickly.
> yellow paper is used primarily for quick throw-away notes and scribbles in reality (at least here in the UK).
Is it? I know yellow is the default colour for sticky notes, but for everything else -- at school, university, work, home -- the paper is white.
Ryman stock over 500 notepads. Three have yellow paper, and are described as "Being Yellow in colour [they] may appeal to people with dyslexia as the coloured paper can aid reading and writing in people with this condition".
Great point, but I've had the opposite reaction — to me the old one says that someone's else junk is already in there (the scribbles) while the white blank page is a blank canvas, in the good sense of the term. It's inviting. What great thoughts might I write in there?
Oh that make sense then ! I never understood why most of the notes apps on my smartphone were yellow and not white, I found it bizarre and assumed it was some kind of fashion, it must be international differences then.
Wow, I've never seen those in real life (I live in Poland). I know most of the results are photos, but I always encountered those in the form of icons, so my brain is still telling me that I'm looking at icons. It's a weird feeling ;)
Certainly a peculiar regional difference, they are ubiquitous in the States. I might not have one in my house, but I grew up around them, they are usually clipped into a clipboard.
I would guess that stationery is not extremely globalized as of yet. I’m honestly not sure why, though. It seems easy enough to mass produce and export everywhere. Maybe historic standards (different paper formats, different rulings) have created trade barriers that prevent globalization.
My brand new notepad (DIN A5, 5mm grid, spiral bound at the top) for my board game evening today doesn’t say where it was made, just that it’s from a German company (it’s labelled predominantly in German, though somewhat prominently also in English – language designated as “UK” – and Turkish, as well as French, Italian and Dutch in much smaller print).
Googling the company doesn’t tell me where and even whether they produce the notepads. Maybe they just relabel someone else’s notepads and resell them?
All I know that the text on their website makes me want to vomit: “Kyome’s target group is primarily women between 30 and 50 who want to combine the practical with the attractive. SoHos (Small Office or Home Office) are increasingly finding their place in living rooms and kitchens. For this reason, kyome products are surprising, as according to the brand promise, with nice, clever ideas, are pleasantly functional and a long way from grey, everyday office life.”
Firstly that’s some really bad English, secondly that’s insultingly sexist.
But back to the topic at hand: I think the important point is that white paper with some ruling (lines or grid, with margins or without) and bound in some way (left or top, spiral or glue) is a widespread internationally recognizable look for notepads. The details then don’t matter that much.
I don't see anything particularly sexist nor insulting about a company having a target demographic. Most companies that sell products do.
That said, I was thinking along similar lines a few weeks ago. I was at a home improvement store browsing the power tools for a jig saw when I came across a hot pink drill kit.
"Hot pink?" I thought to myself. "Did they see that the number of women interested in home improvement is rising and figure that women are simple enough to fall for that? To buy your shitty drill just because it's pink?"
Feeling grumpy, I told my mom about it over lunch the next day. My mom bought an old foreclosed-on house in BFE Appalachia last year, and took it upon herself to renovate it -- it went from complete, unlivable dump to nice, cozy home as she replaced the floors, the ceilings, the roof, the cabinets, all of the bathroom fixtures, all of the doors, etc. My mom is no girly-girl and has never been afraid to get her hands dirty, and she's physically stronger than most men I know (including myself). To my surprise, upon hearing about the pink drill, she declared, "I want one!"
Let me tell you, my mother is far from simple. Beyond being strong, dedicated, and resourceful, she's also very intelligent. I know that she knows that the company doesn't actually care about women doing home improvement and is just trying to make a quick buck by "tapping" a market that's already been tapped by your typical orange or yellow or black unisex drill. But you know what? If you like something, you just like it, even if it happens to be stereotypical for you to like it. Stereotypes exist for a reason, and businesses would not be constantly wielding them in attempts to appeal to their target demographics if they didn't work in the market. There's clearly no ill-intent behind it, just business.
If I were out buying eyeglasses and saw an advert for some new sort of lens or coating to suit people who stare at computer screens all day, and the advert featured a nerd typing furiously on a computer with a fake lightsaber mounted on the wall and a set of D&D books on the shelf, should I be insulted? Or should I be glad that someone is finally making glasses for me? Chances are, I'd be excited. I might even wait around for a bit to see if I can find a new cleric for my party...
I think people should make diverse aesthetically pleasing things (even if only some people find some of those things to be aesthetically pleasing).
The world needs diverse things and something for all tastes. What I dislike very much, however, is strict bucketing or stereotypically selling those things.
Pink drills? Why not, though maybe blue, green, orange, magenta and so on drills would also be cool to have. And please don’t write “drills for the female renovator” above them.
Also, if there is only one shitty pink drill and the rest of the stuff is not available in pink, wouldn’t you say that sends a message, too? It says something about how normal it is for women to do e.g. home renovations. It says something about their status and role and as such is pretty shitty. See the wider context.
(Also, your assumption that you are somehow uniquely positioned for glasses for people looking at screens all day is itself somehow weirdly sexist. So many people look at screens all day for all kinds of reasons, irrespective of their gender.)
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this. I've been carefully mulling it over the last few days.
> I think people should make diverse aesthetically pleasing things (even if only some people find some of those things to be aesthetically pleasing).
I agree completely.
> The world needs diverse things and something for all tastes.
I agree here as well.
> What I dislike very much, however, is strict bucketing or stereotypically selling those things.
I understand why someone might find that distasteful. The problem is that marketing budgets are only so big, and companies need to identify some well-defined subset(s) of the population in order to effectively advertise and (hopefully, to them) sell their products. Perhaps it's unfortunate, but the straightforward way to advertise to some group of people is to identify things that some large percentage of them have in common, and appeal to those things. If the selected strategy doesn't work, it's time to abandon it and come up with a new one. If Kyome's advertisements have been along the same lines for some time, then it's likely that it's been effective. If the adverts aren't working, Kyome will eventually ditch them in favor of something else. For what it's worth, there is (usually) no ill intent behind it -- it all just comes down to trying to effectively advertise without spending a fortune creating tailored advertisements for everybody. If you let it get to you, then you're going to be constantly offended by all the advertisements that (unfortunately) fills the modern world.
> Pink drills? Why not, though maybe blue, green, orange, magenta and so on drills would also be cool to have. And please don’t write “drills for the female renovator” above them.
Again in agreement.
> Also, if there is only one shitty pink drill and the rest of the stuff is not available in pink, wouldn’t you say that sends a message, too? It says something about how normal it is for women to do e.g. home renovations. It says something about their status and role and as such is pretty shitty. See the wider context.
I didn't notice any other pink tools, but if they were there, it's likely I overlooked them. I'm not the most observant person in the world, especially when I'm locked on target. The only reason I even noticed the pink drill was because it was out of place, not with the other drills, but on the counter with the "display models" of a bunch of handsaws rather than on a shelf.
The thing is, up until recently, it hasn't been normal for women to do home renovations in the US. There has been growing interest in DIY home improvement and construction projects among women in just the last few years. Of course, there have long been some women interested in it (my mom, for example), but they didn't constitute a large enough segment of the market to convince companies to produce demographic-targeted tools. That's apparently beginning to change.
> (Also, your assumption that you are somehow uniquely positioned for glasses for people looking at screens all day is itself somehow weirdly sexist. So many people look at screens all day for all kinds of reasons, irrespective of their gender.)
I've read and re-read what I wrote here, and I couldn't at first figure out where you got the idea that I think I'm somehow "uniquely positioned" for such glasses. I gather that you're German, though I'm not sure German is your native tongue (your written English is very good). If it is, it may be a "language barrier" type thing, and I think the misunderstanding likely comes from this phrase: "someone is finally making glasses for me". I can see how that might be taken to mean that I thought the manufacturer literally had me specifically in mind when creating their product or their advertisement. However, this is a common figure of speech (a hypon...
American here. Can't say I've ever seen a notepad like that, nor have I heard of Rhodia. For what it's worth, with the cover folded back it looks very much like a legal pad. That wide left-hand margin with red vertical rule with the faint blue horizontal rules are pretty characteristic of legal pads. While you do often see legal pads with yellow paper in the US, whitely-papered legal pads are also readily available (frankly, I never liked the yellow paper and I don't really understand why anyone would...). I've also seen legal pads with pale pink paper, and ones with pale blue paper, but in my opinion both of those were too dark to offer good contrast with ink.
(American here, but pen-and-paper snob). I literally was walking through my apartment as I was reading this, looked over at the (Rhodia) notepad on my counter, and thought "hmm, looks about right".
I'd imagine Rhodia is pretty correlated with the popularity of fountain pens.
We don't do yellow pads in my country either, but I still find the yellow icon with writing on it ('notes') more evocative than the white icon with no writing ('lack of notes'). If you were to show me the flat white icon without any context, I might not even get it right.
Yeah, I think it's an US - European thing. The parent comment mentioned Germany, you mentioned France, another comment mentioned Italy, I'm from Romania and we also use white notepads.
This and it's subsequent comments are the weirdest, most unexpected thing in here to me.
I'm an American who's worked in offices the last 10+ years and I have stacks and stacks of yellow legal pads from years of note taking in my closet.
I think it is probably to do with it being cheap recycled discolored paper that was cheaper to dye than bleach. Might be better for the environment than bleach as well.
I switched to dot paper about 4 years ago, though, and I'm relatively happy with the decision.
The yellow pads are available in the UK but I've never seen them in the wild, I use 5mm squared A4 pads as they are the cheapest I've been able to find without buying an insane bulk order.
"Flat design versus Skeuomorphism" isn't really a valid comparison; flat design can still use skeuomorphic elements like the infamous floppy-disk icon, just without the subtle hints that the icon is actually a button. Battery status is still shown, generally, through an AA-cell icon, the trash is a dustbin, 'like' is a heart.
"Flat design" versus "visual nudging", for want of a better term, is what the debate's really about.
I think "flat versus skeuomorphism" is the correct opposition, and it's the "Apple Goes Mushy" article which is muddling the terminology by conflating at least three different things.
* Skeumorphism is about rendering individual materials. E.g. compare the old and new Safari icons. Both show a blue compass, but the old one is drawn as a realistically rendered 3d-object with perspective and metallic reflections, and the new one is a flat 2d drawing. Similarly, the old design of the maximize/close buttons on windows were rendered skeumorphically, as a some kind of plastic 3d-object, the new ones are 2d.
* Then there is the use of visual metaphors versus abstract symbolism. E.g. the old icon for Photos was a picture of a camera and photo, the new one is an abstract symbol (apparently it's supposed to be a stylized sunflower?).
* And finally he talks about color choices: the old design used lots of saturated colors, the new one has more desaturated ones with a few saturated accents.
All of these can vary independently. A stylized line drawing of a battery is not an instance of skeumorphism, but it is a use of visual metaphor.
I agree with the author that OSX has lost a lot of it's personality, but I don't agree with the notion that this is a bad thing. I don't want my OS to have much of a personality. It's a tool for getting things done. The less I see of the OS the better.
I agree that OS X should out of your way most of the time, but what about the unboxing experience? Buying or upgrading a Mac used to feel very satisfying because you were welcomed by a cool intro video (10.3 was playing even Röyksopp!):
Apple still produces videos like these, but only to show them at WWDC and on their website. New users are only greeted by grey/white screens and lots of cloud settings. :|
Apple should not be designing icons that are optimised for their initial visual impact. In fact, "impact" is not a word you really want to associate with something you use on a daily basis.
I hate having intro videos playing when I set up a new computer. They attract the attention of everybody else in the office, and I have to scramble to mute, then close, them.
I really agree with this - I thought it was me getting slower but every time I open finder or Dock I have to spend that split second extra effort to discern between the "Applications" folder or "HD" icons etc.
The removal of colour from the icons in the Finder sidebar is the change that feels the most clearly anti-usability to me. It clearly makes the items harder to distinguish and has no benefits that I can see apart from fitting in with the flat design concept.
Above, on the left, you can see the creative, dazzling, H.G.-Wells-spirited Time Machine interface and icon of yesteryear, receding into radiant oblivion (complete with animated stars that drift toward you). Well-crafted, they stirred the right mood. On the right, observe what Apple bulldozed the old Time Machine for: a low-effort cartoony icon in place of the hatch to hyperspace, and a blurred desktop background with flat grey controls in place of a fantastic portal to the past. To me, this "update" to Time Machine stands as one among many sad and uncaring obliterations of the heart Apple used to have.
My head was spinning (literally) every time I used old Time Machine, so I'm glad they removed this silly animation.
It seems as if the web has influenced the latest round of GUI designs, especially the 'flat' design trend which has clearly harmed usability when it comes to things like buttons. This is handled better by Android's material design guidelines, but it's still a regression.
The problem with this approach is that the web has no guidelines whatsoever, beyond user-agent defaults. So each and every site does their own thing (whether 'good' or 'bad') and Apple (+ Google, etc.) decides to cherry-pick what is 'popular' or thought to 'look good', seemingly without thinking through the impact on usability. Or, possibly worse, they have considered the usability impact but deem the tradeoff worthwhile.
Many of the icons like Safari and iTunes haven't changed that much, just have progressed with current designs. Take a look at the Mozilla icons, or whatever app you're using like Evernote or LibreOffice. Do they remind me of a webbrowser or Office app? Not really. It's just that they are significantly different from other apps. After one or two times use, I remember what it looks like and that's all you need.
I like the minimalistic UI of El Capitan. It gets out of the way, and puts in focus what I really want to look at: the content, Web pages, my code, my photos. My computer is a tool, it's not an artwork I turn on to look at.
Buttons still look pushable, input fields still look editable. The Dock didn't lose any functionality whatsoever by having the 3D effect removed.
In my opinion, the El Cap UI requires just as much talent as the overdesigned (but very pretty) icons and graphics from the previous era. I don't miss the brushed metal and pinstripes, though.
Hmm, not sure on that one. A beautiful interface can be better but I suspect it's better to have an uglier consistent and intuitive interface.
I'm a long-term Inkscape user, they recently 'improved' the icons; it all looks wrong (but handsome in a minimalistic, low-visibility of chrome, sort of way) and disturbs my workflow considerably.
A beautiful interface can be better but I suspect it's better to have an uglier consistent and intuitive interface.
I'm not sure why the parent comment was downvoted. If the above statement was intended to mean that being consistent and intuitive is more important than aesthetics then that is almost certainly true, in my experience designing and testing UIs. Of course, the ideal is to have it all by using the aesthetics to support the functionality. Being attractive and being functional aren't mutually exclusive.
This is where, IMHO, a lot of generic minimalist/flat designs following the current trend go wrong: they sacrifice so much detail and so many possible ways to be visually distinctive or interactive that what remains inevitably all looks very similar and loses some of the visual cues that could help to guide the user in how the system works.
>Being attractive and being functional aren't mutually exclusive. //
But being fashionable and being functional are often opposing forces.
