With the proliferation of different screen sizes and zoom factors, these kinds of usability problems will continue to happen. The only way I see around this is by re-introducing the 'obvious scroll bar' element, or alternatively a different kind of indicator that advertises where the current view is in relation to the entire content.
The user doesn't need to know where they are on the page. They just need to know they're not at the bottom. A line along the bottom of the page when there's more content available would work. You could have the same at the top too.
It's debatable whether it's bad that the user knows where exactly they are.
The problem with just showing a bar at the bottom is that iOS already uses a bar at the bottom to invoke the app switcher. Maybe a small triangle in the corner would help.
The user probably wants to know where they are in a list while scrolling, but otherwise it shouldn't be a problem to reclaim that screen space by hiding the scroll bar when they're done.
That reflects how things work on macOS and iOS right now, the scroll bar disappears when you stop scrolling. However, that does not apply to "pop-in" elements like the share pane. It operates like a slidable component on-top of the current app, it does not even have a scroll bar in theory, because from its point of view there is nothing to scroll. Whether that's a good choice to begin with is open to debate, but I assume Apple's design team would be averse to showing a positioning indicator due to the fact that it would break their skeuomorphism.
You mean Apple excuses? That's a Steve Jobs quote. Linux UX is rough in parts and the answer is "it's a $0 volunteer group project, we need your help to make it better."
No, it's definitely a Linux thing too. Linux Desktop community in general doesn't care what anyone's experience is except their own, and if you're not a C programmer who's willing to fork the code to make the change you want (because they almost certainly won't accept your patch), then screw you.
Common phrases heard on Linux Desktop software issue trackers and forums:
"Why would you want that?"
"You don't want to do that, do it <the way I do it>."
"Works on my machine."
"PRs are welcome."
"We've rejected your PR because there isn't any demand for this."
This is the community that thinks .desktop files are a good idea and largely uses the GUI as a really fancy tmux. They're hopeless.
User interfaces are testable. There's a whole field of practice on this. Considering how sloppy this is (and Apple's recent trends in slop) I bet they didn't test it on all their screen sizes
> Like a tiny down triangle in the corner? This stuff is super not hard.
That's also what I suggested in my answer to onion2k below. I agree, it's not hard. But it does require their design team to overcome some instinctive minimalism.
> The only way I see around this is by re-introducing the 'obvious scroll bar' element...
Or Apple could do the right thing and go back to a 3.5" screen size on all their phones, no exceptions. Even a 4" screen size would be better than these clown-phone monstrosities. IOS could then just dead-pixel all pixels outside of the center 3.5" screen on all existing clown-phones for backwards compatibility.
Personally I hate the big phones, but I would prefer to have a dumb phone with physical buttons if I didn't need all the two factor apps, public transportation ticket apps, car apps and whatnot.
Right now I am looking at the Sony Xperia 1 as it seems to be the best "smallish" phone now a days.
Nope. A few years ago I used to really want a large-screened phone. Then I got one with a 5" screen and found out its clunky and awful to carry around. Standardizing the screen back to 4" or 3.5" would greatly improve my tolerance for carrying it around and, if the resolution were also standardized, would greatly simplify UX design.
I hear you except that apple controls all the screen sizes and zoom factors. They know right off the bat what it's gonna look like on all the screens in the world because they have every screen this will show on... also if you forget zoom it's still only like 5 screen sizes: SE, 6, X, XS Plus, and XR.
How did they not test this on 5 different screen sizes, of which two it's entirely un-intuitive?
I'm personally torn on the new share sheet. It's actually fast now, which is nice, and I like the fact that it (supposedly) can put contacts in the top bar that I talk to frequently (which I guess no app has added support for yet?) But it's still a bit confusing how it's organized, and now it has two planes of scrolling and sometimes apps disappear off of them unless I pin them in "Favorites" or something like that and the list only has a limited number of items unless I go into the "More" option. But more on point, I don't get why it doesn't flash scroll indicators…isn't that the standard way that iOS has hinted at scrollable content for years?
An easy fix would be to do the gravity/pointmass type deal that Messages does for the message bubbles, so when the sheet "shoots up", you see that they're movable.
I switched to Android around the time iPhone 5 came out.
Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and confusing.
For some reason this always accidentally triggers when I’m using the ‘Mail’ app. After opening an email, it offers me the opportunity to ‘Undo Read’. It means ‘leave the email you just read marked as unread for now’, but somehow instead the displayed confirmation modal implies that iOS can reach into my brain and take back the information imparted by the email.
Just keep shaking until you see the popup appear. The phone also "thumps" (with the vibration motor) to let you know it felt what you were trying to do.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to posit that this is a better way.
Ha, yep I feel like an absolute idiot doing that in public. My genuinely favourite hidden/unintuitive feature is the force-touch on the on-screen keyboard to see a little cursor you can scroll around the text field you are using. I hate that it's so unintuitive, but it's incredibly useful
and i hate that they removed it in the latest generation! i know you can do the hold down on space instead, and i know that you can then tap with a second finger, but there’s so much more you could do much quicker with the force touch keyboard!
On many Android keyboards you can hold and drag on the space bar to do the same. You can also drag back on backspace to delete whole words/sentences. Similarly unintuitive though, I only know about it because I saw someone else mention it on the Internet.
They replaced/depreciated it in iOS 13 with some crazy three finger swipe thing that for the life of me I can’t remember, so I still shake my iPad or just hold down backspace.
They need to rebuild their software development team.
iOS 13 just added a delightful feature where long press on a web browser link it opens on Safari, even if you are in Firefox, and even if you are in private browsing. It pops up a split screen window that has no close-window button. The only way to close the pop up window is to exit your browser and go Home, and then go to Safari to clean up.
I too found that annoying. If I understand correctly what you’re referring to, if you notice closely, there is a “Hide Preview” on the top right of that Safari popup. Tap that once and you’ll be back to just seeing a nice menu of what to do with the link and no more opening the link in a Safari popup.
The visual cue that one exists is, let me check my notes, oh here it is "go fuck yourself."
The #1 thing that drives me crazy with phone UI is the huge amount of hidden functionality that you'll only ever discover if you find an article online or just randomly tap and swipe everything in the app until things happen. And then you have to remember that all in your head because there are no reminders anywhere about the functionality.
And what do they do with all of the space they save by not having indicators? Absolutely nothing at all. Tons of whitespace is added to the app so you are always scrolling around anyway.
Dunno about iOS but on android, one of the first things I do on a new phone is set all animations to twice the speed. I can't stand these sluggish animations.
The iPhones have degraded in every respect as far as I can tell. When I got my first Android phone about 4 years ago I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I was surprised at how expensive the iPhone was but after using a friends phone I understood that it was a higher quality product and you got what you paid for.
But my girlfriend recently got the latest one (11?) and I was shocked at how bad it is. It feels absolutely massive for a start. Has weird software. But it has a huge design flaw that I really struggle to believe actually exists. I've pinched myself several times and I'm now convinced that it's true. Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface. The cameras bulge out of the back such the whole thing rocks like a table with a short leg when you use it. If anyone can explain how that is considered OK I'd love to know.
Bugs me too (iPhone SE is the last good phone anyone made), but I think the assumption at this point is that it’s a $1000 phone and everyone puts a case on it, so as long as the case is as thick as the camera bump it’ll sit flat.
The iPad is worse. Camera bump sticks out so that it doesn’t sit flat, and no one should be using a 13” tablet as a camera so I’m not sure why they thought adding a good camera was important enough to make it not sit flat on a table.
On pictures, iPhone looks sleek, easy to brag about.
In spec sheets, iPhone is impressively thin.
In real life, iPhone is expectedly fragile, so people put protective covers on it. It also solves the problem of uneven shape.
In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this at no expense to Apple, which can continue to pretend they don't exist.
> In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this [...]
Absolutely. I'd go one further and say many owners don't want Apple to "solve" it. The cover can be more than utility, for some it's an expression of themselves. Plain covers. Sports team covers. Franchise covers. Utility covers with e.g. battery packs also say something about you. Covers are a feature, and I'm glad there's a healthy 3rd party market Apple doesn't control.
Agreed on phone cases, it's nice to have all the options, and if people are all using them anyway then the camera bump isn't as big a deal.
