This has to be an age thing. When I was 10 I shitted (shat?) all over people's work. Now that I'm 25 I have nothing but respect for people who produce.
There's a middle ground though. You can be very critical and tough and still provide feedback that helps point out weak spots and suggests ways to improve things.
Problem is that it's easy to complain, but hard to provide constructive criticism that helps push things forward. So the "shitters" resort to complaining.
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
I dunno, I worked with one designer who firmly believed that "users like a challenge". He loved little tricks like "hiding" clickable things by making them blend in with decorative elements, he liked unusual fonts, he liked layouts that forced the users to hunt all over the screen for the next thing they wanted.
But we weren't making games, we were making corporate Intranets. So my advice is, ignore your designer and try using something he's designed. If it's easy and intuitive, he's a good designer. If it's not, put him on the silly little scooter he'll invariably have and push him gently out of the door... Especially if he tries to tell you "you don't understand design, maaan"!
It's true, even in the act of creation, there has to be some selection. With that said, if you spend all of your time critiquing, you never end up building anything.
It's all in the balance...
There's also a difference between "I'm working on critique to improve my craft" and "I make a blog specifically designed to talk shit on people." You can critique in a few ways, some more abrasive than others.
Criticism is good for a creator. If you can't turn criticism into a force to improve your product, you're doing it wrong. (Granted, baseless criticism doesn't count.)
And if they're violating Apple's HIG... Seriously, why? That should be the easiest thing to get right. They've outlined it for you.
Technically the AppStore guidelines say that Apps must follow the HIG, and that not doing so is grounds for rejection. In practice however, I think you're right since I've not heard of someone actually being rejected because of that.
There's a truism in many fields, "You have to learn the rules before you can break them." It means that rules are not the end-all-be-all, but they exist for a reason, and breaking them is generally bad unless you have a very good reason.
When you're just copying an iOS interface to the Mac, to use an example from that site, that isn't intelligently deciding that you can do one better than the HIG. That's just pointlessly making the app less intuitive.
I agree that just shitting all over people's work is, well, shitty. But I disagree entirely that the anonymous critic behind Read the Fucking HIG (http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/) is out of line or that this kind of criticism is lacking in merit.
Firstly, it's clearly a bit tongue in cheek: "The evil doctor cackled as the thunder struck his lightning rod, giving life and sentience to his unholy creation, spliced together from iphone, ipad and mac ui." And the vulgarity is right in line with other satirical, single purpose sites like http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/ and others I can't think of right now.
Secondly, he's got a "legitimate" complaint. You don't have to agree with his point, but I think a lot of people who are passionate about design (and about design in the context of their Mac) really, really do experience visceral rage at the way Apple flouts the HIG. A site like this is really just capturing that zeitgeist and reflecting how heated people actually feel about the topic.
Anyhow, I really am a big proponent for civility in discourse (that's why I'm always reading HN), but everything has its place.
He may be right. But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out. I think the biggest problem I have with it is that he's insulting and attacking the people who made these apps. There is no reason for that.
> "But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out."
It's a curious community we have. Pointing out problems or reporting visceral reaction is considered not constructive. Yet speculative re-designs to illustrate what the critic might have done differently are also considered not constructive.
It seems to me that when nothing short of actually competing against a product is considered useful or valid, the real argument is that criticism shouldn't exist and isn't useful in and of itself.
So the people complaining about complaints over UI being about style instead of substance are themselves complaining about argumentative style instead of substance.
You still do not get the point here. His arguments may be valid, I don't know I never read the HIG nor am I a designer. But there is a way to do constructive criticism without belittling the efforts of other developers. He is acting like a "Chinese mom".
This line from HN guidelines illustrate my point:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I know that showing "attitude" and being cool is all the rage these days, but I still thinking politeness works like a charm.
You're belittling RTFHIG like a "WASP mom" for belittling app authors like a "Chinese mom".
There's more than one way to show attitude, and politeness is one of them. It's an affectation, no different from RTFHIG's all-lowercase ironic outrage.
But even 'constructive' criticism is frequently derided here. That's why I made the point about speculative redesigns. No matter how polite or constructive you try to get, it seems a large chunk of this site will wave it off as being only as useful as reporting your gut feeling on whether something 'works' or 'doesn't'. (As only the designer facing actual decisions knows why they made certain compromises and has to deal with all the real permutations, etc)
You can narrow your argument to just "can't we all just be polite" and have a nice, if naive, point. But I disagree that the core complaints in the article or this thread are restricted to, or even primarily about, the tone.