Seems to me flat web design was a reaction as the antithesis of an over-indulgence in skeuomorphism. We just appear to have thrown out a lot of affordance and visibility in that reaction.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "over-indulgence in skeuomorphism". However, if you're suggesting that the previous trend of almost photorealistic visual styles could sometimes become too detailed/cluttered/noisy or that UIs in that style sometimes lost cohesion because being photorealistic was about the only thing a lot of the iconography and window dressing had in common, then I would agree with both of those points.
I sort of understand, but no-one outside my family uses my desktop and when I worked in an office it was just me or the IT support people, so how is it about branding in the general situation. For media stuff everyone is likely to be using the default.
The Dock absolutely lost usability; all the icons look the same now. I practically stopped using the dock because I never find the apps I'm looking for quickly; I've switched to using Spotlight for opening apps instead.
The old "Pages" icon was instantly recognisable. The new one looks, at first glance, exactly the same as text edit and notes.
I don't think that the UI actually needs to get out of the way. We humans are perfectly able to ignore even the most obnoxiously designed mess (cf. banner blindness). But we are not very good at picking from many similar-looking things. Replacing the colorful sidebar icons with simpler monochrome versions now requires us to actively look for the icon you need, instead of just picking it intuitively.
>I don't think that the UI actually needs to get out of the way
Getting a bit fed up of listening to fellow designers preaching about "cognitive overload" over a few button shapes and icons then proceeding to ship designs where all the controls are un-styled blue text with the occasional semi-abstract line art icon.
One thing I really dislike about 10.10 is that "maximizing" a window will - with a few exceptions - switch it to fullscreen. To maximize a window I need to press Alt while clicking the maximize-button. And there is not even an option to switch this behavior.
On a small laptop screen this behaviour might be preferable, but on a FullHD display, I find it rather annoying.
Not across applications, sadly... Chrome just likes to stretch the window horizontally a little and then extend the window vertically to the top and bottom of its current display.
Hey, Google! When I double click the title bar, it means fill the !@%&%#* display!!
I really liked the old nuanced "full size" behaviour. Unlike Windows "Maximize" it would only increase the window size just enough so that all its contents where visible. This was neat, and elegant, and really showed considered design as well as the OS taking an interest in what was "in" it's windows not just the displayable area of the screen. I thought the Ctrl-F fullscreen behaviour in Lion was perfectly fine. It was slightly dissonant with overall windowing system control but I thought that was fine - going to full-screen seems to me more of a system feature than an window manager feature (it subverts the window manager to a certain extent), but maybe I'm just getting old ...
I agree the old window zoom, as it was called, was the best. I know Windows user hate it, and so many of the recent changes seem to have been to placate Windows user complaints. I liked my Mac the way it was. We don't need to appeal to Windows users.
People who really like Windows (including me) generally seem to dislike the full-screen button in OS X though, so how is that placating anyone?
Everywhere I look I find people saying that window management in Windows is miles ahead of OS X. Even from people who wouldn't want to use Windows. If Apple wanted to placate those people, they would make the green button maximize by default, get rid of that ghastly global menu bar, fix the bad keyboard acceleration, make the Dock even more like the taskbar and add window snapping among a few other things.
I'm hoping some day someone at Apple will see the light. It only took them twenty years to realize that letting users resize a window by any corner or edge is a good idea and that one-button mice were really not a good idea so maybe by 2036 it will all change.
In Windows everything really wants to take up the whole screen. If you drag a window near an edge, it'll try and maximize! If you double click, it maxmizes! If you click the button, it maximizes! Shoot, in Windows 8 they wanted everything to start in full screen with that modern UI.
As much as I love overlapping and reasonably sized windows and having many windows strewn about my very large monitor, I'll see a post on Reddit about how websites aren't designed to look good when maximized on a 21:9 monitor, and then I'll face palm. It's weird.
Ah see I like that behaviour. I've never once wanted to fill the screen with an app without putting it in fullscreen, I just don't see what the point of doing that would be.
To be honest, this comment section is a bit mind-blowing to me, it really just goes to show how the behaviour that I take for granted isn't at all the default for other people. I would never, ever, have thought about people wanting to maximise the windows without actually hiding the menu bar.
> I just don't see what the point of doing that would be.
So you can still see the Dock and the Menu bar without having to do anything?
I always maximize and never use full screen because I don't want to hide the most useful parts of my OS...but I can imagine that visual artists might use it a lot.
> I've never once wanted to fill the screen with an app without putting it in fullscreen, I just don't see what the point of doing that would be.
For me, it’s for ease of working with multiple windows. I frequently work with multiple windows at one time, or multiple programs, and Apple’s full screen is awkward for that.
Switching windows invokes a cute but lengthy animation. I can’t have a window take most of a full screen, leaving a corner for clicking to the other window. ⌘-tab works very poorly, especially on multi-monitor desktops, because it forces you to remember implementation details about which application has windows on which desktop. ⌘-` window switching doesn’t work with full-screen. It’s just a mess.
Even in web browsing, I don’t use only tabs. I use multiple windows, so I don’t full-screen those, either.
To my surprise - or not, now that I think of it - I actually had Spectacles installed already, but I had not come around to getting acquainted with it.
Major facepalm for me... ;-) Now, off to put on the spectacles... ;-)
I'm not sure how to tell this guy, but I'm over 40 years old and I have been using Apple computers literally since elementary school. At a certain point the reference to intuitive design can be to ones own past, if that past has become sufficiently ingrained and intuitive to users.
I thought the lament about the photo app dropping the icon that looks like a camera was particularly odd. He seems uninterested in even acknowledging the point that most cameras don't look like that anymore, and there are many (most?) full fledged adults who have never used a camera with a large attached lens.
I'd even wonder at this point if there are more people in the world familiar with Apple products than with actual apples that grow on trees, but I digress.
> the photo app dropping the icon that looks like a camera
But the old iPhoto icon was not only showing a camera, it was showing a camera and a photo. The camera is part of the icon because iPhoto/Photos can also be used to import photos from cameras that look exactly like the one in the icon. The old icon really couldn't be more fitting for what the app does.
And even if users don't know what a camera is, they can still recognise the other 50% of the icon.
Plus, Apple itself still uses the same type of camera in other icons, most notably on the current iOS lock screen, so I don't think anyone is confused by the iconography. Most people never compose a song and yet they know that iTunes' icon is a musical note.
It's a picture of a physical camera with a big lens, and a physical print of a photo with a white border. Supposedly representing an app that people use to store and organize photos they take with a phone and view on a display screen.
People still know what that kind of camera looks like, just like they know what a floppy disk looks like or an old phone handset. The new icon isn't evocative at all.
> He seems uninterested in even acknowledging the point that most cameras don't look like that anymore
Digital SLR cameras still very much look like traditional cameras. Why? because the form is optimal for the task at hand - taking high quality pictures.
> He seems uninterested in even acknowledging the point that most cameras don't look like that anymore, and there are many (most?) full fledged adults who have never used a camera with a large attached lens.
I consider this an an casualty of the switch to flat design: how do you draw a "flat" lens?
Without 3D or lighting effects, a lens is just a few concentric circles. So a flat picture of a camera housing is less ambiguous, even though it is not what a phone camera looks like.
I see a lot of opinion here, and not a lot of hard evidence. Maybe the changes in OS X, and the move away from skeuomorphism in particular, have hurt its usability, but the way to prove that isn't through emotional op-eds.
Get a group of non-Mac users, randomly split them into two groups. Set them a number of basic tasks: writing and sending an email, editing a photo, opening a particular website, etc. Then have one group do it on an older version of OS X, and the other on a new version. Then record how long it takes them, what things they struggle with, etc. Ask them to report their level of frustration and enjoyment.
It wouldn't be a perfect experiment, but it would at least produce some concrete data to discuss.
I think the greatness of OSXs past UIs is a bit over hyped. I changed from Windows 7 to Mavericks a couple of years ago and still find 7 more intuitive. You can see at a glance which programs are running from the bar in 7 unlike OSX, I still have not figured out the Finder very well and so on. On the other hand OSX seems better engineered in many ways, more stable, faster to respond and so on.
I think the hype goes back further than that, with OS X 10.5/10.6 vs Windows Vista.
Windows 7 really narrowed the gap between Windows and OS X, and at the same time OS X 10.7 took many steps backwards (black & white sidebar icons, no Save As, terrible multi-screen experience).
Snow Leopard and Windows 7 marked the respective pinnacle of each OS to me, UI-wise. Windows 8.1 has some nice incremental touches... If only they'd applied them to Windows 7's basics. I haven't spent much time with newer OSXes, admittedly, and I'm basing most of my opinion here on co-workers' muffled curses.
In the Dock Preferences, click the box "Show indicators for open applications". You should get a black dot under (or to the side) of the app icon. I've used this setting for years.
Agreed with the sentiments of the author. While I don't expect an OS to be "beautiful" - attractive would perhaps be the better word, the general grayification and over-simplification has made OSX harder to navigate.
Compare it to Atom which I, and I am sure many others here, use every day" syntax highlighting, coloured icons, etc all make navigating code/screen faster.
The use of metaphors worked when people didn't know what a computer was, and the only way to make its UI make sense was to mimic real-world objects. Now, this is no longer necessary. It's been 40 years.
While I agree that new macOS icons aren't great (see the Game Center icon), the old ones were silly. I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts. The old icon for Pages? I don't even know what that is, I'm not into calligraphy.
The only thing I'd agree with is hiding UI controls. Apple has been making its apps less usable to make them look pretty, hiding important elements in an attempt to declutter the interface. I hate how Safari hides the full address in the address bar, for instance. Or, how they removed scrollbars and force people to actually scroll every piece of the interface to check if there's something more to see, while before you could tell just by looking at scrollbars. Of course, there are settings to go back to the old behavior for both my examples, so power users are fine, but I fail to see how these moves improve things for regular users.
I also disagree that Steve Job's death was detrimental to macOS's UI. He was the one who kept Apple looking outdated with his obsession for skeuomorphism, I'm glad they went for a flatter look right after his death.
Of course, everyone's taste is different, but I still think this is a bad article.
> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts.
There was a rhetoric not too long ago where OSx fanboys would make fun of Windows' interfaces for still using the disk icon as the "save" button. Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
Case in point – telling a young kid how to answer a call on the iPhone: press the green banana button.
In the sphere of "talks," I know TED puts a big round carpet on stage that you're supposed to stay on while speaking. More generally for "carpets on stage," I've seen some smaller music venues and studios with carpets to make a nicer area for performers and to absorb unwanted sound (in the case of studios)
My best guess is an acoustical reason. The floor might reflect the speaker's voice in ways that muddle it for the audience, so those carpets are placed in front of them to kill that reflection?
I'm the organizer of this conference. The stage is very flexible and has many opportunities for trap doors etc. It's honestly just a little creaky.
We've seen other benefits like folks have mentioned. It draws speakers out from behind the podium.
The theater we use is popular and we often didn't have the stage setup until 2AM the night before a 9AM start time. As organizers/hosts we couldn't be up that late.
Sometimes you come in and the stagehands at the venue read the notes about putting down the carpet and they decided to put two carpets instead of one. And the carpets are secured with gaffers tape. And you don't really see an issue with it so you leave it be.
Sums it up. Most interesting is that more teenagers tend to know what an icon is used for on the computer than what it originally represented. Which makes total sense because they grew up with these icons.
So it might make more sense to ask "to what degree are people used to this icon?" rather than "how many know where this icon came from?".
In this sense, changing established icons (like I would argue the photo app's one) doesn't seem such a good idea.
> Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
The old icon also had a photo on it though which made it clear it was the Photo's app, even if you don't know what the other thing is in the icon at all.
I know a few people who still print photos, but most of my friends never do. So a photo on a screen would maybe be a better metaphor if you need one.
It's a really difficult problem. So many of the things we do today are done on a rectangle with a screen. That doesn't make a good icon. Maybe icons are obsolete altogether?
And yet, people do grow up knowing that the green banana button means "phone" and the notched rectangle means "save", and often never even question "is there a real world analog for this icon?". It isn't that icons are obsolete: it is that we are graduating from a language of pictograms to a language of ideograms, yet for some reason we have large numbers of people telling us that that is somehow a horrible thing to do.
I don't think people are arguing against ideograms; in fact, I think the argument is very much in favor of ideograms, but simultaneously that icons like the floppy disk save icon are not very good ones. From what I've seen, there seems to be somewhat of a trend away from object-base metaphors and toward action-based metaphors, at least when it comes to action icons like the save icon. Instead of a picture of a storage device, modern or extinct, many applications now use icons intended to represent the act of storing something digitally, either using a an arrow directed down toward a rectangular shape meant to represent local media or using an arrow directed up into a cloud to represent cloud storage. (For an example of these, see Glyphicon's `glyphicon-save` and `glyphicon-cloud-upload` icons[1].)
One explicit advantage that these sorts of icons have is that they allow for a nice symmetry between Save and Open icons and upload/download icons (Glyphicon is again a good example; see glyphicon-open and glyphicon-cloud-download). This ties into another, perhaps more arguable advantage, a blurring between local and remote save actions. As applications become increasingly web-based, device-independent, and portable, it makes more sense to me to intentionally separate the "save" action from it's destination; I don't care so much where or how my data is saved, I only care that it's save and that I can get it back later.
I'd love to hear responses to my thoughts here; they sort of developed as I wrote the comment, so they're rather fresh at the moment.
Personally I liked the old way when there was a crappy low resolution icon, with text underneath telling you what it was. In most interfaces since the text disappeared it takes me a while to work out what at least some of the icons are.
That may be intentional. Road signs typically see lots of usability research (do drivers recognize this when driving past it at 50 mph in fog?) before they are deployed, and a modern camera is just a box.
I once read that one country decided to keep the steam train on their road signs based on such results because it makes it easier to distinguish it from other signs.
> Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
Does that really matter? A perfect case in point was the old Pages icon in OS X: a quill pen in front of a cup of ink. Do you know any person who has ever used a pen like that in real life? Have you ever even seen a pen like that? I'm willing to guess not. But everyone still recognized the contents of that icon, and correctly inferred that the app was for writing things.
Furthermore, the use of ye olde imagery in that icon was playful, like the app was inviting you to an older time when writing was simpler and you could just focus on your words. The app was aiming for that kind of simplicity too. The use of way outdated imagery in the icon did not prevent Apple from conveying deep meaning to a modern audience. If anything, it enhanced the point they were trying to make with that icon.
I'd argue that the quill pen was a special case. As you point out, it was an intentional anachronism to communicate a certain point. This was not the case with, e.g., the floppy disk, the notepad, the contacts book, etc. Everyone knew what the quill pen was because it was still frequently seen in portrayals of the olden days when it was used; even today, portrayals of Victorian England in Doctor Who or Revolutionary America in Hamilton inevitably show a few quill pens in use. But the reason people recognized floppy disks, contact books, and notepads was because they were still in active use at the time.