For iPads though, the only reason mine has a hard case on the back (instead of just a folding screen cover) is the stupid camera bump. I've literally never dropped it once, it doesn't need a case except for the fact that it's not flat. And I don't think people treat tablets as quite as much of a personal expression as their phones, there's really no good reason for most people to need an iPad case.
Maybe the USA is different but here in Japan the odds of seeing an iPhone without either a case or a ring are probably 1 in 1000. Problem solved. Further, there rows and rows and rows and rows of cases for sale.
I'm not saying the phone shouldn't sit flat (though I personally don't care). But just in looking around most people seem to want to customize their phone by adding a case so at least in Japan it's a non-issue.
Because you can't buy something for a thick phone to make it thinner. Each person can make their own decision on the thickness/other concerns trade-off.
Because the thinness is a design decision unilaterally made for you and whose potential downside comes at your expense.
I always get thick, rubberized cases. The high friction makes phones easy to hold, and they've never been damaged from drops (like I'm sure OEMs, especially Apple, would like for repair/replacement $$$). :3
I used my iPhone X un-cased for nearly two years based on that reasoning. My replacement is cased.
And I've realized: regardless of how thick the phone is, people are likely to drop them, and give the materials nature of these things, a case is going to be required. So I'd rather start with something as thin as possible, given that I'm going to add a case either way. The end result is therefore as thin as possible.
Because you can put a decent case on a thin phone and get a reasonably sized brick that can fit in a pocket and doesn't feel too awkward to hold in your hand. When you put a case on a not-so thin phone, it becomes way to large for most people.
No idea about the USA either, but I wouldn't like to imagine how big that thing is with an added case. Good grief. The phone comes in multiple colours. If it has to be used with a case it should come with a case. Otherwise it's like selling a car without seats.
You can't use a car without seats, but you can use a phone with or without case.
Case gives you options to personalize your phone too. If you want your phone to be as small as possible, don't use a case. Some people actually love large heavily stylized cases. To each their own.
I have a Xiaomi that copied the camera bulge from the iPhone X/XS. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I literally never ever tried to use a phone flat on the table. Why would I ever need to use it like that?! I always pick it up.
Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface
That's a feature, not a bug.
When placed on a surface, the phone becomes a tripod, so that any hard dirt or crumbs can't scratch the majority of the surface. It reduces the potential surface area and the parts of the phone that will most likely be scratched by being placed on a dirty surface are confined to the bottom edge and the edge of the lens protrusion.
The best user interfaces (which include some video games) have great discoverability for new users, while rewarding the user with greater speed and efficiency after learning the app after a time.
With all the things mentioned in this thread so far, how are you supposed to discover them if you are a new user?
The poor design described in the article is really bad.
But
> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.
Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).
I use both and am now a current iPhone user. Certain things on iPhone (like muting all notifications with "Do Not Disturb" are much more unintuitive on the iPhone)
I’m genuinely curious, how do you turn on Do Not Disturb in Android? On iOS, you swipe the top right corner to open the control panel and then tap the moon icon for enabling Do Not Disturb. I won’t argue that magically knowing the control panel is in the top right corner or that moon == Do Not Disturb is intuitive, but I am curious how android does it that is significantly better?
I think it's very device dependent sincem ost OEMs ship some kind of non-native shit UI on top, but my Android phone has a slider (hardware) on the side of the phone like an iPhone to toggle between this.
Android 9/10: Pull from the top to open your "tray" where you can turn on/off things like wifi, flashlight, airplane mode, do not disturb, etc. You can re-order and enable/disable those items too, I forget what it looks like stock but mine is right at the top.
While not playing media, the volume buttons control ringer volume. If you turn the volume all the way down and then press the volume button one more time it enabled Do Not Disturb. When you press the volume button again at any time, the volume indicator drops down from the top to show it is in Do Not Disturb. You can cancel Do Not Disturb by pressing the volume up button one more time or pressing the "Turn Off Now" link in the menu that shows the Do Not Disturb setting.
You can also Settings > Sound > Do not Disturb where you can change automatic settings, allow priority notifications which break through, etc.
> Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn.
Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears.
It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back.
Of course users can also arrange apps on their home screen however they want and ignore the launcher altogether.
> Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it!
