Agreed and upvoted. It's been long enough since the previous discussions, and articles like this have repost value in my eyes, since they can generate a good discussion of the content in light of the current state of things.
What an absurd and tiresome article. IOS is significantly easier and more intuitive than any PC ever was, including the Mac. Most gestures are so intuitive you don’t even realise they are gestures, 2-year olds scroll and zoom without being told how. The only people who could possibly find iOS unintuitive are those whose minds have hardened in a PC shaped mold.
What an absurd and tiresome comment (actually though). Just because he has a different opinion than you doesn’t mean that opinion is biased. Perhaps he likes apple because he finds their interfaces intuitive, as opposed to saying their intuitive only because he likes apple. IMO, comments like yours have no place on hacker news.
Two year olds are certainly taught to scroll. Its not a natural human gesture. In fact, what they're actually taught is to just try scrolling everything to see what happens because there's no way to know. This is why you see kids trying to scroll on televisions now.
I definitely didn’t teach my children to use iphones or ipads, I didn’t even allow them to use them. And I’m pretty sure nobody else taught them, but they are happily swiping and scrolling and zooming and rearranging icons.
I mean come on, what could possibly be more intuitive than dragging a photo or screen to the right when you want it to move to the right? Barring mind-controlled computers, I think this is as intuitive as it could possibly get.
Keep in mind also that mouse controlled computers introduce a whole level of indirection.
3D Touch is an optional feature. You can use an iOS device without 3D Touch (I do, for example, because I do not personally own a device with this feature).
Right-click would be equivalent to long-press on iOS. But don’t long-press too hard or you’ll get 3D Touch. Or maybe you do want 3D Touch, so you press hard. Surprise! Your iPad doesn’t support 3D Touch; you were thinking of your phone. Does this particular app even support 3D Touch? Only one way to find out!
Inconsistent and not discoverable, which isn’t anything like a right mouse button at all.
3D Touch is like if pressing the right mouse button a little harder than usual opened a second, completely different context menu. But only sometimes; in some programs, it would just open the regular context menu, leaving you to wonder if you pressed hard enough.
FWIW I know about it, am not old or unhealthy enough to have fine motor control problems, and can't use it effectively. I have to disable it to get press-and-hold to do what I'm used to it doing, reliably, without requiring several attempts.
Ditto the similar force-press thing on the newer Macbook touchpads—my file drag-and-drop operations drop to a success rate of about 50% with that enabled. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong with my new laptop first time I used one, because I'd forgotten about that "feature".
There's a physical button on the mouse to aid discovery, which gives you tactile and audible feedback that it has been actuated, and whose method of action can be discovered by observation of others (you don't have multiple identical-seeming actions which produce distinct results).
You can right click almost anywhere and get some feedback. Almost every element has some context menu. That's not the case for 3D touch. You just have to know in advance where it works, experimenting won't work.
Also I agree that mouse has tactile feedback. Even if I wanted to experiment with 3D Touch, I can never know whether there's nothing 3D-touchy under my finger or I just did not apply enough pressure.
IMO they should have some standard UI idiom for 3D-touch enabled regions and they should have negative feedback (like some vibration) when user pressed 3D-touch on unsupported region. But in its current iteration 3D touch is almost user-hostile. I can't imagine why Apple released it without better polish.
>IOS is significantly easier and more intuitive than any PC ever was, including the Mac.
How so?
One of the key points of the article is that the the perceived intuitiveness, especially among expert users, doesn't extend to people unfamiliar with the interface. I have seen my own folks struggle with iOS, especially recovering from accidental taps as the article mentions. My mom hits the home button on her iphone whenever she hits the wrong UI button. On her laptop, that happens much more rarely. I forgot who said this first, but I firmly believe that software developers should personally watch non-expert users interact with their UI before shipping.
Your point about toddlers being able to scroll and zoom, applies to most things kids do. They can pickup a remote and turn the TV off, or unlock doors, play handheld video games, etc, etc.
It sure is personal. But is it a personal computer?
I knew IOS was nothing for me when I couldn’t access a file system, there was no way to switch between open applications and the backups were not backups of my photos, but some special format only meant to be played back onto another iphone.
Things might have changed since, but the iphone I had never felt as if it belonged to me, it felt as if I belonged to the phone.
I think it was true in the very, very early days of the iPhone, where the only way to switch apps was to go home then tap on the app you wanted, internally it was switching between suspended apps, but to the user it felt like you were closing and opening a new app each time.
Tell that to people who have to use a iPad for doing office work. I just switched jobs on April 1 and I want to throw this hunk of hot garbage away. Mouse and Keyboard are so much better for doing most things. iOS will be much friendlier to mouse and keyboard as more people are given iPads.
They chose a "computer" just like the ad told them. It all reminds me of the ST:TNG episode where a space faring alien doesn't know how his technology works.
I use my ipad for all work in my startup that does not require xcode, i much prefer it. The only thing except programming that I feel is worse on the ipad is Keynote, but I am not sure it has to be, it should be possible to make it as nice as the mac version.
I agree. I think there are plenty of valid things to critique Apple for with regards to design (e.g. their odd fetish for thinness at all costs: battery life, a functional keyboard, and resistance to bending be damned), but picking on iOS usability vs. a PC is a bizarre choice.