You point out that while the quill pen was long outdated when it was first used, "everyone still recognized the contents of that icon", but that's exactly the problem that the GP and GGP are pointing out: more and more of the old skeuomorphic icons reference real world icons that younger users (and indeed some older users) actually don't recognize. Notepads, sure, we've still got those; contact books, eh, you'll see them once in a while, but tbh when I see a bare "contact book" icon without a label it occasionally takes me a second to figure out what I'm looking at; floppy disks, as has been argued to death, are entirely a thing of the past, with the exception of old systems and archives still in use in dusty university basements. Young users today essentially just know the image of a floppy disc as "the save button" without any skeuomorphic rationale backing it up.
The skeuomorphic link between computers and the physical objects we use is is constantly degrading, to the point that using skeuo icons can sometimes actually inhibit the user experience and slow the user down while they try to figure out what they're looking at. We have common patterns emerging with no or very little connection to the real world; a great example would the "hamburger" menu button. If there's any metaphor there in the user's mind, it's to the row items that will appear when you click on it, not to anything physical, yet it's perfectly comprehensible to anyone who's been using digital devices for any length of time.
> Young users today essentially just know the image of a floppy disc as "the save button" without any skeuomorphic rationale backing it up.
Yeah, but so what? It is, nevertheless, recognizable to nearly everyone. In a world where cars still advertise their "horsepower" and pencils have graphite compound "leads" we can probably live with an icon that is well understood but whose original referent is no longer familiar.
The icon is recognizable because younger people learn the weird boxy icon means save. Even with an explanation of the icon's origins, for the younger generation, the icon is recognizable but not meaningful. Can we devise a more meaningful icon? Can we break with convention and just choose a different icon that's recognizable but more aesthetically pleasing or consistent with our style guides, even if it's still meaningless?
This isn't an argument against vestigial iconography. It's not even an argument against skeuomorphism. It's a recognition that skeuomorphism increasingly fails to serve its intended purpose of conveying a meaning. Once we recognize that the old icons are dead metaphors, that we often times keep them only because of inertia and not because they have any intrinsic value, we can build momentum on the necessary work of establishing the visual language of the digital age on its own terms.
I bet when you see a red octagon, you just think of it as a thing on the side of the road that means "stop", don't you? But despite your not knowing its origin, not knowing why it means stop, it still works well right?
Yeah, but why are red/yellow/green "universal" colors for driving? I don't think it's because of some innate human love for those particular meanings of the colors. In fact, I'd bet that in a society without cars the red octagon would not be so "universally" understood to mean "stop."
Basic colour meanings of red and green transcend many genres of human existence, from business (using a red pen, or being "in the red") to entire gamuts of electronics and engineering, red warning stickers, etc.
I agree that the octagon is arbitrary. But that's beside the point, because it's self-evidently arbitrary. Nobody assumes there must be a deeper meaning behind a basic shape. The iconography of a floppy disk is not a basic shape.
To be honest, I don't know what point you're trying to make. It is as if you think I was claiming arbitrary symbols cannot work well as icons. But I actually said the opposite of that: the floppy disk is basically an arbitrary symbol at this point. It works because we train people what it means.
What, you really think kids have no idea what floppy disks are? Of course they do! They're young, not stupid. It's not as hard as you're making it sound.
Language is full of dead metaphor. Words and symbols have meaning because they have been given meaning; most of the associations might as well be arbitrary. Doesn't matter; humans are very good at recognizing these associations and deriving the intent.
Floppy disks have entirely disappeared from our daily lives except as an icon (and then largely only on Windows). A computer-savvy 18 year old that grew up on Macs could have entirely grown up without ever using a floppy disk and rarely if ever seeing the icon. I know adolescents that have never seen a floppy disk. Being unfamiliar with an obsolete media format doesn't make them stupid.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not sure what you think I was trying to make sound difficult. I was arguing that it's entirely possible to replace the floppy disk with an arbitrary symbol, and it's just inertia (user training and a strange sacredness afforded this one random icon) that really keeps it around. I think assosciating a distinct symbol with an action is pretty damned easy, actually. (Designing a good symbol can be hard, though.)
One need not have ever personally used a floppy disk in order to recognize the symbol and pick up its meaning through cultural context; this is exactly how we learn to associate meanings with most of the symbols we use. We gain familiarity with all kinds of obsolete technologies throughout the course of an ordinary education, and easily recognize images of such devices whether or not we've ever seen one in real life - but beyond that, we learn to recognize all kinds of completely abstract symbols and use them as comfortably as words or numbers. There's nothing harmful about the fact that the "save" icon happens to look like an obsolete bit of storage media; the "save" symbol could have any shape, as long as it doesn't already represent something else.
Of course it's possible to pick a different symbol to represent the action of saving data to permanent storage: but why bother? We have a symbol, and it's as good as any other arbitrary symbol might be. Changing it would create confusion for no benefit, since it's ultimately the association of the symbol with the action that matters, and not the history of that symbol's origin.
> Can we devise a more meaningful icon? Can we break with convention and just choose a different icon that's recognizable but more aesthetically pleasing or consistent with our style guides, even if it's still meaningless?
I guess I don't see the point; you'll just confuse people who already know what the old icon means. Our letters aren't particularly brilliantly chosen (arguably other systems are more logical or easier to learn), and yet who wants to replace them?
The idea is that if you choose a good enough icon, you won't confuse people who know the old one. Users are at this point used to encountering unfamiliar icons and trying to quickly guess what they mean, so if a sufficiently communicative icon is chosen there should be no problem.
Importantly, the user has no reason to directly contrast the new icon to the old one. The user doesn't answer the question "Is this icon as effective as that old one?", they simply have to answer the question "Do I know how to perform the action I want to perform?", and as long as your save icon clearly communicates its meaning, there shouldn't be much/any confusion when the user tries to save. They'll look for something that seems to say "Click me to save", they'll see your icon, they'll say "Hey, that looks like it means 'Save'!", and they'll try it. (Aside: I don't say this randomly, I'm speaking from experience here; there have been plenty of applications in recent years that have tried out new "Save" icons, and I can't say I've ever had a problem figuring out how to save with any of them.)
As far as what "the point" is in changing out the icon, the point is that the entire reason for using action icons on buttons, etc. is to give the user an intuitive sense of what action will be performed when they click it, and as time goes on, the link between the floppy disk and digital storage will become weaker and weaker. And while it may be true that we could drag that symbol with us by convention, my question would be, why bother? If we can come up with something better, especially if we can find something that isn't tied to any specific technology (and I'd argue that we have), isn't this an improvement? I can't think of any advantage the old icon has over new ones other than the small advantage that it's familiar, but, as I said above, I don't think that's enough.
In other words, instead of asking "Why should we get rid of the floppy disk icon?", I honestly think the better question is, "Why not get rid of the floppy disc icon?"
That's all fine and good, but this response is entirely different from the blog's original argument that I was responding to. The original argument was "Icons should be based on real world objects because they give the user an immediate sense of what the icon is for." The argument here seems to be "People know what the current save icon means, so there's no reason to change it", and the thing is, this sort of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" viewpoint is pretty antithetical to our jobs as interaction designers. Even if most people know what the save button means by convention, that doesn't rule out that might find a better icon, one that is strictly iconic and not skeuomorphic in any way (in fact, I think some better alternatives have already been found are are gaining in popularity).
So in summary, while I agree that it's sometimes fine to use an old icon if enough people understand what it means by convention, this is not a good reason to avoid using the newer, less skeuomorphic icons that the linked blog post was trying to argue against.
Is it actually though? I used to read Jakob Nielsen's page a lot and he seemed to harp all the time on the point that you should stick to familiar designs rather than trying to demonstrate your creativity, even when objectively your design might be a little better.
Have you ever even seen a pen like that? I'm willing to guess not. But everyone still recognized the contents of that icon, and correctly inferred that the app was for writing things.
So what you're saying is that we should have skeuomorphism, but mostly with things we've seen in TV shows and movies, especially period ones. This would tend to make everything look like stuff from pirate/fantasy/sci-fi/superhero movies. Looking back on indy developer graphics, that does seem to be a trend.
I don't want to make a strong case for or against any specific skeuomorphist style. I'm just arguing that there's a place for it in modern UIs if done well, and that I don't find it inherently bad to use "extinct objects" as metaphors.
iOS and OS X are still full of skeumorphisms. But why do they have to be so super ugly flat low-contrasty? Why can't we have futuristic inventive super abstract UI elements that are non-flat, with proper contrast and beautiful? Most people here conflate skeumorphism with non-flat stuff. So for you antonyms:
>Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
It makes sense for older people who remember them, who also are the folks who are more likely to have trouble understanding and interacting with computers. If your target audience was just young kids with neuroelasticity and hipsters who live this stuff, you could deploy a Brainfuck UI/UX and not only would they get it, they'd love it.
> Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
Actually a problem with this icon is that it is misleading. The iPhoto app is not a camera app. It is a photo library with some minor editing capabilities. You can't use it for creating photos which is what the icon suggests.
A better icon would be a photo album or a stack of photos but that's hard to fit in an icon.
The difference with icons for Web browsers is that there really is no real-world equivalent of a Web browser, so producing icon metaphors is not an issue.
"The use of metaphors worked when people didn't know what a computer was, and the only way to make its UI make sense was to mimic real-world objects. Now, this is no longer necessary. It's been 40 years."
I disagree strongly. It is now more needed than ever. 40 years ago, the majority of people using computers knew what they were doing. Now, they're everywhere, and people interact with them every day. It's very common to have to interact with a computer we have never interacted with before, and the need to give visual clues to the user is far more important than ever before. It's also very common now for people to simply reach out and grab new software; a well-designed interface that uses visual clues and cues to help people achieve their goals is much more important now than the days when people would actually sit down with the manual to work out how to operate their new piece of software.
I am routinely unable to immediately answer a phone that isn't mine because none of the pictures drawn on the screen are obviously about answering a phone.
>40 years ago, the majority of people using computers knew what they were doing.
You think that 10 and 20 year olds growing up with computers and even smartphones available for all of their life, know less of computers than people in the past?
Even a 7 year old that plays games can almost run circles around a 1980s propellerhead computer programmer in using a GUI. Compared to regular people (e.g. office workers) from 40 years ago that just used DOS and some word processor or POS or accounting program, there's just no comparison.
You think that 10 and 20 year olds growing up with computers and even smartphones available for all of their life, know less of computers than people in the past?
Most of them don't know a thing about computers. It's a magic box with a small selection of shiny buttons on. They use it for passive media consumption.
Even a 7 year old that plays games can almost run circles around a 1980s propellerhead computer programmer in using a GUI.
Well, they clearly forget by the time they're twenty.
>Most of them don't know a thing about computers. It's a magic box with a small selection of shiny buttons on. They use it for passive media consumption.
You'd be surprised.
Except by "know about computers" you mean they known about interrupts, and cache lines, and filesystem design, and other stuff that are completely inconsequential to using their computers.
>Well, they clearly forget by the time they're twenty.
Actually the linked article states the opposite:
>"This current generation of young people has never lived without tech," said Linda Rosen, CEO of Change the Equation. "It's second nature to them." Yet, using technology for social reasons doesn't make a person adept at using it in other settings, she said.
So it's not that they "forgot" something, it's that they never bothered to learn it in the first place, e.g. Excel or whatever. But computers, for what they do like to use them for, are "second nature" to them according to TFA.
I'm a young (24) dev working in a very large org (tens of thousands large), I often feel like most people should never have been allowed to use a computer in their office.
Young or old.
Of course it's silly because of the global productivity gains. And it may just be my innate misanthropy which made me a nerd when I was younger now manifesting in this new form.
I'm already an old man annoyed by people my age and annoyed by older people. But truth is, I'm annoyed by most non technical people.
PS: I like discussing technics with people from non tech fields though, luthiers, masons, cooks etc...
I think they know less than the people who were using computers back then.
The difference is of course that today computers are used by more of the general public for communication, office, and media consumption, rather than (only) bunch of tech savvy specialists.
Most of my generation and the generation that followed barely have a concept of a computer beyond "press the thing to make things happen". They know no more about their telephones now than did the people using the landlines of 20 years ago, or how much most people understood the internals of TV or radio or fridges.
As for running circles around people while using a GUI, while I accept there are specialized fields and exceptions that disprove the rule, outside of marketing presentations I just don't see it happen. As much as any generalisation can be valid, the GUI does not run circles around anyone that can actually program and is generally the mark of the computer novice/consumer...
> As for running circles around people while using a GUI, while I accept there are specialised fields and exceptions that disprove the rule, outside of marketing presentations I just don't see it happen. As much as any generalisation can be valid, the GUI does not run circles around anyone that can actually program and is generally the mark of the computer novice/consumer...
I wonder. Every time I see a colleague using command line to do git operations I get itchy and think to myself "oh, come on! I could've done this in gui in seconds". Each interface has its time and place, but to me using a GUI is more of a mark of valuing one's time than that of a novice.
I think it depends on the operations being performed. Adding a subset of the changed files? Holding ctrl/cmd and clicking the files is probably faster than typing all those names out on the command line.
Need to pull some new code though, or commit changes? I think "git pull" or "git ci -m 'Message'" is faster than opening up a complicated GUI window with lots of decisions to make.
Of course they do, but typing stuff is just physically slower for some operations. Typing git log, then scrolling through the pages of text in order to find the interesting change will always be slower than a right click -> log and then "pointing at things".
I think your conversation metaphor is good, but in a GUI the answer can be richer and interactive. A CLI can only manipulate text, a GUI can manipulate text where necessary and use a better medium (images, graphs, tables) where necessary.
There are always advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. I always shudder when I recollect configuring IIS using GUI ;).
CLI does not need to manipulate text only necessarily, see the command line in AutoCAD for example.
But yes, GUI in many cases is a better way, I wouldn't want to have cli-only Photoshop-like app (or even cli-only CAD modeller). The point is to recognize effectivity of both approaches for a given problem, at the given abstraction level.
Would you rather have a conversation with your car "left 20 degrees, now right, slow down a little, whats the speed atm?" or just turn the wheel and press some pedals?
That's not a good example - the conversation with the car would be "take me to {someplace}", which couldn't necessarily be a specific name of the place, it could be "where I met with {someone} {sometime} ago". Think Star Trek conversation with the computer ;).
There would be no point in micromanaging the car using a limited vocabulary.
But I can't go to command line and tell it "delete all of the files from the project X I do not want anymore" or "find me the change in this file in the history that caused bug Y".
Sometimes it is better to mass delete files with a find, grep and rm, sometimes an auto-filtered search and cmd+a cmd+delete is better.
> Every time I see a colleague using command line to do git operations I get itchy and think to myself "oh, come on! I could've done this in gui in seconds".
What operation could you possibly perform significantly faster in a gui than on the command line? I can think of tons that would be far, far slower in a gui.