I haven't witnessed this, but anecdotes are useless! I've had to show iOS users how to force kill misbehaving apps. Back in the days of 1 button knowing the right sequence of taps / holds to activate any of the button's many features was, well, the exact opposite of intuitive. Not that the modern practice of various arbitrary swipes around the screen to do stuff is much better.
On stock Android, one button is switch task, one button is go home, one button is go back. Three of the most common things users want to do, all right there.
A quick access menu + notifications can be pulled down from the top. Pull down once to get notifications and common shortcuts (Wi-Fi, flashlight, rotate, Do Not disturb, shortcut to settings), pull down again to get less commonly used options (Airplane Mode, BT Toggle, manual brightness adjustment)
Media playback stuff is done in the same UI as notifications, media playback apps pin a card to the top of the notifications list. No separate UI to learn, everything is in one place.
Don't get me wrong, Android used to be terrible. It was slow, buggy, and background apps had free rein to thrash the system to the point of it being unusable. But now days it is pretty good.
Also I can set my own animated wallpapers, so that is pretty nifty.
(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
>(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
Was that the one with all the floating "tiles" on the screen? IIRC it was influenced by the Zune UX. I remember when my father purchased a Windows phone as his first smartphone. It had already been announced they'd stop supporting them, but the Verizon guy didn't tell him that. I actually rather liked the UX and OS; the thing about Android's "desktop" that I dislike is its "pagination" - i.e. you can fit 12 icons on one page, and have to flip through them. So I have my calendar on one page, 8 icons or so there, my work email on one, my personal email on the next. I can navigate it quite quickly, but compared to the Windows tiles it seems antiquated for some reason.
Thank God that setting does not persist through reboots!
Seriously though, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the control center will appear, a button to turn the flashlight on or off should be there.
If it's a X/Xs/11. It's on the initial lock screen. The bottom left of 2 buttons has a flashlight icon. You just touch the phone to wake it up then click the flashlight.
I managed to lock myself out of the office earlier this year on a work from home day, so no one I worked with was there and my phone / keys were at my desk.
We're in an office park, so I could still get into the building, just not into our office.
Wandered around a while hoping to find someone that would let me use their computer. Eventually found someone I'd seen a couple times before. Told them I was locked out and asked if I could use their computer to contact someone who could come let me in.
Instead of their computer, they handed me their iPhone and said they'd be back in a few minutes. I had absolutely zero idea what the heck was going on. Eventually did manage to find a browser. Took probably a minute to figure out how to open a new tab.
Finally managed to navigate to the Slack page and sign in, only to be greeted by a notice that I couldn't actually use Slack from the website, I had to download the app for "optimal experience". I wasn't about to install an app on some random person's phone, so instead I just accepted defeat.
Handed the phone back when they came to check. Told them no luck but I'd figure something out. Ended up just walking two miles to the coffee shop I was planning to meet my wife at for lunch and waiting.
You will note that I did solve the problem. I met my wife where I was planning to meet her anyway, and from there used her phone to make the needed connections.
All told I lost maybe an hour of my day. Not really a big deal.
Sorry, didn't mean to be critical. Just trying to be funny. Many folks nowadays (my sister included) won't ever resort to voice calls; she won't even answer them.
Hahaha, funny, I feel the exact same way about Android whenever I pick one up. Not saying one is better or worse, just different enough to be unintuitive and confusing to an outsider.
I very much agree. Valid point, bad presentation. Embedding screenshots of dialogues and Twitter threads is something I'd really prefer not to get widespread.
Hey grumpy - awesome site, but I thought "Cancel Subscription? - YES / CANCEL" was the title of the post and spent sometime wondering why it had nothing to do with subscriptions:
I already mis-swipe in my Reddit app and downvote instead of upvote... the "small" vs "large" swipe option feels like something that gets mis-input a lot. Okay for something inconsequential like votes, but I can't imagine deleting something I wanted to save because of it.
This is great, thank you for posting this. It seems like a good counterpart for Dark Patterns [1], though these examples are simply very confusing design choices rather than outright malicious ones. Anyway I'm happy to see Telegram's (and I believe Whatsapp's) decision to put archived chats at the top of the normal chat list here, that has always been totally inexplicable to me. I want these chats to go away, but not to fully delete them... on top of the chat list seems like the worst place to put them!