Usabilty depends on the problem you are trying to solve. If you wanna browse websites and do basic things IOS is easy. If you wanna backup your photos to a windows machine, things start to get hairy. If you want to do anything professional it takes a special kind of dedication to stay with IOS.
You need to look at iOS as a full solution. Of course it is not good at backing up to windows because there’s no need for that, all your photos are backed up to iCloud.
Sure, but then your mother comes with this picture print software she has on your computer and asks you to transfer the pics from her phone.
Stuff like this should be simple. On android it is connecting the cable and copying the pics. The only reason you are not able to do this is, that Apple values lock-in over good design. And I do not trust a company with these values to store my pictures indefinitly, sorry.
We were talking about lock in. And my argument was that making it harder to get your pictures onto another device without using another apple service is a form of lock in. It is a computer you should be able to connect it via USB and drag files over.
The whole point about ios is that it’s a new paradigm. They don’t make it harder to lock you in, you just don’t need to do that anymore. If you insist on using an ipad as an old fashioned pc, well yes then it will appear inconvenient. But that is like complaining that there’s no disk defragger or command line.
I’ve heard user experience designers pushing for UI so simple that the least experienced human can use it, but making ape-friendliness the standard seems to be taking intuitive design a step too far.
My father changed to android after using ios for 6 generations of iphones. He is very bad with computers. After a week he told me: “Why didn’t you tell me I should use Android? This is so much better, it allows me to do the things I want!”
Design is always about solving problems. Toddlers wiping screens is the equivalent of toddlers smearing paint. They explore, they don’t solve problems.
IOS might be the better thing for a certain class of problems, but for other classes of problems it can become a burden very quickly, even to undemanding people like my father.
Truly good design would grow with the user and give each person the level of control they need. OSX works much better in these regards IMO.
This was two years ago, so I cant recall precisely, but I remember he liked the contacts app more on android and he liked how switching running apps worked.
Let me give you an example of where I think iOS is significantly worse than even the earliest graphical operating systems from Apple: Multitasking.
The number one way I would want to use my iPad daily is to have it in portrait mode with a book or video on the top half and my note book on the bottom. This cannot be done. The only way to split the screen is side by side (which I have never found useful for anything), and only for a couple of predefined widths. Further, I had to go online to find out how any of that worked since it was completely undiscoverable for me. Even further, when switching between apps, they regularly lose state (e.g., Apple's Notes jumps to the top of the document so I have to scroll all the way down to continue).
These issues make multitasking on iPad a completely frustrating experience for me. While all of these things were worked out in the very first multitasking graphical user interfaces, where multiple windows would just open and I could move and resize them at will.
This[0] is one of my favorite websites ever. It’s by Apple’s first HCI engineer (long before such a title existed). He has some great articles on HCI as well as a bunch of critiques of Apple’s missteps after he left.
I find I agree with pretty much everything he says.
Honest question: why do so many design/HCI/typography experts have unreadable/unusable websites of their own? I don't doubt what you're saying, but damn.
> Honest question: why do so many design/HCI/typography experts have unreadable/unusable websites of their own?
Because they are not only aware of what is ideal, they are aware of the effort-payoff balance involved in doing it right.
The ones that have a secure brand and are sharing knowledge for free (as opposed to the ones using their website to build/establish a personal brand) don't have a lot of incentive to invest heavily.
...except it actually took effort to make it that bad. Plain HTML without any styling whatsoever would be more readable. Someone _thought this was an improvement_.
> ...except it actually took effort to make it that bad. Plain HTML without any styling whatsoever would be more readable
Handcoding HTML is a lot more effort than picking up one of the many canned tools that you configure some settings and throw text at and it produces a blog.
Just like how some open source projects object to improving the look and feel of their software as it would be ‘dumbing it down’, UX designers, especially those from an HCI background somehow feel that making their stuff look good also makes it less functional.
Forgetting that properly good design is both usable and also doesn’t look like a dog’s dinner.
It's Instagram but it's Apple's user interaction design [1].
>and works the same on any phone.
Well yes, that's what Jobs' "thermonuclear war" was about. In fact Google is still at it with Android Q. They've given up and just aped the iPhone X gestures [2]. Apple might be mad about it but they shouldn't be because it just makes switching from Android to iOS easier.
I once visited Google’s Mountain View campus. When I pulled out my Android phone, the employee showing me around suppressed incredulous laughter and told me that everyone there uses an iPhone.
Yes, instagram’s swipe back is much better than apple’s.
Though in fairness, I do think the iphone is pretty intuitive. My parents picked it up quite well (mac too).
However, there are a variety of mid-tier functions that are not very discoverable. Not pro features, even simple stuff like screenshots and certain sharing options.
This article is correct, but this the points it brings up about discoverability are somewhat misrepresented. iPhones usually make it easy to do simple things and hard to complicated ones. That’s why you can see tech illiterate people being able to use iPhone so well: they just tap on things and scroll, and it usually works. But these people have no need or can get by without accelerators or advanced features, so iOS chooses to hide them. I’m not sure if this is the ideal design, but it does allow for visually pretty products that work a lot of the time. Note that Apple has recently started moving away from the iOS 7 design of “minimalism is the best”, so some of the things mentioned in the article are not relevant anymore or significantly less of an issue.