I wouldn't accuse someone of adding no value when clearly the site would not exist if readers did not find it valuable enough to keep coming back. Or if the author didn't find it valuable to keep contributing.
Maybe you don't find it valuable for you. But clearly you found it interesting enough to stop and make a comment when so many other articles on "more valuable" subjects sit uncommented.
Not all time needs to be spent on productive endeavors. And maybe he just might increase the quality of these apps by shaming them into compliance. The devs might even read the HIG!
I think the bigger point here is that he's complaining about something which may not even be relevant any more. As John Gruber wrote recently, the HIG is dead and Apple is what killed it.
The point of the blog, from what I can tell, is to make people laugh. Let's lighten up.
Honestly, if I had an app in the store and it was featured here (with a handy backlink) I'd probably send him a thank you note for the free advertising and feedback.
First freelance job I did as a teenager (around 1996 maybe?) was for a sporting celebrity in my country. I got paid $90/hr which I was particularly excited about.
I spent so much time on this web interface, 'Shopping my brains out. The result was, for the time, amazing. People, who didn't have to use the site on a day-to-day basis, gushed.
Then I happened across an absolutely brutal, brutal review by some random on the net. At first I was crushed, but soon I realised that, though coarse, they had made good points and I became a better designer because of it.
If the developers who made these apps were, instead, writing novels of similar quality, their work would have been coldly rejected by publisher after publisher after publisher after publisher.
1. If you're going to create, you need a thick skin for rejection and criticism, constructive or otherwise.
2. Everyone has a certain amount of shitty work that they need to work out of their system before they get good. If nobody tells them their crap work is crappy, they'll probably keep making it like that and won't improve.
3. Even successful novelists can get to a point where they stop being edited, and their work from that point tends to be flabby, overlong, and not well-regarded compared to earlier work that actually was edited.
Nowadays they'd self-publish and would only have to worry about reviews from people who bought the book from Amazon (and many of them stack their book reviews with friends and family).
Well, that would be an option, but they probably wouldn't make much money, they wouldn't get the marketing support, and they wouldn't get the prestige of having published.
But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.
Consider the similar site Photoshop Disasters. That mocks the designers who make the images. But it's had value in pointing out the ludicrous editing that fashion ads and magazines are guilty of, twisting women's bodies into ridiculous impossible forms.
And, to some extent, has probably created some pressure on advertisers to not do that, because they'll be mocked.
There's a difference between criticism and vulgar flaming. I have no problem with the former when presented constructively and with some knowledge of the subject, but the blog is engaging in the latter.
A quick glance at Read the Fucking HIG and it's very clear what they're mocking deserve to be mocked; not a single one validates based on the HIG.
Vulgarity is immature and childish but it's a tonality the Internet has adopted. You can participate or choose not to, sermonize about decency or not, but this insistence--beyond the scope of this article and RTFHIG--that everyone does things on your pace, your schedule, your needs, your preferences, on you... is just so whiny.
> this insistence ... that everyone does things on your pace, your schedule, your needs, your preferences, on you... is just so whiny.
We're talking about the "Everything that differs from the HIG is a fucking abomination" crowd here, right? </sarcasm>
I value civility, pragmatics, and constructivity, and you evidently don't. I think we've reached the point where it's clear we have two fundamentally different opinions and continuing to talk past one another is pointless.
But there is this social element to designing an app on OS X that you don't get elsewhere. People will critcise you if your app 'feels wrong' or 'feels un-mac-like'.
This is why writing software for the mac is harder than the PC. On the PC (or especially Linux) you can just do whatever you like, whatever makes sense to you.
But here's the thing, the reason that the Mac feels so 'intuitive' is because - if you're doing it right - you have to implement six different ways to do anything. That means that the second or third way someone tries to do something will work, so it feels instant. On the PC if you try 20 ways to do something, and it doesn't work, you feel frustrated.
This is a lot more work. It is much easier on the PC because if you can't be arsed supporting say... drag and drop, no one is going to call you on it. On the Mac, you will be pilloried. Saying it's not fair on people because of their hard work is to commit two errors:
(1) to not understand Mac culture, where developers are expected to put in the extra effort
(2) to falsely label something as hard work when they clearly haven't done their homework, and have taken shortcuts to avoid putting in the real hard work
If I ask someone to cut my lawn, and they go over it with a roller in order to flatten it because they can't be arsed and it's just the same... I will not praise them for their ingenuity or hard work.