Me too! Until reading this article, I hadn't found the other commands. I had been missing "Save image" and "Set as wallpaper" and wondered why they had become so difficult to access. FYI, it's also possible to save a photo in iMessages by long-pressing it.
Wow...this is TOO weird. I was helping my mom the other day with her iPhone (I use Android so I'm not all that familiar), and I could NOT figure out how to save the image. Now I know why...
I have an ipad at work we can't sign into, since we changed the email address on the iCloud account (months ago), and the old address is on a domain we don't use any more...
On my iPhone SE, it is also well-spaced and perfectly cropped, omitting the 'copy' row and perfectly finishing below the second line of icons.
(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions, which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)), went. Oh well...)
Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods. Then even the touchscreen will be removed, to be replaced by a LIDAR chip mounted around your belt buckle. The design of the Great Wizards of Old will have come to fruition, and men will call forth driving directions and Amazon orders using mystic incantations and vigorous, unnatural hand movements.
> Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods.
This function is already available (with the minor difference that it speaks to you using, you know, words and stuff). It's called VoiceOver. It's designed for blind users.
Eventually we'll be forced to have chips implanted in our brains as babies where we can communicate with the giant computer in the sky which can also regulate gland secretions.
On my SE I also have only two rows, no menu entries. (1)
I've also wondered where the functionality went.
Without this article I would never know that it's actually there but hidden.
Somehow I feel really bad about that.
-----
1) I don't remember if I've tried to adjust the font size. My pet peeve regarding that is the font in the Notes app which has a and o similar enough to allow false reading of anything that is not plain common words.
This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.
I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.
I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI.
I've reluctantly upgraded iOS here and there, mostly because my bank app requires it. Other than that, I've hated upgrading because there's always new UIs that are more confusing than before. Yes, there's sometimes some nice newer features (the call handoff thing is kinda nice at times), but... I'm also on an SE (just bought a new one in Feb) and much of the new stuff assumes newer/bigger phones too. I'd like security updates on previous iOS versions for earlier devices, but I'm also aware of the logistical problems that would create.
My primary complaint of the share sheet is that it’s suggesting I share things with people I either never text or texted once for a specific purpose with no reason to communicate with ever again.
This is a very common issue. The best and most common solution (besides visual indicators for scroll) is to make sure you are always cropping some elements. Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.
This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like 3.1-3.2 elements.
I thought about this and while it does work, there's not enough screen real estate on a phone for this to be efficient. Phone screens are already very narrow and vertical. So either the scroll bar would be too narrow to be useful or too large.
Keep in mind that this "scroll bar" would only have to indicate that there is more content, or at most, which part of the content you are looking at. It doesn't have to be interactive (tap/drag to scroll) because you can still scroll by swiping. So a few pixels would be enough if the color stands out enough.
In general I'd much prefer a scroll indicator to a scroll bar on mobile. Google Play Music gets this precisely wrong: the album list lets you click a play button on the album cover as a shortcut, but the button is so close to the edge of the screen that it's very difficult to avoid hitting the scroll bar area and scrolling to a random section of the list instead of hitting play. So you have to seek to the album you want again, and, because you are optimistic beyond rationality, you try again, and whoops! Did it again...
> Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.
In this case it's not in a fluid container. All of the elements shown are of a fixed size—the photo, the row of contacts, the row of apps, and then the actions. (Well, the list of actions is fluid, but those are mostly off-screen).
Plus, one of Apple's advantages is that they have a small set of possible screen dimensions, because there are only a few phones. This should absolutely have gotten caught.
I used to use that about 5-6 years ago, you have to be very delicate with it because it can look extremely cheap, but if you make it too subtle it's impossible to see.
What's worse is that if there's enough of a bottom boundary to the last visible bit of content in the viewport, it doesn't look like there's anything below it at all, which puts you in the same position.
> This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance.
I just did some testing:
• Play Store uses scroll-snapping for the horizontal scrolling
• Play Store doesn't use scroll-snapping for the vertical scrolling (they should adjust white space to ensure you see 0.1 of an item at the bottom). Fiddling with text size and display size in the display settings can cause vertical items to exact fit (unobvious that vertical scrolling is available).