> to me using a GUI is more of a mark of valuing one's time than that of a novice
I would argue the exact opposite. GUIs are there to make things accessible to non-power users. A command line is just infinitely more expressive and will let you be much more efficient if you learn to use it effectively.
With nearly every program that I use I start by depending heavily on the GUI and then transition to using almost exclusively keyboard shortcuts as I become a power user, as GUIs are fundamentally inefficient.
> What operation could you possibly perform significantly faster in a gui than on the command line? I can think of tons that would be far, far slower in a gui.
Sticking to the Git example:
- visualising history (in gui it is just there)
- opening old versions of files
- visualising a complete log of a file and then jumping to individual diffs/commits
The fact that in a decent GUI everything that could possibly be a link is, is very useful. I do not ned to go around copy pasting SHA1 sums. I drop down to command line when I need an occasional filter-branch or do some arcane incantations. But maybe Git is a bad example because it has a notoriously bad CLI.
Some other example, debugging.
For me it seems that you can actually see whether a programmer uses a visual debugger or a cli. If they have to drop down to GDB then their code will most probably be sprinkled with useless debug macros.
Setting break points, jumping from function to function is easier with visual debugger and a good IDE. (note that the IDE can be emacs or vim running in a terminal session for what I care)
> With nearly every program that I use I start by depending heavily on the GUI and then transition to using almost exclusively keyboard shortcuts as I become a power user, as GUIs are fundamentally inefficient.
Keyboard shortcuts are awesome of course, but I think they are so efficient because there is a GUI around. In a GUI you can always see more state at the same time. This is because graphics can sometimes pack more than text in the same space (e.g.: a visualised Git tree or a graph spitted out from callgrind)
I couldn't agree more with this. I generally prefer command-line tools like vim and gdb, but for getting a view on things like file history or browsing the output of tools like callgrind? GUIs are the way to go. Horses for courses.
>I wonder. Every time I see a colleague using command line to do git operations I get itchy and think to myself "oh, come on! I could've done this in gui in seconds"
A lot of the CLI usage feels fast because its busywork.
>As much as any generalisation can be valid, the GUI does not run circles around anyone that can actually program and is generally the mark of the computer novice/consumer...
That is patently false. There are hard core GUI users, from VFX and 3D artists to DAW and NLE operators, graphic designers and many more, than run circles around any "command line" person for the tasks they actually do.
Just as there are tons of programmers using Visual Studio and other GUI platforms, than can program far more efficiently with the intelligent autocomplete, integrated debuggers, profilers, and such, than some CLI-jockeys who think they are more efficient with their pimped Emacs or Vim.
Is Rob Pike and his GUI editor/environment a "novice/consumer"? What about tons of excellent Windows programmers? What about Notch?
> You think that 10 and 20 year olds growing up with computers and even smartphones available for all of their life, know less of computers than people in the past?
Yes. Aptitude with screwing around with a GUI isn't very relevant.
40 years ago, computers were at best used by clerk type people for specific tasks at a terminal. Accountants were using tabulation machines, written materials were on IBM selectrics.
The people engaged in professional work with computers were mostly programmers or others doing "data processes" or working with business analyst types to model business process around workloads that could live with the available computing resources.
> The use of metaphors worked when people didn't know what a computer was, and the only way to make its UI make sense was to mimic real-world objects.
I disagree strongly. If you were new to a machine, is there anything in the new Photos icon that tells you that it anything to do with images, photos or image manipulation? No.
Perhaps for you. But for me, icons are cryptic. I can glance at a list of words and find exactly what I'm looking for. My brain is wired to read and pick out words much faster than little drawings.
Anyway, I think the idea is to get some visual cue that you're about to tap the right icon. You know where you put your apps on your home screen, so the colors or wahtever lead you there faster. And the icon provides a large touch target.
Going back to the original article, it doesn't really matter what the icon looks like, as long as it's unique. You're not looking at each icon and asking yourself "is this a camera?" to get to the Photos app. You know it's a circular array of colors, and your finger goes there.
> You know where you put your apps on your home screen
Really? Because when I used an iPhone, I most definitely didn't know where most of my apps' icons were. I knew most of them on the first screen and the rest of the screens were a mix of random stuff.
I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned this earlier. Everyone's arguing about what image the icon contains and thinking of imaginary folks who are using computers for the first time after coming off a ship from a lonely desert island.
Back in 'teh day' when my icons were all cutesy skeuomorphs, my computer came with maybe a dozen apps and most of them were on my desktop. Now, I have over a hundred sitting in my global Apps folder alone - never mind user Apps, sub folders, etc.
This gets compounded even more on phones - on my iPhone, I've accidentally placed 1Password next to the Settings app - both have a grey background with a circular center. Settings' center is grey gears, 1Passwords is a blue ring with a keyhole. On examination, they're not similar at all, but I can't even begin to tell you how many times I clicked on when, meaning to click the other - even _knowing_ the differences and kicking myself each time.
I think a lot of what the designers are trying to do is create an icon that stands out visually, and is easily found from amongst a large set of other icons, rather than trying to impress upon us what its functionality is from a metaphor.
Is happiness unnecessary? Doesn't it matter what people like? I don't mean the masses, I mean people who evolved to navigate meatspace. Shouldn't designs make people happy?
But what has actually happened is a mess of inconsistent designs. Older apps still use skeuomorphism. Newer apps copy the flat look.
Skeuomorphism implemented a design principle - discoverability. You could argue with the choices made for specific icons, but there was a consistent goal - to make the OS as usable as possible.
The flat look is an anti-pattern - fashion over discoverability. The point seems to be to allow Sir Jony to impress everyone with his aesthetic skillz. User experience has become secondary to internal politics.
That's a huge problem for a company like Apple, because it'a fundamental shift in focus.
And there have been obvious effects. Watch isn't doing brilliantly, precisely because the user experience is nothing special. iOS is creaking under the weight of new features apparently added with no overall strategy, many of which remain invisible to users because the literally never find them.
MacOS is going the same way. Some of the new features are certainly welcome. But the Apple UX generally is suffering badly - from bugs, from questionable design choices, from popular products like Logic and FCP that have been cut down, then more or less abandoned.
There's no one in charge to obsessively fine tune the conflicting needs of product momentum, reliability, UX, and aesthetics.
Jobs was very good at that. Cook doesn't even seem to realise there's an issue.
Yeah you can click it and see what happens, that is what I do when I am on new system. Maybe my grandparents would be scared of clicking some icons. Current new users are kids which are less scared of clicking around and getting to know what this thing does.
Icon can help later in quickly locating this program, but I do not really care what it is. Does firefox, chrome icon or internet explorer show you that it will display websites? Internet explorer icon became "Internet" icon for a lot non technical users I think.
But if you have never seen a camera then you would not know what the old icon means either. Yes there is a picture of a palm tree there but that could be anything (given that all icons are basically pictures of something).
Looking at my desk and my habits there are actually very few objects that I use for work most of it happens on screen. All in all, I think good icon design will become harder.
Who are these supposed people who are buying Macs but have never seen a camera? This set of people must be miniscule if not empty.
Cameras are still in use, even if most people have replaced them with smartphones. Walk around any city and you'll see gobs of people taking selfies on their phones, but you'll also see a decent number of people carrying dedicated cameras.
> should the icons represent something "iconic" or something that most people use?
I don't know what you mean by "iconic". If you mean "abstract and without independently-identifiable meaning", then I think in general, no. Icons should be immediately identifiable when possible. The overlapping rainbow paint chips that make up the current photos icon seems utterly meaningless. The camera was meaningful. A stack of photos would be meaningful. An abstracted "photo" like Windows 10 uses (and like Google uses in the sidebar of their online photos app) would be meaningful.
For the record, I think Android/Google's photos icon is also utterly meaningless to most people. I think it's supposed to represent a camera aperture (same as Apple's icon?), but most people probably don't know what a mechanical aperture is.
By iconic I meant represented by an object associated with an activity that has the most meaning. (I have some difficulty phrasing this)
For example, in the current world maybe 10% of the people are taking pictures with actual cameras but we still represent the camera as a "box with a huge lens". Few people use land lines but the phone icon is still a banana. To send and e-mail in general we use an envelope but we send way more electronic messages than snail mail.
In that case, yes, I think icons should be "iconic" when possible. At this point, the "most used" version of basically every app is unsurprisingly an app. The phone app is used more than landline phones (or dumb cell phones). The camera app is used more than dedicated cameras. Word processors are probably used more than paper and pen.
So you either use something "iconic", or every icon is just a small screenshot, or I guess you make something up that is meaningless.
Can you find me some actual person who honestly does not know what a camera looks like? Not "someone who has never personally used a camera," not "I'm sure that somewhere out there there's someone who doesn't know what a camera looks like," not "in twenty years, maybe lots of people won't know what a camera looks like."
Someone that, right now, actually honestly has no idea what a camera looks like.
Well. I can imagine that there must be some kids (let's say some 4-5 year olds) who already use tablets but they have never had a picture taken with anything else but a phone. I grant you that camera is not the best example since the phones have hardly caught up to good cameras and we will see them at least in some form for a long time.
Images are everywhere, and images are reality (fuck off, René Magritte).
Also, young people don't live in some sort of post-technical isolation. When they go to school, they will probably see the photography students walking around with cameras. And kids still burn music CD's for each other. Because it's cute and sentimental, and it feels a lot better than texting someone a link to a playlist.
I agree that the current photos icon is awful, and I actually find myself unable to quickly locate the photos app on iOS. Game Center is pretty bad too, but I never open Game Center.
The rest of the aticle's arguments seem like personal, subjective distaste for flat/minimal design and a yearning for the good ol' days of skeumorphism.
> I hate how Safari hides the full address in the address bar, for instance.
You have no idea how much this change makes the URL field palatable for regular Joe. Previously: hhtpttpp://faceblablah.com/techmumbo/jumbo?not=h4ck3r. Now: <lock icon>facebooook.com.ru => "wow this really is not Facebook!". I basically witnessed such behaviour change first hand.
> Or, how they removed scrollbars and force people to actually scroll every piece of the interface to check if there's something more to see, while before you could tell just by looking at scrollbars.
No need to scroll, you can check just by resting fingers on the touchpad (except in Chrome) and look at the scrollbars.
Except it's infinitely easier to slightly drag your hands on the trackpad your fingers are already on, than to glance over at the side of a window, identify a scroll bar, and glance back to the content you were viewing.
> Previously: hhtpttpp://faceblablah.com/techmumbo/jumbo?not=h4ck3r. Now: <lock icon>facebooook.com.ru => "wow this really is not Facebook!". I basically witnessed such behaviour change first hand.
Anyone who does that is uneducated and ignorant; the proper response to that is to educate, not to remove the ability of those who are educated to do other things.
Using that argument, having a keyboard is too advanced as well. A microphone and a pointing device should be enough. And it is, but we all know not having one kills productivity.
Is Siri big in the US? Here in Europe I see a lot of people with iPhones but I have never seen anyone use Siri. I have seen my friend attempt whatsapp messages via the vice recognition thing while he is driving, but it looks way more hassle than what it is worth.
Years of education have been horribly ineffective, which is why phishing continues to work. Meanwhile, the ignorant audience keeps growing. A whole lot of UX work is about making ambiguous things less ambiguous and making the "right" or "safe" choice the default. In those scenarios, the best UX will make the non-default choice available with some additional effort (changing settings, diving deeper), which this feature in Safari absolutely does.
Hang on to your hat, because every other browser has been playing with the exact same feature, for the exact same set of reasons.
> Years of education have been horribly ineffective
It should be obvious by just looking how social engineering is working and have been using the same tricks for literally thousands of years. Classic children literature, before modernisation (like Disney), gives you a good idea on the same lessons needed to be taught then.
On the first point, you can just open Safari's preferences, head to the Advanced tab, and "show full website address." This is one of the first things I do, as I also dislike this behavior. :)
The use of metaphors worked when people didn't know what a computer was, and the only way to make its UI make sense was to mimic real-world objects. Now, this is no longer necessary. It's been 40 years.
My first computer had a text display and a manual, in 1983. I had no trouble teaching my college house mates how to use it for word-processing.
Everything else that I did with the computer involved text symbols such as GOTO. ;-)
Today, when I use most software, beyond a few familiar icons like the floppy disc symbol, I have to hover the cursor over each icon to figure out what it does. When I learn keyboard shortcuts for those icons, I use them, to reduce eyestrain and wrist fatigue. A great feature would be a single button that reveals all of the icon descriptors at once.
And I turn it on EVERY time I setup a new OSX install - I want to bloody well know for damn sure whether I'm on HTTP or HTTPS when I'm on websites and some stupid little lock icon ain't gonna cut it when I'm passing credit card and banking info over the net. A problem further exacerbated by the SSL variants (extended-validation SSL certs causing green text showing company name to appear beside the lock icon - bankofamerica.com compared to news.ycombinator.com for example). This article is dead on the money.
Every single example he gave looked, in my opinion, better the new way. This entire article is just a vast list of opinions about their interface design disguised behind some inappropriate grand declaration of truth.
Not to me. Flat is ugly. Different for difference's sake. Designers' need to make their mark. Microsoft's desperate attempt to find any competitive edge against the iPhone. When Apple designer got suckered into going flat, they instantly made Apple a follower, instead of the leader they were in design, leaving no doubt that there's no one with a taste left at Apple after Steve died and Scott Forstal was forced out. iOS 7 was the saddest thing to happen to Apple in its entire history, imnsho.
skeumorphism was Scott Forestall's thing. Jobs just agreed with it. Once Jobs was dead, Forestall didn't last long in Apple. Officially, he left due to the "maps" debacle, but in reality, Cook was gunning for him for quite a while.
Verbal languages are full of grotesquely outdated vocabulary and that is perfectly fine. The word starts life as some resolveable derivation until it eventually gets detached from that, becoming pure convention. How many people do you know who are called engineers because they routinely operate actual trebuchets?
I really don't see why visual languages should not evolve along similar patterns. Visual communication would hardly get easier if we switched the existing symbols over to black, rectangular screens for all the tasks that have recently been consolidated in the smartphone as a single, multifunctional tool.
The process that you are describing in language is incredibly far from being ideal, it's just a reality because language is truly distributed. It would be far better if we did not overload words, leading to a period of ambiguous transition before the word finally changes definition entirely.
Design language is still distributed, but not nearly to the same degree. If Apple decides that an old skeuomorphic logo is ambiguous, or not understood by younger user, or some other compliant like that they can change it and the new one will enter the design vocabulary very quickly.
Often these are helpful. A little logo with just a person is _much_ clearer to me than a contact book. Over time it would be best to shed all the strange associations with real world objects in favor of a design language that actually describes what the software does, instead of making a poor analogy to a real world object.
Some part of me thinks, they changed everything to a shade of grey so that when they inject rainbow colors into icons they stand out more. I also think new icons are too abstract and make no sense whatsoever, I miss the Photos icon every single time I try to open the app. It's all about rainbows.