They haven't finished the task.
Also, there is a third point
(3) to commit the error of thinking that the software is finished and set in stone forever
Software is change. But how will they know to change if no one points out to them the error of their ways?
I don't see any of the rage at http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/ being directed at Apple. Somehow I suspect it would be hard for one who holds the guidelines in such reverence to do so.
The rage is directed at the people that put forth time and effort into releasing applications in the App Store, as well as at Apple for enabling these people to publish apps that offend their delicate sensibilities.
I can see where he's coming from, and I can agree that it's a little childish and or obscene, but looking through his examples, there are some really terrible apps in the store, and a lot of them are unnecessary (insofar as they duplicate functionality from existing OS X applications that ship with the os).
I agree, and will also point out that the referenced site (http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/) is terrible, IMO. Does the holier-than-thou author not know how to use the fucking shift key?
Although the tone is perhaps a bit mean-spirited (kind of funny), I have to say that I agree with most of the points readthefuckinghig makes.
Critique is important, not immature. Despite the fact that the blogger in question comes off as a real asshole, he makes real observations about specific details which wouldn't have been so ugly if the designer had just read the human interface guidelines.
If something sucks, I think it's better for someone to say it sucks anonymously than for nobody to say anything - especially if they're citing details that can be fixed!
I rarely enjoy 37 Signals posts, but I heartily agree with Jason Z. (new guy?). There's so much negativism on the net in general; everyone seems threatened by everyone else. And you find it here, too, a place where you'd expect to find nothing but support and encouragement. (To be fair: HN is full of supportive people; there's just more negativity than you'd expect. I'm probably guilty of that, too, although I'm making a concerted effort to do otherwise.)
All criticism is not constructive criticism. If someone's trying, they ought to be encouraged to keep trying. That may sound naive and pollyanna, but ask yourself: when was the latest time a hater changed the world for the better?
FWIW, I think parents/friends give blind support and encouragment. HN/peers/tech community should give complete honesty. If that means saying "That idea is terrible" so be it.
Complete honesty can be simple, direct, and if not exactly nice to hear, certainly not mean-spirited in tone.
That's quite different from the style of "oh my god what a bunch of fucking idiots these guys are, ha ha ha". It's a cheap, easy way to get some laughs (see: Ted Dziuba) but I'm not really a fan.
sure, but if you're making money and having fun, other peoples opinion shouldn't really matter.
It seems to be popular at the moment to laugh at Justin Beiber online and say how much you hate him. But he's the one making millions out of teenage girls...
I agree, but there's a big difference between honest, polite feedback and negativity, meanness, or just good old-fashioned flaming.
HN is pretty good in this respect. Reddit is still decent, though it can definitely lean towards mean. YouTube / app store reviews... forget any chance of respect.
Who is hoping to gain from the public ridicule? I doubt it is the target.
With this in mind, it would be wise to direct critical feedback privately to the creator. I believe feedback delivered directly and privately is more likely to see the desired change.
While I agree with the sentiment, I think sites like Read the Fucking HIG serve a good purpose: they keep UI designers from getting lazy. Nobody wants to come up with a design that ends up on a site like that.
37signals is at their worst when they adopt this sanctimonious attitude. Say what you want about their juvenile tone, the criticisms on RTFHIG are mostly valid.
What are we going to do next? Pillory literary, film and food critics because their insights are inconvenient to the sensitive feelings of creators in those realms? Come on.
Creating things for other people has a long, rich history of criticism. Some valid, some bullshit, but all essential to the advancement of whatever creative field is under scrutiny. The shovelware artists who RTFHIG pick on might find a genuine direction for improving their work. Meanwhile, we're all talking about what genuinely makes a good interface.
That these guys are provocative makes their insights more valuable, since they get more attention. If you don't have or can't grow a thick skin, you don't belong in a creative field. It's as simple as that.
You don't need to use an application to know that a close button that is sixty pixels large, with an appearance that's completely inconsistent with the rest of the application, along with the operating system at large, and is positioned in the wrong place... is poor design.
Half of using a visual interface is visual. You can tell a lot about the quality of a GUI-based application by the level of effort that went into making it look correct.