Had the same issue the first time I was using Uber, around 1.5 year ago. Uber is not available in my region, and I was in the States, wanting to catch a ride with my colleagues to the airport, so that was my first time in the app. We were going long-haul and had a lot of luggage. First car that comes in is a Corolla in which there is no way we could fit. The guy (in poor English) tells us to choose a bigger car. We try to tap around, just to get a Jetta.
At the end we asked a guy in a shop near the spot we were waiting, for him just to swipe the ride type right to left. Felt like an idiot, because the three types available at were perfectly centered and aligned.
There is no need to include the quip about the drivers poor English other than racism. It added nothing to the story and it wouldn’t have mattered if the person was an expert English speaker either. You just wanted to be racist.
Testing on older devices is something many (any it appears iOS) doesn't do well enough.
I ran into this with an apps verification system. Because of the positioning on an iPhone 7 you couldn't perform verification. When I contacted them I learned they don't test on iPhone 7's because they are too old. This was prior to the 11 coming out.
I've also had to help someone with this problem on their older device.
A casualty of always chasing new is design and QA for older devices.
This issue confused me too, on my iPhone SE. The top action is copy and is partially cut off on the screen, and I didn't know save image was below it. At least it being cut off eventually led me to scroll down. Apple has destroyed UI intuitiveness by going too far in the minimalist direction. Sometimes we need some damn scrollbars or indicators.
However, it appears this changes based on the app? If I long press an image to save it from the browser or from the Toot! (mastodon) app, I get the regular save image dialog that I've always gotten on iOS.
If I long press an image to save it from Twitterific, I get the share sheet.
Ugh. The share sheet annoys me too. I get the convenience of having "most common" contacts at the top to send things to, but most of the time this is in the way for me and I'd prefer it completely off and as expected with Apple's "features" they rarely provide options to turn them off.
While I prefer iOS over Android, it's stuff like this that I realize is a big trade-off for me.
Edit: Looks like I can at least re-order so "Save Image" is the top option... but it's still buried beneath the contacts and apps
Our mainstream iOS app has tons of these kind of issues. Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things. I did UI design back in the 80's when it was actually a programmer duty more than an art thing. Of course back then were no phone sized screens and the UIs were much simpler in desktop apps. But the concept of making a UI usable for all sorts of people is still the same. Apple traditionally does not use user lab testing (which is not terrible in itself, often I've gotten mostly useless feedback when I watched them) but sometimes you work in an environment that has too many people who know the app too well to notice issues.
I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability in UI was with Windows 95 - and even that wasn't free from form-over-function issues. In Windows 3.0 it was meant that only elements you could interact with the mouse would have a beveled 3D appearance, so people would know just by looking at a screen what they would be able to interact with. However it wasn't fully followed - checkboxes, radio buttons and input boxes were flat. Instead of addressing that Windows 95 made everything 3D.
Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a Win95-styled UI.
Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these inconsistencies.
I haven't really thought much about accessibility TBH, especially around KDE. At least not outside some basic stuff, like color schemes and the like.
I haven't used KDE much but from my little use i found it better than GNOME - mainly thanks to Qt - but still leans a bit too much into the flat trend (especially some newer things that use QML instead of Qt Widgets). Still, if i absolutely had to choose between the KDE and GNOME i'd choose KDE. Fortunately there are more choices and if i had to go with a desktop environment that currently exists (as opposed to my fantasy one :-P) i'd go with XFCE.
Though in practice i use Window Maker, but that is mainly out of habit as it doesn't exactly match what i'm talking about. But I do use Thunar as a file manager and Mousepad as my notepad-like text editor.
Themes are not enough (f.e. there isn't much you can do from a theme when it comes to an application using a header bar instead of a menu bar) and i wasn't talking about imitating Windows' style (as i said it is inconsistent).