Also,
> The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?
I have never seen this be an issue? On macOS, you scroll with two fingers because you have a cursor, and on iOS you use one. Since Magic Mouse has an alternate way of moving the cursor, you can actually use both methods.
The person replying to you agrees and was just adding an interesting and relevant quote to the discussion. Not every post on the internet is an argument.
No, he’s saying Apple makes hard things possible to do. The person he’s replying to is saying Apple makes things impossible to do. They are in complete disagreement. The person he’s replying to also isn’t “just” adding an interesting and relevant quote, he’s adding commentary after the quote which invalidates the quote in the context of Apple. The quote is also unnecessary to introduce to the discussion because it’s paraphrasing what the person you’re replying to already said. Everything I just typed should have been obvious and intuitively understood by you and the fact that anyone had to articulate it for you is horrifying. Your entire first sentence is a lie and your post is an idiotic exercise in trying to chastise someone for something they never did. I pray you never gain a position of power over other people.
> “Indeed, in Apple’s latest release of its mobile Operating System, iOS 9, a number of the issues we have discussed have been addressed.”
This is a strange line to find 90% into the article. It seems like a lead in rather than a late acknowledgement. iOS struggled to find its way back to usability after rejecting “skeuomorphic design” in favor of flat design (see the drop in emphasis on metaphors), but it’s doing better now.
> Discoverability
This does continue to be an issue. However, the subtle bars that indicate the availability of the swipe up from the bottom and swipe down from the top right are helping.
> Undo
This is a huge design flaw. I finally enabled shake-to-undo because I’ve started doing more work on iOS and needed undo, but I feel foolish shaking my phone. Photoshop introduced the history palette years ago and that’s a fantastic approach to undo/redo. Now the feature is common on desktop apps. iOS badly needs a “time machine” control as a universal access to undo/redo. The rewind/fast forward 2-finger gesture introduced in the Paper by 53 was a nice solution, but not widely implemented. An icon would be better.
> Feedback
The most satisfying feedback on iOS is the click vibration when the flashlight or camera app snap open after a long press on the lock screen.
iOS badly needs a “time machine” control as a universal access to undo/redo.
It's not like they don't know, they shipped watch complications with a time machine control, and of course OS X has time machine baked into its backup UX.
On iPad, the keyboard has a Undo/Redo buttons. Given the increased screen space reserved for the keyboard on the iPhone X/XS/XR I’m surprised Apple uses it for an emoji shortcut key and dictation button (and a lot of empty space) instead of Undo/Redo.
While it exists, this feature isn’t exactly discoverable when you need it most. Who would think of going to the menu for inputting a number or symbol when they want to undo deleting a chunk of text?
I do notice that on iPad, though it seems inconsistent & I’d forgotten about it.
I also wish the X line of phones had the two-finger touch keyboard cursor control... It seems like iPad is innovating (maybe because the potential universe of pissed off users is less) & hopefully we’ll see some of those updates on iPhone in the future.
Lucida Grande looked great on displays for which it was designed (non-Retina) but looked a bit naff and oddly-proportioned on Retina displays. Not unreadable by any means, but the features baked into the font to aid readability on non-Retina displays simply no longer applied once the majority of Apple's products had moved to Retina displays.
I agree that San Francisco looks more visually pleasing on Retina displays, but I still find Lucida Grande easier to read. Particularly via peripheral vision, which matters in a UI.
My father used to hold the home button to start siri. Siri then says "hello" so my father politely says hello back. On hearing this siri turns itself off so it never hears his question and he stands there wondering why it works for other people but never him.
I think for most people this kind of empathy is a skill that can be learned and improved. It is very easy to forget the assumptions you make everyday. Very carefully studying how e.g. your parents use things or remembering how foreign certain parts of a computer felt to you the first times you used them are valuable excercises.
This is a bit like writing novels with main figures that are very much unlike yourself: if you want to paint a convincing picture, you will have to research and figure out how people do things. And if you go deeper you need to understand where their ideas come from.
It is quite sad, that many people in the tech world have a very one-dimensional collection of possible user characters. In the worst case they divide the world into people that are like them and idiots who have no idea.
The only thing worse than this is not thinking about design at all.
Especially for a company like Apple, I think it should be less about having empathy and more about having the resources to gather bug reports and track them down.
Large beta pools and other feedback mechanisms could credibly get reports like "Siri doesn't work for me" to come in. Then you have to have people to trace those down. Really? It works for me? What are the recent queries on this account? Ohhh, he's just saying hello back, then the exchange ends and Siri misses his question. How many other people have this pattern? Can we get a fix so, if the user replies with a greeting the conversation stays open?
Having people getting and tracking down reports from customers will cause your organization to develop something that's a lot like empathy. You'll learn what customers have problems with and fix them.
Ofc this depends on the size of the project. But you have testers who will need to figure things out. It is not very creative to say “Hallo” to a thing that says “Hallo” to you, people do it every day. This is something that should work from day 1 and could have been avoided by one person testing it with their un-techy dad in mind.
And this as you said depends on the organization, but if your product speaks to people and it doesn’t know that greeting back isn’t necesarilly the end of the conversation, you skipped conversation 101
> It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible...