Or, to ground this in actual HCI terms: from a screenshot alone, you should be able to see the affordances of a design. If you need more than the screenshot to find your way around the app, the app is badly designed in other ways (mystery-meat navigation.) Thus, it is actually the Principle of Charity that would have us evaluate the app by a screenshot.
Let's run with the cow shit metaphor a bit. A large component of taste is smell, and I can tell without taking a bite that the smell of cow shit would foul any pleasant flavor.
Likewise with UI, a large component of its quality is visual. There is plenty we can gather about an application design just by looking at it. That isn't unfair, it's just plain observation.
Your nose is trained by generations upon generations to recognize shit as something bad.
I also know a dog perfectly happy to eat his own shit, but that would refuse to eat a Big Mac or other fast-food. It's a 12 year old Rottweiler in perfect health with beautifully looking hair without special care.
It's sufficient only if you conflate design and visual aesthetics.
Since the blog in question hammers on apps that don't follow the Apple HIG, a document dedicated to the argument that good design is a lot more than visual aesthetics, this is an oddly contradictory position for him to attempt to occupy.
Have you even read the blog? The UIs in question are, for the most part, immediately recognizable as bad. It's not about artistic or aesthetic interpretation. It's about this is not how any sane or competent person would design UI.
There are a few that are fairly cluttered visually, but the vast majority are simply different, and I can't say, looking at them, whether or not they'd be any good in practice because I haven't used them, and I'm not so full of myself as to believe that I know everything about something based on a single picture of it.
For instance, there's nothing obviously wrong with the interface of the grammar app currently at the top of the blog, but he goes off on it like it shot his dog.
Not just strange – incorrect. iOS UI vocabulary is designed for touching. You have a big meatstick you can freely move around and squash against whatever interests you.
This does not apply to the desktop. On the desktop, you have a plastic puck you need to shove around a surface, which moves a pointer to a designated area. At the most advanced, you're massaging a glass tile, for the same effect. By merit of these facts, the interface must work differently.
It's a lazy design, by someone who couldn't be bothered to learn the correct UI paradigms for a desktop app. It doesn't make them a bad person, it doesn't mean they caused any grievous offense, it simply means they made a bad design. This isn't subjective.
But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false.
If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Period. At best, top-notch effort in other areas can drag it up to the same approximate level as pristine-looking-but-utterly-unusable designs, which are still terrible. His position would only be contradictory if he somehow claimed that something was a good design based solely on a screenshot.
Completely agree. I love that site and I think most of the criticisms are on point.
There is/was something special about apps on a Mac versus their equivalent shareware versions on Windows. I think it's fair to assume the Mac App Store will bring with it the same kind of UI trash that is in the iPhone app store.
That these guys are provocative makes their insights more valuable, since they get more attention. If you don't have or can't grow a thick skin, you don't belong in a creative field. It's as simple as that.
“Where the heck were you when the page was blank?” - Paul Butterworth
Always such a bogus argument. This is what people say when they don't like your opinion but have no argument to counter, so they resort to a rhetorical that implies you have no authority on the issue. But the fact is you do not need to be a creator to criticize a creation legitimately. Sometimes specializing in just observation/criticism and not creation allows you more time to think things over from the standpoint of analysis, whereas creation demands that a large portion of your mental energy goes to the creation process.
I can't speak to the blog in question but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of a blog just for the sake of criticism. How it goes about that criticism and any unnecessary hostility is another issue.
> Sometimes specializing in just observation/criticism and not creation allows you more time to think things over from the standpoint of analysis, whereas creation demands that a large portion of your mental energy goes to the creation process.
This sounds suspiciously like saying that you're an "ideas man". The reality is that the barrier to creation is so low in the digital world that if you are criticizing without bothering to learn how to create, I have a hard time telling you apart from the guys who would generously let me do all the work on their idea for 5% of the profit.
If you have opinions on good design, put them into practice; don't just stand on the sidelines cursing at everyone who is trying.
'Read the Fucking HIG' (and 'Perversion Tracker', two years ago - http://www.perversiontracker.com) is interesting not so much for the content of the criticism, but because it's a reaction to the massive influx of new developers into a development community with its own distinct subculture.