You are missing the point of mimicking real world objects. It doesn't matter that some people may never have seen an actual contact book. Nobody has seen a real time machine either. But you can imagine one in your mind and how it might work. This is helpful. Donald Norman's POET book explains that people make mental models of your program in any case. If you aid creation of that mental model then your program will become more intuitive and be less intimidating.
Even 'digital natives' live in the physical world. We start learning how it works before we ever touch a computer, and even the most dedicated nerd spends more time interacting with physical objects than with digital interfaces. It doesn't take additional learning to know that an object casting a shadow on another is in front of that other, for example. Failing to leverage that existing knowledge is tantamount to shutting down whole swathes of users' brains.
You are not making a case against skeuomorphism, but against icons in general. We either must resort to using words, or standardized pictograms like road signs.
IMHO the problem with the current OS X design is not the lack of skeuomorphism but the lack of discoverability. Many controls are hidden unless you hover over them, and there's no indication of where the active hover areas are. You just have to know, or get lucky. Buttons are often indistinguishable from plain text. Editable text is often (perhaps even usually) indistinguishable from non-editable text. Useful information is often obscured behind fancy graphics. Visual effects are included simply because the technology exists, not because it actually adds any value. What is the point of being able to see a blurry image of what is underneath a drop-down menu?
> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little.
This just seems weird to me. Contacts books were replaced in a very limited way by PDAs for early adopters, but it wasn't until smartphones and their easy address books that they really started to die off. So post-2008, really.
Were you not in professional settings until your late 20s? Still be surprised if you are both 35 and genuinely unaware of what an address book is.
Not the parent, but I agree with them: Many tech savvy people abandoned contact books decades ago. Contact books serve two needs - long term storage and quick reference to frequently used numbers. Computers have provided the long term storage, and various other facilities provided the quick reference, even before smart phones: human memory, print outs, sticky notes, pdas, basic cell phones.
In the 90s I knew people who'd set their browser homepage to a 'quick reference info' page on their server which included frequently needed numbers.
The only tech savvy people I've known to use contact books in the last twenty years seemed a bit eccentric to me.
My parents had a contact book when I was little (back in the 80s), but they eventually went to a system of cards standing up in a tray separated by last letter. It made it easy to pull it out when you wanted to make a call. They now have a mixed system where their most used phone numbers are in their iPhone contacts, but they have still have that tray for everybody else.
I had a contacts section in my DayTimer back in the 90s, but I've used a contacts program ever since I switched to using a computer-based calendar.
Re: safari hiding urls, click on Preference->Advanced-> And, check the box for "Smart Search Field" to see the complete url.
It should be checked by default and I found it annoying too.
The problem with trying to get rid of skeuomorphism is that skeuomorphism is built on the idea that human beings use single tools for single tasks. A pen to write, and only write. An old school phone to call, and only to call. A clock to tell time, and only to tell time. A camera to take pictures, and only to take pictures. For this reason, skeuomorphism works coz we associate the icon with the task. Hence message icons are envelopes, coz envelopes hold messages and nothing else, more or less. We've seen erase icons on software that look like pencil erasers. The camera icon? Of course it's a camera. And so on.
Enter the smartphone.
The smartphone does everything. It makes calls, takes pictures, receives messages, tells time, shows TV shows (we'll have to stop calling them TV shows, won't we?), etc. Since icons resemble the tools used to carry out given tasks, what are we to do when one tool does all tasks?
That's the problem for skeuomorphism. What are we to do for icons when one tool does everything? Create icons depicting people doing those different things, a bit like emoji? A selfie icon for the camera, a person talking on the phone for voice functions, a message bubbles icon that mimics message interfaces for messages?
I don't know. I guess a language to replace the skeuomorphism language will emerge.
hiding the full URL is considered a security feature, to help people know what site they are actually on. Chrome has considered adopting the same feature for the same reason.
To be fair, one of the big reasons that Safari decided to hide the full address bar was to minimize phishing attempts that took users to scamsite.com/bankofamerica.com/account/whatever where you'd only see "om/bankofamerica.com/account/whatever" in the address bar and people would be fooled into thinking they were at the right site. Now, scammers have to try harder and come up with things like bankofamerica.com.scamsite.com and most people seem to pick up on that just fine. It was a very purposeful decision that, I think, worked out for most people. You can click in the bar to get the full address and, most of the time, you're going to be copying it anyways.
On the other hand, we call this thing a computer, while only the fewest use it to actually compute something. Or, we call that other thing a camera, while it's some years since this was actually a room, you could enter. Such historical traces may be found in visual language too, e.g., we commonly use arrows to indicate directions and relations, while they aren't found in real life anymore (at least, the fewest use to shoot with them nowadays).
These historically grown metaphors make lot of sense, where it comes to how we relate to objects. The word "camera" isn't only short and distinctive, it's also evoking a sense of the history of the medium, and it may provide some emotional bonding to the object which may hardly be achieved by a "multi-image" – while the latter may actually sound a bit fancier in a 1970s SF-movie. I think, there are some valid points made by the article, and, besides, on an empirical level, I'm losing time in the newer, uniformed MacOS GUIs, too. (Not to speak of Miller's magical number 7 or 3.7 bits working memory, which are still valid in the age of flat design. But this is an other story.)
I have to disagree with the author. I understand his frustration with some of the icon choices(Photos, Game center, etc.) but most of the things he's grieving for are just tacky. The leopard pattern on the OSX box and the overly cluttered illustration with the galaxy background, glassy surfaced "X", icons and lens flare would look especially stupid in 2016.
I'm glad they removed all the silly shadows, 3d effects and animations and defined more strict UI guidelines.
Also note that he's conveniently forgotten to mention Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Dictionary, iTunes, Maps, and others that I can't be arsed to list, all of which have managed to get that flat look style while still being an image of their real-world counterpart.
The puzzle background goes contrarian to the text label and makes my eyes/mind jump while trying to read the labels.
The first button makes me think of Wikipedia, the second one of Facebook. It's precisely that kind of cognitive dissonance where you read "blue" written in red and get asked to say the color or the word.
The last button has embossed text for some reason, possibly in an attempt to make it readable in face of the noisy background, but in turn it makes it stand apart from the other buttons.
The whole theme of the design reminds me precisely of the design language of Mac OS X from its origins to Leopard. It's not bad per se, but people don't need as much no-so-subtle hints as before in the UI, which get perceived as distracting noise. It's not zeitgeist anymore.
Yea, I didn't wanna be a dick by mentioning it but scrolling down to that after reading the article just confused me even more about what the author would define as "good UI".
I count at least 2 unnecessary textures, 4(or 5?) different fonts and a color palette that makes no sense to me.
I know some people are enraged about how many "generic 3-column flat UI" websites there are, but give me one of those any time instead of something that can't make a decision over what unnecessary decorations to use around a button that's already cluttered with a background texture and 3d effect.
There's nothing wrong with unnecessary textures though. I think that's the point the author was trying to make, stuff like that adds a bit of character. Get rid of all the textures, and what do you have, another Bootstrap website.
I recently had to use a computer with OS X Mavericks on it (10.9 I think). I was struck by how beautiful the interface was. I'm having trouble finding a good screenshot illustrating this, but compare
Everything just looks better on Mavericks. The gradients may be over-the-top but they're at least consistent. Transparency on El Capitan is pointless and ugly. Maybe I like the system font a little better.
Firefox is also a really good example; it looked great on Mavericks but has not been able to fit in since.
Usually, I prefer simple UIs: i3, terminals, etc.. But the look they have done for Yosemite/El Capitan just doesn't work.
One of those URLs you've posted results in a banned security error in Chrome, with the strong recommendation not to visit it due to malicious activity on that site.
Firefox's problem is that it does the whole UI by itself. This basically makes it look out of place anywhere they haven't explicitly put effort into giving it a similar experience.
It looks out of place on El Capitan and on macOS Sierra it's downright disturbing. I don't want tab titles in Times New Roman (at least it reminds me of that).
Certainly beautiful but the problem is: on the dock, the stuff between Safari and Photos are indistinguishable at first sight. If I used that, I'd have to hover on some of them to pick Pages, or Notes, or Contacts among them.
The transparency is worse than pointless. It is so distracting and ugly, it makes using macOS awful. When scrolling though a webpage (on macOS & iOS) the flickering color of the titlebar always makes me think the display is starting to fail — then I remember it's the stupid transparency.
I suppose Apple truly intends its MacOS to become more mature and streamlined. I also loved the beauty of Leopard and Lion versions. I don't think that making all icons flat and less colorful makes Apple's products more mature. The decision might have been made as Apple decided to move from glossy devices to mat, so later after that all the icon designs also moved from glossy to flat. It took almost 10 years, btw.
OS X looks better than ever. Yeah I agree with Notepad and Photos icons looking not good but everything else is perfect. I'm typing this on an OSX right now and it just looks great.
Worst part of the article by far was
> OS X packaging, once very elegant and eccentric (and printed on a physical box), has become thoroughly unremarkable.
This is 2016, no one uses CD's anymore. And that leopard print box design looks like packaging for some kinky underwear.
>leopard print box design looks like packaging for some kinky underwear
It's funny witnessing how certain people that a couple years ago considered Apple designs the pinnacle of design and far ahead of everything else using the same arguments today that Windows fans used.
Every time Apple says "This is the best way to do X!" it invalidates their last version's claims of "This is the best way to do X!" especially when it undoes exactly what the prior version brought, and especially when it's about ergonomic or ease of use elements whose theoretical maxima really shouldn't vary much.
The cycle is really tired, and their wild claims have worn out their novelty to non-Apple people.
Generally I think OSX looks great but the icons (Safari, FaceTime, Photos) look woefully under-designed, especially compared to the other software installed on my computer.
If you think this is a steep decline, wait until they report earnings after this market closes this evening. Another quarter of iPhone sales drops and they're expect to announce iWatch down by over 50% from last year.
I disagree. I use mac all day and the icons don't pose a problem to me either to the young people in my family.
Really frustrating for me are the changes in Spotlight launcher. It used to be instantaneous search and launch. Now it is painfully slow in all my computers.
I'm finding that its faster now to pinch with all five fingers on the trackpad and then use find-as-you-type in the Launchpad UI. This works even when Spotlight is busy rebuilding its index for whatever reason.
Great points here. The iconography is an important element of navigating a system and recent iterations of both macOS and iOS have suffered at the hands of trendy flat design.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadThat's certainly what the proponents of flat design contend. In terms of measuring usability, I'm not so sure that's true. I've seen people hunting for buttons that didn't quite look like buttons
This is the beauty of the traditional, three-dimensional, consistently-styled buttons: you get a 'button' by default without having to hint that it's a button using other means.
And the Call-button is for whatever reason merged with the SMS-button. It's just one big button of which 4/5 is for calling and 1/5 to the right opens up the SMS-app. There is an icon representing SMS in that 1/5 of the button, but nothing indicates that it's a separate button from the 4/5 on the left.
iOS Contacts has a set of icons that look like the symbols on the app icons. That makes sense to me.
The classic example of good interface design, I was taught, was the "call lift or elevator" button. The theory goes that no one needs to be shown how to use a lift twice. You see it once and just know what every other lift button does even if they look slightly different.
I realise that that skeuomorphism needn't necessarily map to the computer world but _something_ seems to be forgotten in the current trend for flat, non-skeumorphic designs.
I loved hearing that Windows 10 was going to go 'authentically digital', but that emotion died when it became apparent that they decided that mean 'flat design'. Just because something is on a computer screen doesn't mean it has to be made of simple single-colour polygons.
Maybe internationalization was a consideration here? Yellow paper doesn’t read as anything recognizable internationally. (Yellow sticky notes are probably internationally known, though.)
My overall point would also be that taste colors opinions in this case. Or taste at least leaks into them. I think it’s important to be very careful with that and to try and avoid to let taste color too much of what you think. (My taste is very different from that of the author and as such I think many of his points are just plain wrong-footed. There certainly are some good points in there, but taste plays too much of a role.)
I think the bigger issue with the new Notes icon is the weak branding. Previously, you could tell Notes and Reminders apart by just looking at the colours. This was really important when you told Siri to "remind me to buy milk tomorrow" - you would either see a bright-yellow note[1], or a black-red-white reminder[2]. Now, everything is "almost white", making it really hard to tell what content lives in which app. (Notes and Reminders have a lot of conceptual overlap, especially now that Notes supports checklists.)
[1] http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2013/03/siri-not... [2] http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/location-...
The Notes app is far better than that, the white it uses now implies a more permanent organised feel which better reflects the app. The texts I store within it are important to me, they're not final documents but something I'd treat better than a disposable scribble on a yellow-pad. With the app's formatting, cloud and folder abilities this seems a good fit.
I'd always assumed it was dyed yellow to hide poor quality paper. Is there any truth in this?
Perhaps yellow pads are the future.
When I buy cheap recycled-paper notebooks the paper is often off-white and has a yellow look to it. At least to me; yellow implies disposability or cheapness.
In 1844-45, two individuals invented the wood paper-making process. A Canadian, Charles Fenerty, and a German, Friedrich Gottlob Keller, both involved in lumber industries and recognized the cost and durability that wood pulp provided over cotton. Within thirty years, wood pulp paper was all the rage on both sides of the pond. While wood pulp paper was cheaper and just as durable as cotton or other linen papers, there were drawbacks. Most significantly, wood pulp paper is much more prone to being effected by oxygen and sunlight.
Wood is primarily made up of two polymer substances – cellulose and lignin. Cellulose is the most abundant organic material in nature. It is also technically colorless and reflects light extremely well rather than absorbs it (which makes it opaque); therefore humans see cellulose as white. However, cellulose is also somewhat susceptible to oxidation, although not nearly as much as lignin. Oxidation causes a loss of electron(s) and weakens the material. In the case of cellulose, this can result in some light being absorbed, making the material (in this case, wood pulp) appear duller and less white (some describe it as "warmer"), but this isn't what causes the bulk of the yellowing in aged paper.
Lignin is the other prominent substance found in paper, newspaper in particular. Lignin is a compound found in wood that actually makes the wood stronger and harder. Lignin is a dark color naturally (think brown-paper bags or brown cardboard boxes, where much of the lignin is left in for added strength, while also resulting in the bags/boxes being cheaper due to less processing needed in their creation). Lignin is also highly susceptible to oxidation. Exposure to oxygen (especially when combined with sunlight) alters the molecular structure of lignin, causing a change in how the compound absorbs and reflects light, resulting in the substance containing oxidized lignin turning a yellow-brown color in the human visual spectrum.
Since the paper used in newspapers tends to be made with a less intensive and more cost-efficient process (since a lot of the wood pulp paper is needed), there tends to be significantly more lignin in newspapers than in, say, paper made for books, where a bleaching process is used to remove much of the lignin. The net result is that, as newspapers get older and are exposed to more oxygen, they turn a yellowish-brown color relatively quickly.