People harp on this, but what changed is that phone screens are tiny. It's just not possible to show all commands and still show content. Also, people forget that "gestures" like the double-click were not intuitive at all and that Macs came with manuals which had to teach the basic concepts of computing (double-clicking, folders, windows, etc.). While young children seem to use iPads rather intuitively (and they don't come with manuals).
> clearly see how to select that action...
Tapping is just as intuitive as clicking... and select-tap for a context menu is no worse than click-and-hold for a drop-down menu, or right-click for a context menu.
> receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action...
I see no evidence this is any worse on phones. To the contrary, iOS brought a whole new world of animated feedback that makes feedback even clearer spatially (e.g. an app or folder expanding).
> and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.
In the most advanced applications, yes. But "undo" was never a universal concept on the desktop -- it was mostly limited to text editing and actions in Office-type applications. E.g. in System 7 you couldn't undo creating a folder or moving a file or an operation in the calculator, you've never been able to undo setting a preference or resizing a window, and you certainly couldn't undo overwriting a file until Time Machine and file versions came along more recently. (And on iOS, things like drawing and text editing apps usually do have undo, same as on desktop.)
I would argue things haven't gotten any worse, because they were never that idyllic to begin with, and that most of what does seem worse is forced by smaller screens, not by suddenly ignoring principles.
(edit: changed "tap-and-hold" above to "select-tap" which I meant to write, e.g. when bringing up the copy/paste menu for text)
I suspect it was related to the loss of Scott Forestall. It’s notable that “metaphor” dropped from the top iOS design principle to near the bottom. And the backlash against “skeuomorphic design” was a popular narrative in the tech press around the time of these changes.
I'd argue that the gesture interface used in newer iOS devices is proof that modern Apple is fully capable of employing metaphors to make interfaces more intuitive.
Which was a huge change and some hiccups were expected. From a quick scroll through all the complaints in that page have been fixed for quite a while already.
I agree with 99% of what you're saying, except that "tap-and-hold is no worse than right-click for a context menu" -- I can't disagree more, because right-clicking with a mouse cursor has both a precision that touch lacks without careful UI to indicate what I'm touching so I have visual feedback to make my touch more precise and an instantaneous response that by definition cannot be matched by a gesture which requires waiting a set amount of time. To that end, the gesture tap-and-hold works best when right-clicking in a text box as you've a "loupe" or magnifying glass that appears with a cursor to let you know where your finger is, and once you're moving the cursor, to wait and release before seeing a list of actions you can perform at that spot is relatively natural.
However, you've now made a gesture that was instantaneous with a hardware button require a LOT of UI to overcome the limitations of the smooth plane of glass input mechanism.
I'd agree that moving a mouse requires learning that when moved, a cursor appears, and you then have to learn what the buttons do, and generally that the right-click button isn't what you want. So I'm not going to say that a touch UI is easier or harder to learn, as both technically require experimentation or explanation since neither uses on-screen UI to indicate an area can be right-clicked. Users have learned to select, and to right-click, within text fields, which is why that pattern carries over well enough on iOS.
So how would I fix this on iOS? Well, I'd start by continuing to enhance drag-and-drop. Why can't I perform a gesture or click a button to reveal recent clipboard text, then drag the text where I want it? Kind of like how a recent screenshot appears on the screen briefly, it'd be nice if the same were available for text. The biggest difference -- and biggest advantage -- to the touch screen UI is how the entire screen can become whatever control you need at the cost of precision (or screen space to make up for it), while a monitor is an entirely passive experience, where the tools you interact with are literally separate from the screen and so are always available for instant use. Frankly the most interesting times will be when we've the best of both worlds -- when your laptop's lower half is replaced with touch screens that mimic mice and keyboards with haptic feedback and are meant for interaction attached to touch screen displays. That's when we'll be able to get the benefits of both worlds, old and new, as it makes sense to do so.
Another thought -- it's not that touch screens can't do instant right-click, as two-finger tap works that way today on touch-pads, but that on a touch screen two finger tap is ambiguous, you need a cursor to increase its precision. To that end, if the loupe/cursor is visible, I could imagine a power-user interface would be one which either shows the actions before you have to wait, or lets you tap after dragging in order to lock in your cursor's position and perform an action. I could even imagine that after tapping that second time, you could drag through the menu to scroll, or as Microsoft has shown countless times, use a wheel of actions centered around your finger and flick in a cardinal direction to perform an indicated action.
So I'm really not disagreeing here, that UIs are flexible, but I would say we've lost something useful with the disappearance of the mouse cursor and its replacements, just as when I switch from Mac to Windows, I really feel the disappearance of being reduced from two primary hotkeys (cmd and ctrl, with alt and shift modifiers) to one (ctrl, with alt and shift modifiers) because Windows owns its key and doesn't share it. The more restrictive your input mechanisms are (within human limits), the more creative your UI and uses of it have to be to continue to have the same amount of expressiveness as a more full-featured input mechanism would have.
A comment from an earlier time of horrible Apple UI decisions:
Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If those ads were really honest, Mac would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts, while PC effortlessly tore his apart with both hands.
It is also that younger folks are using tech today and they are not bothered by having to try things. For some reason, I've seen older folks scared of trying things and want instructions .. perhaps because they've seen tech fail so badly in their lives. Younger ones try things until something clicks and then they learn that and move on.