Mac developers for the longest time engaged in 'artisanal software production' (for lack of a better term) with high production values - and while a few did well, many of them were just scraping by, doing it largely out of love for the platform. Then iOS came out, everybody learned Objective-C, money began to flow freely, and like homeowners in a town that's suddenly become touristy, they found themselves economically better off but a little ill-at-ease with the new character of their neighborhood.
Because of this, I'm more inclined to give this guy a bit of slack. The criticism isn't personal - it's just one person's way of mourning a world that no longer exists.
You've posted perhaps one of the better definitions of this guy's attitude, and I have to agree.
However, while he's criticising UI design flaws, he doesn't actually provide any real ideas/examples on how they should fix this. This might just be because he can't afford the time to do so. Ironically, this is probably also the main reason why all these bad designs exist.
I think what rubs me the wrong way about this site is not the criticism. Criticism is ok. It's lack of proposed solutions.
One thing I really enjoy is when designers take a look at some established interface and try and design a better one and put it out there for comments and ideas. That is constructive criticism in my book.
Yes, I think I get that, but if everything was done to HIG all apps would look the same (much like all writing conforming to Formal English reads the same). I think what I'm asking is this, what can they do to conform to good GUI guidelines (HIG compliance doesn't necessarily answer that mail) and still maintain a unique looking interface?
Also, in many cases, the developer may not know what's wrong with their interface or why it doesn't comply with HIG.
Non-constructive criticism like this (while funny on some level) isn't exactly pushing humanity forward, it's just bitching.
Mac users care very much about design and aesthetics. I would turn this around: These developers are shitting on the platform. And sure, I will just not download that app, but these developers should be ashamed for realeasing something so ugly. Do they have no pride in their work?
I think it's an important point that constructive criticism has a positive intent and it's rarely mean-spirited. Might be hard to hear, but the critic isn't just being an asshole.
(Did have an art-school teacher who used mean similes to teach, but that was the rare exception. And he had a consistent flair for mean, so it was sort of an odd joy to behold.)
I generally only listen to criticism from people that have accomplished something similar to what they are criticising themselves.
There are so many negative people out there, and it's a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff. People who have been there themselves tend to only complain if there's a valid reason for doing so.
I see this a number of posts here arguing for/agaist this with an unsaid dichotomy where the choices are
1) don't critisize, create instead
2) Criticism is good, even if is kind of mean.
But I think this a false dichotomy. Words and tone do matter. If you put the object of your criticism in a defensive position, you are unlikely to effect any change at all. This is not some new insight; it's been well understood at the very least since Dale Carnegie. You might acheive the goal of making yourself feel good, but then that certainly isn't worthy of any external respect.
What's the difference between:
1) You app is ugly and it fucking sucks. If you used abc to do xyz, at least I wouldn't be vomitting.
and
2)Nice effort on your app. You might consider using abc to do xyz. It might improve the aesthetics and usability some.
Some might say it says effectively the same thing, but the there is a world of difference in the way the reader reacts to those statements.
The irony being of course that the critics themselves should start by reading a f*ing English grammar book and learn to capitalize the beginning of their sentences.
Eh, it's like Regretsy, the site that makes fun of atrocious items placed for sale on Etsy. Even Regretsy has wound up boosting sales of the mocked items. They've also harnessed their traffic for good with occasional charity appeals, and helped a little boy with cancer raise $100,000 or so to pay for his treatment.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt, April 23, 1910
Criticism isn't often worth anything, just demonstrating a sterile person trying to find other things to do than make. Until we see some world class design from the anon behind FTFHIG, their opinion is worth 0.
Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism -
'Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well;
Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true,
But are not Critics to their judgment too?'
I just read through 10 or so posts on that blog, and nothing seems terribly out of line... His criticisms were for the most part legitimate. That's just his style, and, while I don't prefer that and think it's quite immature, I've got to say, I did agree with most of the things he pointed out.
Amusing how you're calling for respect of other's work when you've shown to not give a shit yourselves and put an end to the work of a competing service that many seemed to enjoy temporarily -- HuddleChat.
Of course there is. It's called trolling, and it gets attention. For example, the modern news media is built on trolling, as is most of 37signals's fame.
134 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadProblem is that it's easy to complain, but hard to provide constructive criticism that helps push things forward. So the "shitters" resort to complaining.
--Mark Twain
But we weren't making games, we were making corporate Intranets. So my advice is, ignore your designer and try using something he's designed. If it's easy and intuitive, he's a good designer. If it's not, put him on the silly little scooter he'll invariably have and push him gently out of the door... Especially if he tries to tell you "you don't understand design, maaan"!