As for books, since the paper used tends to be higher grade (among other things, meaning more lignin is removed along with a much more intensive bleaching process), the discolorization doesn't happen as quickly. However, the chemicals used in the bleaching process to make white paper can result in the cellulose being more susceptible to oxidation than it would otherwise be, contributing slightly to the discolorization of the pages in the long run.
Today, to combat this, many important documents are now written on acid-free paper with a limited amount of lignin, to prevent it from deteriorating as quickly.
http://gizmodo.com/why-old-paper-turns-yellow-1692099465 http://siarchives.si.edu/services/forums/collections-care-gu...
Is it? I know yellow is the default colour for sticky notes, but for everything else -- at school, university, work, home -- the paper is white.
Ryman stock over 500 notepads. Three have yellow paper, and are described as "Being Yellow in colour [they] may appeal to people with dyslexia as the coloured paper can aid reading and writing in people with this condition".
http://www.ryman.co.uk/stationery/pads-books
Photos of typical yellow pads: https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+legal+pad&tbm=isch
History of the yellow legal pad: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/scene_snide...
https://www.stylo.ca/fr/produits/Rhodia/Basics-(no.18)/430_2...
Not sure how well known that brand is outside of Europe.
My brand new notepad (DIN A5, 5mm grid, spiral bound at the top) for my board game evening today doesn’t say where it was made, just that it’s from a German company (it’s labelled predominantly in German, though somewhat prominently also in English – language designated as “UK” – and Turkish, as well as French, Italian and Dutch in much smaller print).
Googling the company doesn’t tell me where and even whether they produce the notepads. Maybe they just relabel someone else’s notepads and resell them?
All I know that the text on their website makes me want to vomit: “Kyome’s target group is primarily women between 30 and 50 who want to combine the practical with the attractive. SoHos (Small Office or Home Office) are increasingly finding their place in living rooms and kitchens. For this reason, kyome products are surprising, as according to the brand promise, with nice, clever ideas, are pleasantly functional and a long way from grey, everyday office life.”
Firstly that’s some really bad English, secondly that’s insultingly sexist.
But back to the topic at hand: I think the important point is that white paper with some ruling (lines or grid, with margins or without) and bound in some way (left or top, spiral or glue) is a widespread internationally recognizable look for notepads. The details then don’t matter that much.
That said, I was thinking along similar lines a few weeks ago. I was at a home improvement store browsing the power tools for a jig saw when I came across a hot pink drill kit.
"Hot pink?" I thought to myself. "Did they see that the number of women interested in home improvement is rising and figure that women are simple enough to fall for that? To buy your shitty drill just because it's pink?"
Feeling grumpy, I told my mom about it over lunch the next day. My mom bought an old foreclosed-on house in BFE Appalachia last year, and took it upon herself to renovate it -- it went from complete, unlivable dump to nice, cozy home as she replaced the floors, the ceilings, the roof, the cabinets, all of the bathroom fixtures, all of the doors, etc. My mom is no girly-girl and has never been afraid to get her hands dirty, and she's physically stronger than most men I know (including myself). To my surprise, upon hearing about the pink drill, she declared, "I want one!"
Let me tell you, my mother is far from simple. Beyond being strong, dedicated, and resourceful, she's also very intelligent. I know that she knows that the company doesn't actually care about women doing home improvement and is just trying to make a quick buck by "tapping" a market that's already been tapped by your typical orange or yellow or black unisex drill. But you know what? If you like something, you just like it, even if it happens to be stereotypical for you to like it. Stereotypes exist for a reason, and businesses would not be constantly wielding them in attempts to appeal to their target demographics if they didn't work in the market. There's clearly no ill-intent behind it, just business.
If I were out buying eyeglasses and saw an advert for some new sort of lens or coating to suit people who stare at computer screens all day, and the advert featured a nerd typing furiously on a computer with a fake lightsaber mounted on the wall and a set of D&D books on the shelf, should I be insulted? Or should I be glad that someone is finally making glasses for me? Chances are, I'd be excited. I might even wait around for a bit to see if I can find a new cleric for my party...
The world needs diverse things and something for all tastes. What I dislike very much, however, is strict bucketing or stereotypically selling those things.
Pink drills? Why not, though maybe blue, green, orange, magenta and so on drills would also be cool to have. And please don’t write “drills for the female renovator” above them.
Also, if there is only one shitty pink drill and the rest of the stuff is not available in pink, wouldn’t you say that sends a message, too? It says something about how normal it is for women to do e.g. home renovations. It says something about their status and role and as such is pretty shitty. See the wider context.
(Also, your assumption that you are somehow uniquely positioned for glasses for people looking at screens all day is itself somehow weirdly sexist. So many people look at screens all day for all kinds of reasons, irrespective of their gender.)
> I think people should make diverse aesthetically pleasing things (even if only some people find some of those things to be aesthetically pleasing).
I agree completely.
> The world needs diverse things and something for all tastes.
I agree here as well.
> What I dislike very much, however, is strict bucketing or stereotypically selling those things.
I understand why someone might find that distasteful. The problem is that marketing budgets are only so big, and companies need to identify some well-defined subset(s) of the population in order to effectively advertise and (hopefully, to them) sell their products. Perhaps it's unfortunate, but the straightforward way to advertise to some group of people is to identify things that some large percentage of them have in common, and appeal to those things. If the selected strategy doesn't work, it's time to abandon it and come up with a new one. If Kyome's advertisements have been along the same lines for some time, then it's likely that it's been effective. If the adverts aren't working, Kyome will eventually ditch them in favor of something else. For what it's worth, there is (usually) no ill intent behind it -- it all just comes down to trying to effectively advertise without spending a fortune creating tailored advertisements for everybody. If you let it get to you, then you're going to be constantly offended by all the advertisements that (unfortunately) fills the modern world.
> Pink drills? Why not, though maybe blue, green, orange, magenta and so on drills would also be cool to have. And please don’t write “drills for the female renovator” above them.
Again in agreement.
> Also, if there is only one shitty pink drill and the rest of the stuff is not available in pink, wouldn’t you say that sends a message, too? It says something about how normal it is for women to do e.g. home renovations. It says something about their status and role and as such is pretty shitty. See the wider context.
I didn't notice any other pink tools, but if they were there, it's likely I overlooked them. I'm not the most observant person in the world, especially when I'm locked on target. The only reason I even noticed the pink drill was because it was out of place, not with the other drills, but on the counter with the "display models" of a bunch of handsaws rather than on a shelf.
The thing is, up until recently, it hasn't been normal for women to do home renovations in the US. There has been growing interest in DIY home improvement and construction projects among women in just the last few years. Of course, there have long been some women interested in it (my mom, for example), but they didn't constitute a large enough segment of the market to convince companies to produce demographic-targeted tools. That's apparently beginning to change.
> (Also, your assumption that you are somehow uniquely positioned for glasses for people looking at screens all day is itself somehow weirdly sexist. So many people look at screens all day for all kinds of reasons, irrespective of their gender.)
I've read and re-read what I wrote here, and I couldn't at first figure out where you got the idea that I think I'm somehow "uniquely positioned" for such glasses. I gather that you're German, though I'm not sure German is your native tongue (your written English is very good). If it is, it may be a "language barrier" type thing, and I think the misunderstanding likely comes from this phrase: "someone is finally making glasses for me". I can see how that might be taken to mean that I thought the manufacturer literally had me specifically in mind when creating their product or their advertisement. However, this is a common figure of speech (a hypon...
I'd imagine Rhodia is pretty correlated with the popularity of fountain pens.
That's a bit funny, since it's France's revolutionary units which have been imposed on almost the entire world.
I'm an American who's worked in offices the last 10+ years and I have stacks and stacks of yellow legal pads from years of note taking in my closet.
I think it is probably to do with it being cheap recycled discolored paper that was cheaper to dye than bleach. Might be better for the environment than bleach as well.
I switched to dot paper about 4 years ago, though, and I'm relatively happy with the decision.
Some say yellow is better because it doesn't change color over time. I personally prefer yellow, but it's certainly odd.
My law firm in the USA uses white now.
"Flat design" versus "visual nudging", for want of a better term, is what the debate's really about.
* Skeumorphism is about rendering individual materials. E.g. compare the old and new Safari icons. Both show a blue compass, but the old one is drawn as a realistically rendered 3d-object with perspective and metallic reflections, and the new one is a flat 2d drawing. Similarly, the old design of the maximize/close buttons on windows were rendered skeumorphically, as a some kind of plastic 3d-object, the new ones are 2d.
* Then there is the use of visual metaphors versus abstract symbolism. E.g. the old icon for Photos was a picture of a camera and photo, the new one is an abstract symbol (apparently it's supposed to be a stylized sunflower?).
* And finally he talks about color choices: the old design used lots of saturated colors, the new one has more desaturated ones with a few saturated accents.
All of these can vary independently. A stylized line drawing of a battery is not an instance of skeumorphism, but it is a use of visual metaphor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gov-XY7mDPE
Apple still produces videos like these, but only to show them at WWDC and on their website. New users are only greeted by grey/white screens and lots of cloud settings. :|
My head was spinning (literally) every time I used old Time Machine, so I'm glad they removed this silly animation.
What would that even look like? On what access can a human head literally spin?
The problem with this approach is that the web has no guidelines whatsoever, beyond user-agent defaults. So each and every site does their own thing (whether 'good' or 'bad') and Apple (+ Google, etc.) decides to cherry-pick what is 'popular' or thought to 'look good', seemingly without thinking through the impact on usability. Or, possibly worse, they have considered the usability impact but deem the tradeoff worthwhile.
Buttons still look pushable, input fields still look editable. The Dock didn't lose any functionality whatsoever by having the 3D effect removed.
In my opinion, the El Cap UI requires just as much talent as the overdesigned (but very pretty) icons and graphics from the previous era. I don't miss the brushed metal and pinstripes, though.
Things looking better actually has a positive effect on usability.
I'm a long-term Inkscape user, they recently 'improved' the icons; it all looks wrong (but handsome in a minimalistic, low-visibility of chrome, sort of way) and disturbs my workflow considerably.
I'm not sure why the parent comment was downvoted. If the above statement was intended to mean that being consistent and intuitive is more important than aesthetics then that is almost certainly true, in my experience designing and testing UIs. Of course, the ideal is to have it all by using the aesthetics to support the functionality. Being attractive and being functional aren't mutually exclusive.
This is where, IMHO, a lot of generic minimalist/flat designs following the current trend go wrong: they sacrifice so much detail and so many possible ways to be visually distinctive or interactive that what remains inevitably all looks very similar and loses some of the visual cues that could help to guide the user in how the system works.
But being fashionable and being functional are often opposing forces.
Seems to me flat web design was a reaction as the antithesis of an over-indulgence in skeuomorphism. We just appear to have thrown out a lot of affordance and visibility in that reaction.
I sort of understand, but no-one outside my family uses my desktop and when I worked in an office it was just me or the IT support people, so how is it about branding in the general situation. For media stuff everyone is likely to be using the default.
The old "Pages" icon was instantly recognisable. The new one looks, at first glance, exactly the same as text edit and notes.
I don't think that the UI actually needs to get out of the way. We humans are perfectly able to ignore even the most obnoxiously designed mess (cf. banner blindness). But we are not very good at picking from many similar-looking things. Replacing the colorful sidebar icons with simpler monochrome versions now requires us to actively look for the icon you need, instead of just picking it intuitively.
Getting a bit fed up of listening to fellow designers preaching about "cognitive overload" over a few button shapes and icons then proceeding to ship designs where all the controls are un-styled blue text with the occasional semi-abstract line art icon.
Contrary to popular belief these days, contrast is not the enemy.
On a small laptop screen this behaviour might be preferable, but on a FullHD display, I find it rather annoying.
That's hardly discoverable though.
Hey, Google! When I double click the title bar, it means fill the !@%&%#* display!!
Just another reason why I like Firefox.
Everywhere I look I find people saying that window management in Windows is miles ahead of OS X. Even from people who wouldn't want to use Windows. If Apple wanted to placate those people, they would make the green button maximize by default, get rid of that ghastly global menu bar, fix the bad keyboard acceleration, make the Dock even more like the taskbar and add window snapping among a few other things.
I'm hoping some day someone at Apple will see the light. It only took them twenty years to realize that letting users resize a window by any corner or edge is a good idea and that one-button mice were really not a good idea so maybe by 2036 it will all change.
As much as I love overlapping and reasonably sized windows and having many windows strewn about my very large monitor, I'll see a post on Reddit about how websites aren't designed to look good when maximized on a 21:9 monitor, and then I'll face palm. It's weird.
So you can still see the Dock and the Menu bar without having to do anything?
I always maximize and never use full screen because I don't want to hide the most useful parts of my OS...but I can imagine that visual artists might use it a lot.
For me, it’s for ease of working with multiple windows. I frequently work with multiple windows at one time, or multiple programs, and Apple’s full screen is awkward for that.
Switching windows invokes a cute but lengthy animation. I can’t have a window take most of a full screen, leaving a corner for clicking to the other window. ⌘-tab works very poorly, especially on multi-monitor desktops, because it forces you to remember implementation details about which application has windows on which desktop. ⌘-` window switching doesn’t work with full-screen. It’s just a mess.
Even in web browsing, I don’t use only tabs. I use multiple windows, so I don’t full-screen those, either.
Also, moving windows between monitors, making them side-by-side etc are insanely easy.
To my surprise - or not, now that I think of it - I actually had Spectacles installed already, but I had not come around to getting acquainted with it.
Major facepalm for me... ;-) Now, off to put on the spectacles... ;-)
I thought the lament about the photo app dropping the icon that looks like a camera was particularly odd. He seems uninterested in even acknowledging the point that most cameras don't look like that anymore, and there are many (most?) full fledged adults who have never used a camera with a large attached lens.
I'd even wonder at this point if there are more people in the world familiar with Apple products than with actual apples that grow on trees, but I digress.
But the old iPhoto icon was not only showing a camera, it was showing a camera and a photo. The camera is part of the icon because iPhoto/Photos can also be used to import photos from cameras that look exactly like the one in the icon. The old icon really couldn't be more fitting for what the app does.
And even if users don't know what a camera is, they can still recognise the other 50% of the icon.
Plus, Apple itself still uses the same type of camera in other icons, most notably on the current iOS lock screen, so I don't think anyone is confused by the iconography. Most people never compose a song and yet they know that iTunes' icon is a musical note.
Can they? who prints photos anymore?
Digital SLR cameras still very much look like traditional cameras. Why? because the form is optimal for the task at hand - taking high quality pictures.
People say things like this in defence of the recent Apple UI changes but completely ignore the [iOS6 camera icon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/IOS_6_Home_Sc...) vs [iOS7+](http://static1.i4u.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/main_i...)