The underlying design principle is close to "undoable" .. but not quite that either and perhaps "design for experimentability" captures it better. It may also just be the more common insignificance of actions to be taken - "publish a document" versus "like a post" or "take a selfie".
I remember the first time I saw a mouse, (I think it was an amiga 500), I clicked the button and nothing happened. I remember thinking how does that work, eventually I found out :-). So, yes, there is nothing intuitively obvious about WIMP interfaces, though the amount of instruction required isn't much.
An indigenous person without literacy in any documented language, from a tropical and jungle-like area, is able to use an iPad. Without even one minute of teaching. A person in the biography on Steven Jobs mentions seeing this firsthand. People who are the very best in their field such as Dieter Rams, the Chief Design Officer at Braun, have deeply praised Apple's results.
If anyone here sincerely thinks for even a fraction of one second that this team is giving design a bad name (because your Macintosh didn't come with 8 ports), then you're every bit as stupid as the person at Fast Company that wrote this article.
I believe it was written by Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, one of the more influential books on design. Definitely worth a read, irrespective of the contents of this article.
Dieter Rams is critical about Apple, because they produce unrepairable, hard to service and unsustainable products. And yes, these qualities are a part of good design.
The iPad surely is a step in a good direction for a general population for whom the hurdle was to big with traditional computers. But is it good design as a product? I am not that sure. It is shiny, easy to use, but it values shinyness over sustainability, repairability etc.
When you have a beautiful chair that breaks down after a year or looka scratched and ugly after a party night, it is not a well designed chair. When you have a chair that you need to pack into a silicone cover to make it functional and lasting, it is not good design.
It is styling, meant to make you want it. Meant to look like more than it is.
The people who wrote this article are Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman, both of whom worked at Apple and who are largely responsible for the historic reputation of Apple for user-friendly products. They are anything but stupid.
He praised them then damned them in the very next sentence. "Less would be better everywhere". Funny how that is quoted far less often on the internet. Now it's certainly not just Apple he's criticising but the excess of replacing everything on one, two or three year cycles. He then criticised them more extensively in a more recent interview than the heavily mis-quoted documentary.
Apple? Ive manages to directly copy (iPod, webcam, podcast and calculator app etc) Braun, or parody them. He was infinitely better whilst Jobs was still around to keep him on a very short lead. That shows through in every product in the current Apple range.
The stupid people who wrote the article? Well, Tog is the guy who wrote Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and created a good chunk of the Mac and other UIs. Don Norman is the Norman in Neilsen Norman group, as well as writing the book others have mentioned. Far more respected in the field than most authors on the topic, and both did lengthy stints at Apple.
It is somewhat less important to me that someone from the jungle can accomplish something on an iPad than that people who have used computers for decades find many things on iPads to be confusing or difficult.
Tried to use Apple's email client on a friend's phone to send and email to myself and 1 other person. I entered both emails with a space between them and it didn't handle it considering it a single email address. Tried to go back to add a comma between them and I could no longer select the space. Finially added a comma and the client didn't recognize it as a delimiter. In the end I deleted the addresses and started again finially figuring out what it wanted. Generally I'm confused by Apple's great reputation for design.
The back button being furthest place away from the thumb on the iPhone was another thing that never made sense. I think ppl just get used to it but a lot of the good design is really good marketing.
I just switched to iPhone after 6 years of Android. One feature I really like is the reachability setting, being able to swipe down at the bottom to bring the top of the screen within thumb's reach so I can use it one handed. That lets you press back buttons or access URLs easily. You can also swipe from the left side of the screen so you never really need to use the back buttons. You still need to use reachability or two hands if you’re trying to press Done or something, but there were cases like that on Android too and the reachability setting helps those cases. I also love being able to move the cursor by pressing on the keyboard. I do still use the gmail app, so that’s a win for google.
The back button being placed at the top is because it's the clearest place to put an indication of a hierarchy. Remember, iOS has always made it explicit where a back action will take you — the arrow button isn't just an arrow, it also contains text that tells you where it's going.
It makes perfect sense to put such a control at the top of the screen next to the title. The interface is clear: you are here, you can go back where you came from — and these two things are grouped together.
Android has now adopted this which is great, because it's still a crapshoot where the hardware back button will take you on an Android phone — back in the navigation hierarchy? Out of the app entirely and into a different one? Will it just dismiss a popover? In the past moreso than now, the button's behaviour could almost have been described as entirely arbitrary.
Article argues that Apple UX no longer have affordances and discoverability as it used. I am not sure if I completely agree with this. Even kindergartners very quickly learn and use iOS and for most part Apple's UX primitives are well thought out. I'm more concerned about bad or no design decisions that are accumulating over time such as,
* Power and volume buttons on exactly opposite side means you often press one when you meant another when held in one hand.
* Extremely slippery surfaces means the devices slips away and fall down all the time.
* No easy way to organize app icons. Over time you accumulate 100s of apps and its lot of pain to organize and discover apps.
* Cannot disable click sound when taking photos easily.
* Cannot search and organize photos easily.
* Anything related to iCloud is either mess or dysfunctional.