It's all in the balance...
There's also a difference between "I'm working on critique to improve my craft" and "I make a blog specifically designed to talk shit on people." You can critique in a few ways, some more abrasive than others.
And if they're violating Apple's HIG... Seriously, why? That should be the easiest thing to get right. They've outlined it for you.
It's a guideline. Not hard and fast rules that must be followed in all cases.
When you're just copying an iOS interface to the Mac, to use an example from that site, that isn't intelligently deciding that you can do one better than the HIG. That's just pointlessly making the app less intuitive.
this is not a site for criticism, it's failblog for iOS apps; somewhere for people to gather, point and laugh and some poor sod.
Firstly, it's clearly a bit tongue in cheek: "The evil doctor cackled as the thunder struck his lightning rod, giving life and sentience to his unholy creation, spliced together from iphone, ipad and mac ui." And the vulgarity is right in line with other satirical, single purpose sites like http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/ and others I can't think of right now.
Secondly, he's got a "legitimate" complaint. You don't have to agree with his point, but I think a lot of people who are passionate about design (and about design in the context of their Mac) really, really do experience visceral rage at the way Apple flouts the HIG. A site like this is really just capturing that zeitgeist and reflecting how heated people actually feel about the topic.
Anyhow, I really am a big proponent for civility in discourse (that's why I'm always reading HN), but everything has its place.
It's a curious community we have. Pointing out problems or reporting visceral reaction is considered not constructive. Yet speculative re-designs to illustrate what the critic might have done differently are also considered not constructive.
It seems to me that when nothing short of actually competing against a product is considered useful or valid, the real argument is that criticism shouldn't exist and isn't useful in and of itself.
This line from HN guidelines illustrate my point:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I know that showing "attitude" and being cool is all the rage these days, but I still thinking politeness works like a charm.
There's more than one way to show attitude, and politeness is one of them. It's an affectation, no different from RTFHIG's all-lowercase ironic outrage.
You can narrow your argument to just "can't we all just be polite" and have a nice, if naive, point. But I disagree that the core complaints in the article or this thread are restricted to, or even primarily about, the tone.
Maybe you don't find it valuable for you. But clearly you found it interesting enough to stop and make a comment when so many other articles on "more valuable" subjects sit uncommented.
Not all time needs to be spent on productive endeavors. And maybe he just might increase the quality of these apps by shaming them into compliance. The devs might even read the HIG!
I think the bigger point here is that he's complaining about something which may not even be relevant any more. As John Gruber wrote recently, the HIG is dead and Apple is what killed it.
The point of the blog, from what I can tell, is to make people laugh. Let's lighten up.
Honestly, if I had an app in the store and it was featured here (with a handy backlink) I'd probably send him a thank you note for the free advertising and feedback.
I spent so much time on this web interface, 'Shopping my brains out. The result was, for the time, amazing. People, who didn't have to use the site on a day-to-day basis, gushed.
Then I happened across an absolutely brutal, brutal review by some random on the net. At first I was crushed, but soon I realised that, though coarse, they had made good points and I became a better designer because of it.
1. If you're going to create, you need a thick skin for rejection and criticism, constructive or otherwise.
2. Everyone has a certain amount of shitty work that they need to work out of their system before they get good. If nobody tells them their crap work is crappy, they'll probably keep making it like that and won't improve.
3. Even successful novelists can get to a point where they stop being edited, and their work from that point tends to be flabby, overlong, and not well-regarded compared to earlier work that actually was edited.
But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.
And, to some extent, has probably created some pressure on advertisers to not do that, because they'll be mocked.
And I tend to agree with the article's argument that a criticism of the design without using the design is pointless nerdrage.
Vulgarity is immature and childish but it's a tonality the Internet has adopted. You can participate or choose not to, sermonize about decency or not, but this insistence--beyond the scope of this article and RTFHIG--that everyone does things on your pace, your schedule, your needs, your preferences, on you... is just so whiny.
Care less, it'll make you happier.
We're talking about the "Everything that differs from the HIG is a fucking abomination" crowd here, right? </sarcasm>
I value civility, pragmatics, and constructivity, and you evidently don't. I think we've reached the point where it's clear we have two fundamentally different opinions and continuing to talk past one another is pointless.