We went from an icon that literally looks like the iPhone camera to an icon of a point and shoot you and others claim is antiquated and not relevant.
Without 3D or lighting effects, a lens is just a few concentric circles. So a flat picture of a camera housing is less ambiguous, even though it is not what a phone camera looks like.
Get a group of non-Mac users, randomly split them into two groups. Set them a number of basic tasks: writing and sending an email, editing a photo, opening a particular website, etc. Then have one group do it on an older version of OS X, and the other on a new version. Then record how long it takes them, what things they struggle with, etc. Ask them to report their level of frustration and enjoyment.
It wouldn't be a perfect experiment, but it would at least produce some concrete data to discuss.
Windows 7 really narrowed the gap between Windows and OS X, and at the same time OS X 10.7 took many steps backwards (black & white sidebar icons, no Save As, terrible multi-screen experience).
Compare it to Atom which I, and I am sure many others here, use every day" syntax highlighting, coloured icons, etc all make navigating code/screen faster.
The use of metaphors worked when people didn't know what a computer was, and the only way to make its UI make sense was to mimic real-world objects. Now, this is no longer necessary. It's been 40 years.
While I agree that new macOS icons aren't great (see the Game Center icon), the old ones were silly. I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts. The old icon for Pages? I don't even know what that is, I'm not into calligraphy.
The only thing I'd agree with is hiding UI controls. Apple has been making its apps less usable to make them look pretty, hiding important elements in an attempt to declutter the interface. I hate how Safari hides the full address in the address bar, for instance. Or, how they removed scrollbars and force people to actually scroll every piece of the interface to check if there's something more to see, while before you could tell just by looking at scrollbars. Of course, there are settings to go back to the old behavior for both my examples, so power users are fine, but I fail to see how these moves improve things for regular users.
I also disagree that Steve Job's death was detrimental to macOS's UI. He was the one who kept Apple looking outdated with his obsession for skeuomorphism, I'm glad they went for a flatter look right after his death.
Of course, everyone's taste is different, but I still think this is a bad article.
There was a rhetoric not too long ago where OSx fanboys would make fun of Windows' interfaces for still using the disk icon as the "save" button. Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those.
Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing.
Case in point – telling a young kid how to answer a call on the iPhone: press the green banana button.
Surprising and excellent talk.
We've seen other benefits like folks have mentioned. It draws speakers out from behind the podium.
The theater we use is popular and we often didn't have the stage setup until 2AM the night before a 9AM start time. As organizers/hosts we couldn't be up that late.
Sometimes you come in and the stagehands at the venue read the notes about putting down the carpet and they decided to put two carpets instead of one. And the carpets are secured with gaffers tape. And you don't really see an issue with it so you leave it be.
shrug
Stuff happens.
Lis' talk is excellent though.
So it might make more sense to ask "to what degree are people used to this icon?" rather than "how many know where this icon came from?".
In this sense, changing established icons (like I would argue the photo app's one) doesn't seem such a good idea.
The old icon also had a photo on it though which made it clear it was the Photo's app, even if you don't know what the other thing is in the icon at all.
It's a really difficult problem. So many of the things we do today are done on a rectangle with a screen. That doesn't make a good icon. Maybe icons are obsolete altogether?
And yet, people do grow up knowing that the green banana button means "phone" and the notched rectangle means "save", and often never even question "is there a real world analog for this icon?". It isn't that icons are obsolete: it is that we are graduating from a language of pictograms to a language of ideograms, yet for some reason we have large numbers of people telling us that that is somehow a horrible thing to do.
One explicit advantage that these sorts of icons have is that they allow for a nice symmetry between Save and Open icons and upload/download icons (Glyphicon is again a good example; see glyphicon-open and glyphicon-cloud-download). This ties into another, perhaps more arguable advantage, a blurring between local and remote save actions. As applications become increasingly web-based, device-independent, and portable, it makes more sense to me to intentionally separate the "save" action from it's destination; I don't care so much where or how my data is saved, I only care that it's save and that I can get it back later.
I'd love to hear responses to my thoughts here; they sort of developed as I wrote the comment, so they're rather fresh at the moment.
1: http://bootstrapdocs.com/v3.1.0/docs/components/
I don't follow all the points in the article but I can't count the times that I overlooked photo's for example.
I don't follow all the points in the article but I can't count the times that I overlooked photo's for example.
I once read that one country decided to keep the steam train on their road signs based on such results because it makes it easier to distinguish it from other signs.
Edit: https://www.quora.com/Who-designs-the-icons-on-the-UK-road-s... claims this was indeed intentional.
Does that really matter? A perfect case in point was the old Pages icon in OS X: a quill pen in front of a cup of ink. Do you know any person who has ever used a pen like that in real life? Have you ever even seen a pen like that? I'm willing to guess not. But everyone still recognized the contents of that icon, and correctly inferred that the app was for writing things.
Furthermore, the use of ye olde imagery in that icon was playful, like the app was inviting you to an older time when writing was simpler and you could just focus on your words. The app was aiming for that kind of simplicity too. The use of way outdated imagery in the icon did not prevent Apple from conveying deep meaning to a modern audience. If anything, it enhanced the point they were trying to make with that icon.
You point out that while the quill pen was long outdated when it was first used, "everyone still recognized the contents of that icon", but that's exactly the problem that the GP and GGP are pointing out: more and more of the old skeuomorphic icons reference real world icons that younger users (and indeed some older users) actually don't recognize. Notepads, sure, we've still got those; contact books, eh, you'll see them once in a while, but tbh when I see a bare "contact book" icon without a label it occasionally takes me a second to figure out what I'm looking at; floppy disks, as has been argued to death, are entirely a thing of the past, with the exception of old systems and archives still in use in dusty university basements. Young users today essentially just know the image of a floppy disc as "the save button" without any skeuomorphic rationale backing it up.
The skeuomorphic link between computers and the physical objects we use is is constantly degrading, to the point that using skeuo icons can sometimes actually inhibit the user experience and slow the user down while they try to figure out what they're looking at. We have common patterns emerging with no or very little connection to the real world; a great example would the "hamburger" menu button. If there's any metaphor there in the user's mind, it's to the row items that will appear when you click on it, not to anything physical, yet it's perfectly comprehensible to anyone who's been using digital devices for any length of time.
Yeah, but so what? It is, nevertheless, recognizable to nearly everyone. In a world where cars still advertise their "horsepower" and pencils have graphite compound "leads" we can probably live with an icon that is well understood but whose original referent is no longer familiar.
This isn't an argument against vestigial iconography. It's not even an argument against skeuomorphism. It's a recognition that skeuomorphism increasingly fails to serve its intended purpose of conveying a meaning. Once we recognize that the old icons are dead metaphors, that we often times keep them only because of inertia and not because they have any intrinsic value, we can build momentum on the necessary work of establishing the visual language of the digital age on its own terms.
If stop signs showed the picture of the brake lever from a Ford Model T, you'd have a point.
I agree that the octagon is arbitrary. But that's beside the point, because it's self-evidently arbitrary. Nobody assumes there must be a deeper meaning behind a basic shape. The iconography of a floppy disk is not a basic shape.
Language is full of dead metaphor. Words and symbols have meaning because they have been given meaning; most of the associations might as well be arbitrary. Doesn't matter; humans are very good at recognizing these associations and deriving the intent.
The younger ones don't seem to know what one is, but the older ones do.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not sure what you think I was trying to make sound difficult. I was arguing that it's entirely possible to replace the floppy disk with an arbitrary symbol, and it's just inertia (user training and a strange sacredness afforded this one random icon) that really keeps it around. I think assosciating a distinct symbol with an action is pretty damned easy, actually. (Designing a good symbol can be hard, though.)
Of course it's possible to pick a different symbol to represent the action of saving data to permanent storage: but why bother? We have a symbol, and it's as good as any other arbitrary symbol might be. Changing it would create confusion for no benefit, since it's ultimately the association of the symbol with the action that matters, and not the history of that symbol's origin.
I guess I don't see the point; you'll just confuse people who already know what the old icon means. Our letters aren't particularly brilliantly chosen (arguably other systems are more logical or easier to learn), and yet who wants to replace them?
Importantly, the user has no reason to directly contrast the new icon to the old one. The user doesn't answer the question "Is this icon as effective as that old one?", they simply have to answer the question "Do I know how to perform the action I want to perform?", and as long as your save icon clearly communicates its meaning, there shouldn't be much/any confusion when the user tries to save. They'll look for something that seems to say "Click me to save", they'll see your icon, they'll say "Hey, that looks like it means 'Save'!", and they'll try it. (Aside: I don't say this randomly, I'm speaking from experience here; there have been plenty of applications in recent years that have tried out new "Save" icons, and I can't say I've ever had a problem figuring out how to save with any of them.)
As far as what "the point" is in changing out the icon, the point is that the entire reason for using action icons on buttons, etc. is to give the user an intuitive sense of what action will be performed when they click it, and as time goes on, the link between the floppy disk and digital storage will become weaker and weaker. And while it may be true that we could drag that symbol with us by convention, my question would be, why bother? If we can come up with something better, especially if we can find something that isn't tied to any specific technology (and I'd argue that we have), isn't this an improvement? I can't think of any advantage the old icon has over new ones other than the small advantage that it's familiar, but, as I said above, I don't think that's enough.
In other words, instead of asking "Why should we get rid of the floppy disk icon?", I honestly think the better question is, "Why not get rid of the floppy disc icon?"
So in summary, while I agree that it's sometimes fine to use an old icon if enough people understand what it means by convention, this is not a good reason to avoid using the newer, less skeuomorphic icons that the linked blog post was trying to argue against.
So what you're saying is that we should have skeuomorphism, but mostly with things we've seen in TV shows and movies, especially period ones. This would tend to make everything look like stuff from pirate/fantasy/sci-fi/superhero movies. Looking back on indy developer graphics, that does seem to be a trend.
skeumorphism <-> devoid of metaphor
flat <-> three dimensional
It makes sense for older people who remember them, who also are the folks who are more likely to have trouble understanding and interacting with computers. If your target audience was just young kids with neuroelasticity and hipsters who live this stuff, you could deploy a Brainfuck UI/UX and not only would they get it, they'd love it.
Actually a problem with this icon is that it is misleading. The iPhoto app is not a camera app. It is a photo library with some minor editing capabilities. You can't use it for creating photos which is what the icon suggests.
A better icon would be a photo album or a stack of photos but that's hard to fit in an icon.
The Photos icon "metaphor" doesn't work for me, for example
- Chrome is a brand, and people have been educated to expect that from it (same with Ps and Ai - "everybody" knows what's that)
- Photos is an utility, it does not exist outside of Mac OS X. Like the fuel icon in a car gauge, it is supposed to be discoverable
I disagree strongly. It is now more needed than ever. 40 years ago, the majority of people using computers knew what they were doing. Now, they're everywhere, and people interact with them every day. It's very common to have to interact with a computer we have never interacted with before, and the need to give visual clues to the user is far more important than ever before. It's also very common now for people to simply reach out and grab new software; a well-designed interface that uses visual clues and cues to help people achieve their goals is much more important now than the days when people would actually sit down with the manual to work out how to operate their new piece of software.
I am routinely unable to immediately answer a phone that isn't mine because none of the pictures drawn on the screen are obviously about answering a phone.
You think that 10 and 20 year olds growing up with computers and even smartphones available for all of their life, know less of computers than people in the past?
Even a 7 year old that plays games can almost run circles around a 1980s propellerhead computer programmer in using a GUI. Compared to regular people (e.g. office workers) from 40 years ago that just used DOS and some word processor or POS or accounting program, there's just no comparison.
Most of them don't know a thing about computers. It's a magic box with a small selection of shiny buttons on. They use it for passive media consumption.
Even a 7 year old that plays games can almost run circles around a 1980s propellerhead computer programmer in using a GUI.
Well, they clearly forget by the time they're twenty.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/10/millennials-arent-as-tech-sav...
http://www.millennialmarketing.com/2010/04/millennials-tech-...
You'd be surprised.
Except by "know about computers" you mean they known about interrupts, and cache lines, and filesystem design, and other stuff that are completely inconsequential to using their computers.
>Well, they clearly forget by the time they're twenty.
Actually the linked article states the opposite:
>"This current generation of young people has never lived without tech," said Linda Rosen, CEO of Change the Equation. "It's second nature to them." Yet, using technology for social reasons doesn't make a person adept at using it in other settings, she said.
So it's not that they "forgot" something, it's that they never bothered to learn it in the first place, e.g. Excel or whatever. But computers, for what they do like to use them for, are "second nature" to them according to TFA.
I disagree. The catalogue of complaints listed in this article are the norm.
http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
It seems that this happened somewhat recently.
Suffice it to say - just like you felt when you were younger - most thoughts that boil down to "damn kids these days!" are almost certainly not true.
Of course it's silly because of the global productivity gains. And it may just be my innate misanthropy which made me a nerd when I was younger now manifesting in this new form.
I'm already an old man annoyed by people my age and annoyed by older people. But truth is, I'm annoyed by most non technical people.
PS: I like discussing technics with people from non tech fields though, luthiers, masons, cooks etc...
The difference is of course that today computers are used by more of the general public for communication, office, and media consumption, rather than (only) bunch of tech savvy specialists.
Most of my generation and the generation that followed barely have a concept of a computer beyond "press the thing to make things happen". They know no more about their telephones now than did the people using the landlines of 20 years ago, or how much most people understood the internals of TV or radio or fridges.
As for running circles around people while using a GUI, while I accept there are specialized fields and exceptions that disprove the rule, outside of marketing presentations I just don't see it happen. As much as any generalisation can be valid, the GUI does not run circles around anyone that can actually program and is generally the mark of the computer novice/consumer...
I wonder. Every time I see a colleague using command line to do git operations I get itchy and think to myself "oh, come on! I could've done this in gui in seconds". Each interface has its time and place, but to me using a GUI is more of a mark of valuing one's time than that of a novice.
Need to pull some new code though, or commit changes? I think "git pull" or "git ci -m 'Message'" is faster than opening up a complicated GUI window with lots of decisions to make.
To me, using CLI is like having a conversation, with much richer vocabulary, than GUI. That's just pointing at things.
I think your conversation metaphor is good, but in a GUI the answer can be richer and interactive. A CLI can only manipulate text, a GUI can manipulate text where necessary and use a better medium (images, graphs, tables) where necessary.
CLI does not need to manipulate text only necessarily, see the command line in AutoCAD for example.
But yes, GUI in many cases is a better way, I wouldn't want to have cli-only Photoshop-like app (or even cli-only CAD modeller). The point is to recognize effectivity of both approaches for a given problem, at the given abstraction level.
There would be no point in micromanaging the car using a limited vocabulary.
Sometimes it is better to mass delete files with a find, grep and rm, sometimes an auto-filtered search and cmd+a cmd+delete is better.