It's simple. Steve Jobs died, and Jony Ive was now free to engage in his self-indulgent narcissistic hack work. It took an extra 4 years for the pipeline of Steve's influence to run dry.
They fired Scott Forstall for not assuming the failure of Maps V1. What do you think the likelihood is that Jony Ive will be fired for the butterfly keyboard fiasco, notched iPhone and other design catastrophes?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387
The day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932
> What an absurd and tiresome article.
> IOS is significantly easier and more intuitive than any PC ever was, including the Mac.
> The only people who could possibly find iOS unintuitive are those whose minds have hardened in a PC shaped mold.
Sounds like he has no place for alternative opinions of any form.
I mean come on, what could possibly be more intuitive than dragging a photo or screen to the right when you want it to move to the right? Barring mind-controlled computers, I think this is as intuitive as it could possibly get.
Keep in mind also that mouse controlled computers introduce a whole level of indirection.
Inconsistent and not discoverable, which isn’t anything like a right mouse button at all.
You even had stuff like the puck mouse, which didn’t support the feature.
Ditto the similar force-press thing on the newer Macbook touchpads—my file drag-and-drop operations drop to a success rate of about 50% with that enabled. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong with my new laptop first time I used one, because I'd forgotten about that "feature".
Also I agree that mouse has tactile feedback. Even if I wanted to experiment with 3D Touch, I can never know whether there's nothing 3D-touchy under my finger or I just did not apply enough pressure.
IMO they should have some standard UI idiom for 3D-touch enabled regions and they should have negative feedback (like some vibration) when user pressed 3D-touch on unsupported region. But in its current iteration 3D touch is almost user-hostile. I can't imagine why Apple released it without better polish.
How so?
One of the key points of the article is that the the perceived intuitiveness, especially among expert users, doesn't extend to people unfamiliar with the interface. I have seen my own folks struggle with iOS, especially recovering from accidental taps as the article mentions. My mom hits the home button on her iphone whenever she hits the wrong UI button. On her laptop, that happens much more rarely. I forgot who said this first, but I firmly believe that software developers should personally watch non-expert users interact with their UI before shipping.
Your point about toddlers being able to scroll and zoom, applies to most things kids do. They can pickup a remote and turn the TV off, or unlock doors, play handheld video games, etc, etc.
I knew IOS was nothing for me when I couldn’t access a file system, there was no way to switch between open applications and the backups were not backups of my photos, but some special format only meant to be played back onto another iphone.
Things might have changed since, but the iphone I had never felt as if it belonged to me, it felt as if I belonged to the phone.
And it might be the case that app switching was possible (I cant really remember) but either it didn’t convince me or I didn’t find out how it worked.
I think it was true in the very, very early days of the iPhone, where the only way to switch apps was to go home then tap on the app you wanted, internally it was switching between suspended apps, but to the user it felt like you were closing and opening a new app each time.
Stuff like this should be simple. On android it is connecting the cable and copying the pics. The only reason you are not able to do this is, that Apple values lock-in over good design. And I do not trust a company with these values to store my pictures indefinitly, sorry.
And no, lock-in is not what drives design at apple.
Design is always about solving problems. Toddlers wiping screens is the equivalent of toddlers smearing paint. They explore, they don’t solve problems.
IOS might be the better thing for a certain class of problems, but for other classes of problems it can become a burden very quickly, even to undemanding people like my father.
Truly good design would grow with the user and give each person the level of control they need. OSX works much better in these regards IMO.
The best example of this is Undo. Shake to undo is the dumbest thing ever (well, dumbest aside from Google's "shake to leave feedback")
The number one way I would want to use my iPad daily is to have it in portrait mode with a book or video on the top half and my note book on the bottom. This cannot be done. The only way to split the screen is side by side (which I have never found useful for anything), and only for a couple of predefined widths. Further, I had to go online to find out how any of that worked since it was completely undiscoverable for me. Even further, when switching between apps, they regularly lose state (e.g., Apple's Notes jumps to the top of the document so I have to scroll all the way down to continue).
These issues make multitasking on iPad a completely frustrating experience for me. While all of these things were worked out in the very first multitasking graphical user interfaces, where multiple windows would just open and I could move and resize them at will.
I find I agree with pretty much everything he says.
[0] https://www.asktog.com/
He should lose his designer license for that.
Because they are not only aware of what is ideal, they are aware of the effort-payoff balance involved in doing it right.
The ones that have a secure brand and are sharing knowledge for free (as opposed to the ones using their website to build/establish a personal brand) don't have a lot of incentive to invest heavily.
Handcoding HTML is a lot more effort than picking up one of the many canned tools that you configure some settings and throw text at and it produces a blog.
I like the minimalism, I don't mind the ugly, but the minuscule font size is just awful.
Forgetting that properly good design is both usable and also doesn’t look like a dog’s dinner.
>and works the same on any phone.
Well yes, that's what Jobs' "thermonuclear war" was about. In fact Google is still at it with Android Q. They've given up and just aped the iPhone X gestures [2]. Apple might be mad about it but they shouldn't be because it just makes switching from Android to iOS easier.
[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/09/ios-7-gestures.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18530599/google-android-q-...
Apple’s gesture for this requires starting at the edge of the screen, but Instagram allows you to start swiping anywhere.