This is why writing software for the mac is harder than the PC. On the PC (or especially Linux) you can just do whatever you like, whatever makes sense to you.
But here's the thing, the reason that the Mac feels so 'intuitive' is because - if you're doing it right - you have to implement six different ways to do anything. That means that the second or third way someone tries to do something will work, so it feels instant. On the PC if you try 20 ways to do something, and it doesn't work, you feel frustrated.
This is a lot more work. It is much easier on the PC because if you can't be arsed supporting say... drag and drop, no one is going to call you on it. On the Mac, you will be pilloried. Saying it's not fair on people because of their hard work is to commit two errors:
(1) to not understand Mac culture, where developers are expected to put in the extra effort
(2) to falsely label something as hard work when they clearly haven't done their homework, and have taken shortcuts to avoid putting in the real hard work
If I ask someone to cut my lawn, and they go over it with a roller in order to flatten it because they can't be arsed and it's just the same... I will not praise them for their ingenuity or hard work.
They haven't finished the task.
Also, there is a third point
(3) to commit the error of thinking that the software is finished and set in stone forever
Software is change. But how will they know to change if no one points out to them the error of their ways?
I don't see any of the rage at http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/ being directed at Apple. Somehow I suspect it would be hard for one who holds the guidelines in such reverence to do so.
I can see where he's coming from, and I can agree that it's a little childish and or obscene, but looking through his examples, there are some really terrible apps in the store, and a lot of them are unnecessary (insofar as they duplicate functionality from existing OS X applications that ship with the os).
The people were free to publish applications anyway. The good ones will rise to the top, the bad ones will fail.
Critique is important, not immature. Despite the fact that the blogger in question comes off as a real asshole, he makes real observations about specific details which wouldn't have been so ugly if the designer had just read the human interface guidelines.
If something sucks, I think it's better for someone to say it sucks anonymously than for nobody to say anything - especially if they're citing details that can be fixed!
All criticism is not constructive criticism. If someone's trying, they ought to be encouraged to keep trying. That may sound naive and pollyanna, but ask yourself: when was the latest time a hater changed the world for the better?
That's quite different from the style of "oh my god what a bunch of fucking idiots these guys are, ha ha ha". It's a cheap, easy way to get some laughs (see: Ted Dziuba) but I'm not really a fan.
It seems to be popular at the moment to laugh at Justin Beiber online and say how much you hate him. But he's the one making millions out of teenage girls...
HN is pretty good in this respect. Reddit is still decent, though it can definitely lean towards mean. YouTube / app store reviews... forget any chance of respect.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
With this in mind, it would be wise to direct critical feedback privately to the creator. I believe feedback delivered directly and privately is more likely to see the desired change.
Praise in public, criticise in private.
What are we going to do next? Pillory literary, film and food critics because their insights are inconvenient to the sensitive feelings of creators in those realms? Come on.
Creating things for other people has a long, rich history of criticism. Some valid, some bullshit, but all essential to the advancement of whatever creative field is under scrutiny. The shovelware artists who RTFHIG pick on might find a genuine direction for improving their work. Meanwhile, we're all talking about what genuinely makes a good interface.
That these guys are provocative makes their insights more valuable, since they get more attention. If you don't have or can't grow a thick skin, you don't belong in a creative field. It's as simple as that.
It is not unreasonable to expect a critic to watch/read/eat/use the film/book/food/UI in question before calling its creator a "fucking hack".
If you're going to be the authority on the taste of cow shit (shit tastes like shit is, of course, a tautology), you better eat some cow shit.
http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you...
Half of using a visual interface is visual. You can tell a lot about the quality of a GUI-based application by the level of effort that went into making it look correct.
Likewise with UI, a large component of its quality is visual. There is plenty we can gather about an application design just by looking at it. That isn't unfair, it's just plain observation.
I also know a dog perfectly happy to eat his own shit, but that would refuse to eat a Big Mac or other fast-food. It's a 12 year old Rottweiler in perfect health with beautifully looking hair without special care.
So I'm not sure our nose is doing a good job :)
Since the blog in question hammers on apps that don't follow the Apple HIG, a document dedicated to the argument that good design is a lot more than visual aesthetics, this is an oddly contradictory position for him to attempt to occupy.
For instance, there's nothing obviously wrong with the interface of the grammar app currently at the top of the blog, but he goes off on it like it shot his dog.