What operation could you possibly perform significantly faster in a gui than on the command line? I can think of tons that would be far, far slower in a gui.
> to me using a GUI is more of a mark of valuing one's time than that of a novice
I would argue the exact opposite. GUIs are there to make things accessible to non-power users. A command line is just infinitely more expressive and will let you be much more efficient if you learn to use it effectively.
With nearly every program that I use I start by depending heavily on the GUI and then transition to using almost exclusively keyboard shortcuts as I become a power user, as GUIs are fundamentally inefficient.
Sticking to the Git example: - visualising history (in gui it is just there) - opening old versions of files - visualising a complete log of a file and then jumping to individual diffs/commits
The fact that in a decent GUI everything that could possibly be a link is, is very useful. I do not ned to go around copy pasting SHA1 sums. I drop down to command line when I need an occasional filter-branch or do some arcane incantations. But maybe Git is a bad example because it has a notoriously bad CLI.
Some other example, debugging. For me it seems that you can actually see whether a programmer uses a visual debugger or a cli. If they have to drop down to GDB then their code will most probably be sprinkled with useless debug macros.
Setting break points, jumping from function to function is easier with visual debugger and a good IDE. (note that the IDE can be emacs or vim running in a terminal session for what I care)
> With nearly every program that I use I start by depending heavily on the GUI and then transition to using almost exclusively keyboard shortcuts as I become a power user, as GUIs are fundamentally inefficient.
Keyboard shortcuts are awesome of course, but I think they are so efficient because there is a GUI around. In a GUI you can always see more state at the same time. This is because graphics can sometimes pack more than text in the same space (e.g.: a visualised Git tree or a graph spitted out from callgrind)
A lot of the CLI usage feels fast because its busywork.
That is patently false. There are hard core GUI users, from VFX and 3D artists to DAW and NLE operators, graphic designers and many more, than run circles around any "command line" person for the tasks they actually do.
Just as there are tons of programmers using Visual Studio and other GUI platforms, than can program far more efficiently with the intelligent autocomplete, integrated debuggers, profilers, and such, than some CLI-jockeys who think they are more efficient with their pimped Emacs or Vim.
Is Rob Pike and his GUI editor/environment a "novice/consumer"? What about tons of excellent Windows programmers? What about Notch?
Yes. Aptitude with screwing around with a GUI isn't very relevant.
40 years ago, computers were at best used by clerk type people for specific tasks at a terminal. Accountants were using tabulation machines, written materials were on IBM selectrics.
The people engaged in professional work with computers were mostly programmers or others doing "data processes" or working with business analyst types to model business process around workloads that could live with the available computing resources.
It is relevant to actual stuff they want done.
Unless they are programmers aptitude in screwing around with cli commands isn't very relevant.
I disagree strongly. If you were new to a machine, is there anything in the new Photos icon that tells you that it anything to do with images, photos or image manipulation? No.
The new icon for Pages is fine by the way,
Yes, it says "Photos" below it
I'm far faster at picking text labels from a list than picking the icons. I see the text label as an icon.
The text "icon" is simple and unchanging. I can pick it out much faster than funny pictograms that change with each OS version.
Tell that to my muscle memory that types ⌘A > iP for iPhoto and ⌘A > iCal for iCalendar.
Going back to the original article, it doesn't really matter what the icon looks like, as long as it's unique. You're not looking at each icon and asking yourself "is this a camera?" to get to the Photos app. You know it's a circular array of colors, and your finger goes there.
Really? Because when I used an iPhone, I most definitely didn't know where most of my apps' icons were. I knew most of them on the first screen and the rest of the screens were a mix of random stuff.
Back in 'teh day' when my icons were all cutesy skeuomorphs, my computer came with maybe a dozen apps and most of them were on my desktop. Now, I have over a hundred sitting in my global Apps folder alone - never mind user Apps, sub folders, etc.
This gets compounded even more on phones - on my iPhone, I've accidentally placed 1Password next to the Settings app - both have a grey background with a circular center. Settings' center is grey gears, 1Passwords is a blue ring with a keyhole. On examination, they're not similar at all, but I can't even begin to tell you how many times I clicked on when, meaning to click the other - even _knowing_ the differences and kicking myself each time.
I think a lot of what the designers are trying to do is create an icon that stands out visually, and is easily found from amongst a large set of other icons, rather than trying to impress upon us what its functionality is from a metaphor.
But what has actually happened is a mess of inconsistent designs. Older apps still use skeuomorphism. Newer apps copy the flat look.
Skeuomorphism implemented a design principle - discoverability. You could argue with the choices made for specific icons, but there was a consistent goal - to make the OS as usable as possible.
The flat look is an anti-pattern - fashion over discoverability. The point seems to be to allow Sir Jony to impress everyone with his aesthetic skillz. User experience has become secondary to internal politics.
That's a huge problem for a company like Apple, because it'a fundamental shift in focus.
And there have been obvious effects. Watch isn't doing brilliantly, precisely because the user experience is nothing special. iOS is creaking under the weight of new features apparently added with no overall strategy, many of which remain invisible to users because the literally never find them.
MacOS is going the same way. Some of the new features are certainly welcome. But the Apple UX generally is suffering badly - from bugs, from questionable design choices, from popular products like Logic and FCP that have been cut down, then more or less abandoned.
There's no one in charge to obsessively fine tune the conflicting needs of product momentum, reliability, UX, and aesthetics.
Jobs was very good at that. Cook doesn't even seem to realise there's an issue.
Icon can help later in quickly locating this program, but I do not really care what it is. Does firefox, chrome icon or internet explorer show you that it will display websites? Internet explorer icon became "Internet" icon for a lot non technical users I think.
Looking at my desk and my habits there are actually very few objects that I use for work most of it happens on screen. All in all, I think good icon design will become harder.
Who are these supposed people who are buying Macs but have never seen a camera? This set of people must be miniscule if not empty.
Cameras are still in use, even if most people have replaced them with smartphones. Walk around any city and you'll see gobs of people taking selfies on their phones, but you'll also see a decent number of people carrying dedicated cameras.
Now the question is: should the icons represent something "iconic" or something that most people use?
I don't know what you mean by "iconic". If you mean "abstract and without independently-identifiable meaning", then I think in general, no. Icons should be immediately identifiable when possible. The overlapping rainbow paint chips that make up the current photos icon seems utterly meaningless. The camera was meaningful. A stack of photos would be meaningful. An abstracted "photo" like Windows 10 uses (and like Google uses in the sidebar of their online photos app) would be meaningful.
For the record, I think Android/Google's photos icon is also utterly meaningless to most people. I think it's supposed to represent a camera aperture (same as Apple's icon?), but most people probably don't know what a mechanical aperture is.
For example, in the current world maybe 10% of the people are taking pictures with actual cameras but we still represent the camera as a "box with a huge lens". Few people use land lines but the phone icon is still a banana. To send and e-mail in general we use an envelope but we send way more electronic messages than snail mail.
So you either use something "iconic", or every icon is just a small screenshot, or I guess you make something up that is meaningless.
Someone that, right now, actually honestly has no idea what a camera looks like.
EX: http://www.buttonsoundbook.com/site/595626/product/ISBN%200-... (Recommended for ages 3 years and older.)
Also, young people don't live in some sort of post-technical isolation. When they go to school, they will probably see the photography students walking around with cameras. And kids still burn music CD's for each other. Because it's cute and sentimental, and it feels a lot better than texting someone a link to a playlist.
The rest of the aticle's arguments seem like personal, subjective distaste for flat/minimal design and a yearning for the good ol' days of skeumorphism.
You have no idea how much this change makes the URL field palatable for regular Joe. Previously: hhtpttpp://faceblablah.com/techmumbo/jumbo?not=h4ck3r. Now: <lock icon>facebooook.com.ru => "wow this really is not Facebook!". I basically witnessed such behaviour change first hand.
> Or, how they removed scrollbars and force people to actually scroll every piece of the interface to check if there's something more to see, while before you could tell just by looking at scrollbars.
No need to scroll, you can check just by resting fingers on the touchpad (except in Chrome) and look at the scrollbars.
Never knew this, really handy, thanks! Any idea if it is possible on a magic mouse? or only the trackpads?
Anyone who does that is uneducated and ignorant; the proper response to that is to educate, not to remove the ability of those who are educated to do other things.
Well, yes — they should. Would you rather communicate with speech or by pointing and grunting?
We do need better languages for conversing with our computers, but we can't get rid of the need for language.
Hang on to your hat, because every other browser has been playing with the exact same feature, for the exact same set of reasons.
It should be obvious by just looking how social engineering is working and have been using the same tricks for literally thousands of years. Classic children literature, before modernisation (like Disney), gives you a good idea on the same lessons needed to be taught then.
As a software developer, only one of those things are in your power.
My first computer had a text display and a manual, in 1983. I had no trouble teaching my college house mates how to use it for word-processing.
Everything else that I did with the computer involved text symbols such as GOTO. ;-)
Today, when I use most software, beyond a few familiar icons like the floppy disc symbol, I have to hover the cursor over each icon to figure out what it does. When I learn keyboard shortcuts for those icons, I use them, to reduce eyestrain and wrist fatigue. A great feature would be a single button that reveals all of the icon descriptors at once.
There's an option to show the full URL under Preferences -> Advanced -> Show full web address
This can be changed on MacOS from Safari -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Show full website address.
I really don't see why visual languages should not evolve along similar patterns. Visual communication would hardly get easier if we switched the existing symbols over to black, rectangular screens for all the tasks that have recently been consolidated in the smartphone as a single, multifunctional tool.
Design language is still distributed, but not nearly to the same degree. If Apple decides that an old skeuomorphic logo is ambiguous, or not understood by younger user, or some other compliant like that they can change it and the new one will enter the design vocabulary very quickly.
Often these are helpful. A little logo with just a person is _much_ clearer to me than a contact book. Over time it would be best to shed all the strange associations with real world objects in favor of a design language that actually describes what the software does, instead of making a poor analogy to a real world object.
er, what? i'm 32. i and everyone i knew used contact books until i was probably age 20, especially in offices.
Even 'digital natives' live in the physical world. We start learning how it works before we ever touch a computer, and even the most dedicated nerd spends more time interacting with physical objects than with digital interfaces. It doesn't take additional learning to know that an object casting a shadow on another is in front of that other, for example. Failing to leverage that existing knowledge is tantamount to shutting down whole swathes of users' brains.
Read more: http://blog.tobiasandtobias.com/post/37179466962/in-defense-...
This just seems weird to me. Contacts books were replaced in a very limited way by PDAs for early adopters, but it wasn't until smartphones and their easy address books that they really started to die off. So post-2008, really.
Were you not in professional settings until your late 20s? Still be surprised if you are both 35 and genuinely unaware of what an address book is.
In the 90s I knew people who'd set their browser homepage to a 'quick reference info' page on their server which included frequently needed numbers.
The only tech savvy people I've known to use contact books in the last twenty years seemed a bit eccentric to me.
I had a contacts section in my DayTimer back in the 90s, but I've used a contacts program ever since I switched to using a computer-based calendar.
Enter the smartphone.
The smartphone does everything. It makes calls, takes pictures, receives messages, tells time, shows TV shows (we'll have to stop calling them TV shows, won't we?), etc. Since icons resemble the tools used to carry out given tasks, what are we to do when one tool does all tasks?
That's the problem for skeuomorphism. What are we to do for icons when one tool does everything? Create icons depicting people doing those different things, a bit like emoji? A selfie icon for the camera, a person talking on the phone for voice functions, a message bubbles icon that mimics message interfaces for messages?
I don't know. I guess a language to replace the skeuomorphism language will emerge.
These historically grown metaphors make lot of sense, where it comes to how we relate to objects. The word "camera" isn't only short and distinctive, it's also evoking a sense of the history of the medium, and it may provide some emotional bonding to the object which may hardly be achieved by a "multi-image" – while the latter may actually sound a bit fancier in a 1970s SF-movie. I think, there are some valid points made by the article, and, besides, on an empirical level, I'm losing time in the newer, uniformed MacOS GUIs, too. (Not to speak of Miller's magical number 7 or 3.7 bits working memory, which are still valid in the age of flat design. But this is an other story.)
I'm glad they removed all the silly shadows, 3d effects and animations and defined more strict UI guidelines.
I don't need my OS to look like a Christmas tree.
The puzzle background goes contrarian to the text label and makes my eyes/mind jump while trying to read the labels.
The first button makes me think of Wikipedia, the second one of Facebook. It's precisely that kind of cognitive dissonance where you read "blue" written in red and get asked to say the color or the word.
The last button has embossed text for some reason, possibly in an attempt to make it readable in face of the noisy background, but in turn it makes it stand apart from the other buttons.
The whole theme of the design reminds me precisely of the design language of Mac OS X from its origins to Leopard. It's not bad per se, but people don't need as much no-so-subtle hints as before in the UI, which get perceived as distracting noise. It's not zeitgeist anymore.
I count at least 2 unnecessary textures, 4(or 5?) different fonts and a color palette that makes no sense to me.
I know some people are enraged about how many "generic 3-column flat UI" websites there are, but give me one of those any time instead of something that can't make a decision over what unnecessary decorations to use around a button that's already cluttered with a background texture and 3d effect.
Usability is great and all, but if your products dont sell because they're perceived as unfashionable it's not that good...
I recently had to use a computer with OS X Mavericks on it (10.9 I think). I was struck by how beautiful the interface was. I'm having trouble finding a good screenshot illustrating this, but compare
http://content.gcflearnfree.org/topics/243/2013_new_desktop....
http://download.softwsp.com/sites/12/2015/11/os-x-el-capitan...
Everything just looks better on Mavericks. The gradients may be over-the-top but they're at least consistent. Transparency on El Capitan is pointless and ugly. Maybe I like the system font a little better.
Firefox is also a really good example; it looked great on Mavericks but has not been able to fit in since.
Usually, I prefer simple UIs: i3, terminals, etc.. But the look they have done for Yosemite/El Capitan just doesn't work.
It looks out of place on El Capitan and on macOS Sierra it's downright disturbing. I don't want tab titles in Times New Roman (at least it reminds me of that).
Really? The tab titles on my firefox are very clearly a sans-serif font, and don't look at all out of place.
Worst part of the article by far was
> OS X packaging, once very elegant and eccentric (and printed on a physical box), has become thoroughly unremarkable.
This is 2016, no one uses CD's anymore. And that leopard print box design looks like packaging for some kinky underwear.
The author must be 90 years old.
Haha, exactly my thoughts :)
It's funny witnessing how certain people that a couple years ago considered Apple designs the pinnacle of design and far ahead of everything else using the same arguments today that Windows fans used.
The cycle is really tired, and their wild claims have worn out their novelty to non-Apple people.
You mean, just a few months before the next model is announced? Who would have thought...
Really frustrating for me are the changes in Spotlight launcher. It used to be instantaneous search and launch. Now it is painfully slow in all my computers.