I’d hesitate a guess that without this difference, the ape wouldn’t have been able to browse Instagram nearly as easily.
Though in fairness, I do think the iphone is pretty intuitive. My parents picked it up quite well (mac too).
However, there are a variety of mid-tier functions that are not very discoverable. Not pro features, even simple stuff like screenshots and certain sharing options.
Also,
> The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?
I have never seen this be an issue? On macOS, you scroll with two fingers because you have a cursor, and on iOS you use one. Since Magic Mouse has an alternate way of moving the cursor, you can actually use both methods.
― Alan Kay
Apple used to live by that quote, but maybe they ignore the latter part now.
This is a strange line to find 90% into the article. It seems like a lead in rather than a late acknowledgement. iOS struggled to find its way back to usability after rejecting “skeuomorphic design” in favor of flat design (see the drop in emphasis on metaphors), but it’s doing better now.
> Discoverability
This does continue to be an issue. However, the subtle bars that indicate the availability of the swipe up from the bottom and swipe down from the top right are helping.
> Undo
This is a huge design flaw. I finally enabled shake-to-undo because I’ve started doing more work on iOS and needed undo, but I feel foolish shaking my phone. Photoshop introduced the history palette years ago and that’s a fantastic approach to undo/redo. Now the feature is common on desktop apps. iOS badly needs a “time machine” control as a universal access to undo/redo. The rewind/fast forward 2-finger gesture introduced in the Paper by 53 was a nice solution, but not widely implemented. An icon would be better.
> Feedback
The most satisfying feedback on iOS is the click vibration when the flashlight or camera app snap open after a long press on the lock screen.
It's not like they don't know, they shipped watch complications with a time machine control, and of course OS X has time machine baked into its backup UX.
I’m assuming it’s this: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-10631
I also wish the X line of phones had the two-finger touch keyboard cursor control... It seems like iPad is innovating (maybe because the potential universe of pissed off users is less) & hopefully we’ll see some of those updates on iPhone in the future.
I don’t understand the other complaints. Anecdotally, users are more proficient with iOS than Windows or macOS, for similar usage times.
Excellent reason to test interfaces with people who've never used it before
This is a bit like writing novels with main figures that are very much unlike yourself: if you want to paint a convincing picture, you will have to research and figure out how people do things. And if you go deeper you need to understand where their ideas come from.
It is quite sad, that many people in the tech world have a very one-dimensional collection of possible user characters. In the worst case they divide the world into people that are like them and idiots who have no idea.
The only thing worse than this is not thinking about design at all.
Large beta pools and other feedback mechanisms could credibly get reports like "Siri doesn't work for me" to come in. Then you have to have people to trace those down. Really? It works for me? What are the recent queries on this account? Ohhh, he's just saying hello back, then the exchange ends and Siri misses his question. How many other people have this pattern? Can we get a fix so, if the user replies with a greeting the conversation stays open?
Having people getting and tracking down reports from customers will cause your organization to develop something that's a lot like empathy. You'll learn what customers have problems with and fix them.
And this as you said depends on the organization, but if your product speaks to people and it doesn’t know that greeting back isn’t necesarilly the end of the conversation, you skipped conversation 101
People harp on this, but what changed is that phone screens are tiny. It's just not possible to show all commands and still show content. Also, people forget that "gestures" like the double-click were not intuitive at all and that Macs came with manuals which had to teach the basic concepts of computing (double-clicking, folders, windows, etc.). While young children seem to use iPads rather intuitively (and they don't come with manuals).
> clearly see how to select that action...
Tapping is just as intuitive as clicking... and select-tap for a context menu is no worse than click-and-hold for a drop-down menu, or right-click for a context menu.
> receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action...
I see no evidence this is any worse on phones. To the contrary, iOS brought a whole new world of animated feedback that makes feedback even clearer spatially (e.g. an app or folder expanding).
> and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.
In the most advanced applications, yes. But "undo" was never a universal concept on the desktop -- it was mostly limited to text editing and actions in Office-type applications. E.g. in System 7 you couldn't undo creating a folder or moving a file or an operation in the calculator, you've never been able to undo setting a preference or resizing a window, and you certainly couldn't undo overwriting a file until Time Machine and file versions came along more recently. (And on iOS, things like drawing and text editing apps usually do have undo, same as on desktop.)
I would argue things haven't gotten any worse, because they were never that idyllic to begin with, and that most of what does seem worse is forced by smaller screens, not by suddenly ignoring principles.
(edit: changed "tap-and-hold" above to "select-tap" which I meant to write, e.g. when bringing up the copy/paste menu for text)
and us being so familiar with the desktop that we can no longer see what is unintuitive about it for newcomers
iOS7 and up degraded usability relative to iOS6. See: https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ for comparisons of iOS and MacOS old vs new designs.
With the passing of Steve Jobs Apple has lost its design mojo.
What UI people forget is most people don’t sit and study the UI long enough to ask such questions.
If it didn’t do what they wanted they tap again, the color or highlight changes and they remember.
A lot of UX people want the “answers from the back of the book” right in their face.
For most, after 1-3 taps they get it and stop giving af.
However, you've now made a gesture that was instantaneous with a hardware button require a LOT of UI to overcome the limitations of the smooth plane of glass input mechanism.