This does not apply to the desktop. On the desktop, you have a plastic puck you need to shove around a surface, which moves a pointer to a designated area. At the most advanced, you're massaging a glass tile, for the same effect. By merit of these facts, the interface must work differently.
It's a lazy design, by someone who couldn't be bothered to learn the correct UI paradigms for a desktop app. It doesn't make them a bad person, it doesn't mean they caused any grievous offense, it simply means they made a bad design. This isn't subjective.
But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false.
If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Period. At best, top-notch effort in other areas can drag it up to the same approximate level as pristine-looking-but-utterly-unusable designs, which are still terrible. His position would only be contradictory if he somehow claimed that something was a good design based solely on a screenshot.
Looks terrible by whose standards? If you go by my standards, all Mac stuff has 'bad design' by this rule if only because of the font rendering.
There is/was something special about apps on a Mac versus their equivalent shareware versions on Windows. I think it's fair to assume the Mac App Store will bring with it the same kind of UI trash that is in the iPhone app store.
Nonsense.
Always such a bogus argument. This is what people say when they don't like your opinion but have no argument to counter, so they resort to a rhetorical that implies you have no authority on the issue. But the fact is you do not need to be a creator to criticize a creation legitimately. Sometimes specializing in just observation/criticism and not creation allows you more time to think things over from the standpoint of analysis, whereas creation demands that a large portion of your mental energy goes to the creation process.
I can't speak to the blog in question but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of a blog just for the sake of criticism. How it goes about that criticism and any unnecessary hostility is another issue.
No, that's the issue. Dismissing that invalidates your entire comment.
This sounds suspiciously like saying that you're an "ideas man". The reality is that the barrier to creation is so low in the digital world that if you are criticizing without bothering to learn how to create, I have a hard time telling you apart from the guys who would generously let me do all the work on their idea for 5% of the profit.
If you have opinions on good design, put them into practice; don't just stand on the sidelines cursing at everyone who is trying.
Mac developers for the longest time engaged in 'artisanal software production' (for lack of a better term) with high production values - and while a few did well, many of them were just scraping by, doing it largely out of love for the platform. Then iOS came out, everybody learned Objective-C, money began to flow freely, and like homeowners in a town that's suddenly become touristy, they found themselves economically better off but a little ill-at-ease with the new character of their neighborhood.
Because of this, I'm more inclined to give this guy a bit of slack. The criticism isn't personal - it's just one person's way of mourning a world that no longer exists.
However, while he's criticising UI design flaws, he doesn't actually provide any real ideas/examples on how they should fix this. This might just be because he can't afford the time to do so. Ironically, this is probably also the main reason why all these bad designs exist.
One thing I really enjoy is when designers take a look at some established interface and try and design a better one and put it out there for comments and ideas. That is constructive criticism in my book.
example:http://www.flickr.com/photos/zachklein/4831151379/
Also, in many cases, the developer may not know what's wrong with their interface or why it doesn't comply with HIG.
Non-constructive criticism like this (while funny on some level) isn't exactly pushing humanity forward, it's just bitching.
(Did have an art-school teacher who used mean similes to teach, but that was the rare exception. And he had a consistent flair for mean, so it was sort of an odd joy to behold.)
There are so many negative people out there, and it's a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff. People who have been there themselves tend to only complain if there's a valid reason for doing so.
1) don't critisize, create instead 2) Criticism is good, even if is kind of mean.
But I think this a false dichotomy. Words and tone do matter. If you put the object of your criticism in a defensive position, you are unlikely to effect any change at all. This is not some new insight; it's been well understood at the very least since Dale Carnegie. You might acheive the goal of making yourself feel good, but then that certainly isn't worthy of any external respect.
What's the difference between: 1) You app is ugly and it fucking sucks. If you used abc to do xyz, at least I wouldn't be vomitting.
and
2)Nice effort on your app. You might consider using abc to do xyz. It might improve the aesthetics and usability some.
Some might say it says effectively the same thing, but the there is a world of difference in the way the reader reacts to those statements.
Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism -
'Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well; Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not Critics to their judgment too?'
Amusing how you're calling for respect of other's work when you've shown to not give a shit yourselves and put an end to the work of a competing service that many seemed to enjoy temporarily -- HuddleChat.
2.) I find 37s posting something like this humorous. DHH "shits all over" other people's work all the time.
In summary, lighten up.