I'd agree that moving a mouse requires learning that when moved, a cursor appears, and you then have to learn what the buttons do, and generally that the right-click button isn't what you want. So I'm not going to say that a touch UI is easier or harder to learn, as both technically require experimentation or explanation since neither uses on-screen UI to indicate an area can be right-clicked. Users have learned to select, and to right-click, within text fields, which is why that pattern carries over well enough on iOS.
So how would I fix this on iOS? Well, I'd start by continuing to enhance drag-and-drop. Why can't I perform a gesture or click a button to reveal recent clipboard text, then drag the text where I want it? Kind of like how a recent screenshot appears on the screen briefly, it'd be nice if the same were available for text. The biggest difference -- and biggest advantage -- to the touch screen UI is how the entire screen can become whatever control you need at the cost of precision (or screen space to make up for it), while a monitor is an entirely passive experience, where the tools you interact with are literally separate from the screen and so are always available for instant use. Frankly the most interesting times will be when we've the best of both worlds -- when your laptop's lower half is replaced with touch screens that mimic mice and keyboards with haptic feedback and are meant for interaction attached to touch screen displays. That's when we'll be able to get the benefits of both worlds, old and new, as it makes sense to do so.
Another thought -- it's not that touch screens can't do instant right-click, as two-finger tap works that way today on touch-pads, but that on a touch screen two finger tap is ambiguous, you need a cursor to increase its precision. To that end, if the loupe/cursor is visible, I could imagine a power-user interface would be one which either shows the actions before you have to wait, or lets you tap after dragging in order to lock in your cursor's position and perform an action. I could even imagine that after tapping that second time, you could drag through the menu to scroll, or as Microsoft has shown countless times, use a wheel of actions centered around your finger and flick in a cardinal direction to perform an indicated action.
So I'm really not disagreeing here, that UIs are flexible, but I would say we've lost something useful with the disappearance of the mouse cursor and its replacements, just as when I switch from Mac to Windows, I really feel the disappearance of being reduced from two primary hotkeys (cmd and ctrl, with alt and shift modifiers) to one (ctrl, with alt and shift modifiers) because Windows owns its key and doesn't share it. The more restrictive your input mechanisms are (within human limits), the more creative your UI and uses of it have to be to continue to have the same amount of expressiveness as a more full-featured input mechanism would have.
Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If those ads were really honest, Mac would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts, while PC effortlessly tore his apart with both hands.
The underlying design principle is close to "undoable" .. but not quite that either and perhaps "design for experimentability" captures it better. It may also just be the more common insignificance of actions to be taken - "publish a document" versus "like a post" or "take a selfie".
An indigenous person without literacy in any documented language, from a tropical and jungle-like area, is able to use an iPad. Without even one minute of teaching. A person in the biography on Steven Jobs mentions seeing this firsthand. People who are the very best in their field such as Dieter Rams, the Chief Design Officer at Braun, have deeply praised Apple's results.
If anyone here sincerely thinks for even a fraction of one second that this team is giving design a bad name (because your Macintosh didn't come with 8 ports), then you're every bit as stupid as the person at Fast Company that wrote this article.
The iPad surely is a step in a good direction for a general population for whom the hurdle was to big with traditional computers. But is it good design as a product? I am not that sure. It is shiny, easy to use, but it values shinyness over sustainability, repairability etc.
When you have a beautiful chair that breaks down after a year or looka scratched and ugly after a party night, it is not a well designed chair. When you have a chair that you need to pack into a silicone cover to make it functional and lasting, it is not good design.
It is styling, meant to make you want it. Meant to look like more than it is.
Apple? Ive manages to directly copy (iPod, webcam, podcast and calculator app etc) Braun, or parody them. He was infinitely better whilst Jobs was still around to keep him on a very short lead. That shows through in every product in the current Apple range.
The stupid people who wrote the article? Well, Tog is the guy who wrote Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and created a good chunk of the Mac and other UIs. Don Norman is the Norman in Neilsen Norman group, as well as writing the book others have mentioned. Far more respected in the field than most authors on the topic, and both did lengthy stints at Apple.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The back button being furthest place away from the thumb on the iPhone was another thing that never made sense. I think ppl just get used to it but a lot of the good design is really good marketing.
It makes perfect sense to put such a control at the top of the screen next to the title. The interface is clear: you are here, you can go back where you came from — and these two things are grouped together.
Android has now adopted this which is great, because it's still a crapshoot where the hardware back button will take you on an Android phone — back in the navigation hierarchy? Out of the app entirely and into a different one? Will it just dismiss a popover? In the past moreso than now, the button's behaviour could almost have been described as entirely arbitrary.
* Power and volume buttons on exactly opposite side means you often press one when you meant another when held in one hand.
* Extremely slippery surfaces means the devices slips away and fall down all the time.
* No easy way to organize app icons. Over time you accumulate 100s of apps and its lot of pain to organize and discover apps.
* Cannot disable click sound when taking photos easily.
* Cannot search and organize photos easily.
* Anything related to iCloud is either mess or dysfunctional.
... and so on.
They fired Scott Forstall for not assuming the failure of Maps V1. What do you think the likelihood is that Jony Ive will be fired for the butterfly keyboard fiasco, notched iPhone and other design catastrophes?