The way i see it, things that can be interacted with the mouse should have specific styling rules (not necessarily 100% the same), things where you can input text with the keyboard should have their own styling rules that make them distinguishable and things that are static should also have their own rules. Things that group other things (group boxes, tabs, etc) should have their own rules, things that represent multiple options that are visible at the same time should have their own styling rules that clearly show the selected/unselected state. Some of these rules should not interfere with others since some elements may need to mix them (e.g. tabs can be interacted with the mouse, group elements and show multiple options that are visible at the same time). There also other cases that may be helpful, e.g., things that you can navigate to using the Tab key (buttons in a dialog) may be styled differently than things that you can only navigate via clicking (buttons in a toolbar). Similarly with shortcut keys - Windows made the Alt+<key> letter not be underlined unless you press alt, which i always found a bad idea. On the contrary, i'd like to see not just Alt+<key> be visible in a dialog but also other keys that would affect the dialog, like placing a small graphic for Return and Escape in buttons that are equivalent to these keys (nextstep had the return graphic, but AFAIK not the escape thing).
Of course i have not a clear idea of exactly what i'd do, these are just rough ideas. It is something i'd explore if i ever worked on such a thing :-). And yeah, some of it might be information overload and/or look ugly but i think it is better than the information underload we get with current looks-over-anything-else approach :-P.
You know, speaking of Bob, one thing I've been meaning to experiment with is a Minecraft-based desktop UI.
I'm completely serious. Minecraft is relatively intuitive, the space is completely malleable, human minds are already tuned to navigating such spaces...
There's even some precedent in Bob and PSDoom, among others.
A couple months ago, after 5-6 years of not playing it, I installed Minecraft again fiddled around for a week or so. It took me a good day or two to get a solid grasp on all the UI changes that had happened since I stopped playing. I had to get on Google just to figure out how to eat.
I agree that it's relatively intuitive. Emphasis on the "relatively" part - I'm thinking here that it's intuitive compared to the UX changes and kippleization that iOS, Google web apps, things like that have undergone over the same time period. That's not exactly a high bar to clear.
I miss good old fashioned menus. It's one reason I liked the PalmOS UX so much better than iOS and Android.
Menus are so wonderfully discoverable. The first thing I did when opening a new app (on PDA or desktop) was drop each one down to find out what tools I have available. Like a pilot looking over his cockpit or a craftsman laying out his toolbox.
It seems a lot of the last 10 years of UI "progress" has been about burying things in order to "simplify" (aka dumb down) interfaces for audiences developers think of as kindergartners.
Zen of Palm showed us streamlined, clutter-free minimalism is possible to achieve without making your app stupid.
When programmers get too distract by having their own fun, we get hard to maintain complex code base. But hand designers do it, it directly harms users.
We, as an industry, used to do a lot of UX research. Today's designers ignore all of it because they don't like what it says. Spacial file managers? Global menu bars? 3D buttons? Ew. Let's just make shit up.
In reality, most design work these days is shifting to research and usability testing. Any designer who doesn't consider these things is just not a great designer and has much to learn.
Well I can assure you that despite your experience, that is not generally considered good design methodology in the greater world of design. I don't doubt that it happens though.
This link is a great example of bad design, though. They don't even have to design for infinite viewport sides like you would on the web, there's a limited number of screen sizes this UI will appear on. In my work it's common practice to view your design at numerous different sizes and in the past issues like this were something we would specifically look out for when you have content of dynamic height that includes calls to action.
The solution is usually to programmatically ensure it is never perfectly cropped or, ideally, include hints there's more content or you can scroll.
Nearest I can figure, all the tuning is based on "engagement", which is a metric of how long a user spends on a thing. That's a useful metric to tune for if you only care about shoving ads at people, but is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you want if you're trying to help people get shit done.
Precisely. If modern touch user interfaces are the result of any carefully-gathered metrics (a premise I find suspicious, but let's run with it), the metrics themselves must be orthogonal to the user actually being able to complete tasks in as short a time as possible. Efficiency, speed, and accuracy were the sort of metrics used in legacy UI design.
But you are right, it's likely that modern metrics are things such as engagement, and whether the user is doing actions that are high-value for the company, such as sharing content with their social networks.
I think it's more that measuring engagement is cheap: just add some metrics to your app. Measuring usability is expensive: you need to give large groups of users your thing and be physically present to see how they try to interact with it.
I would be fairly surprised if startups regularly tested their UX the way e.g. Microsoft (used?) to test some of their products: give it to a room full of old people who have never touched your app and ask them to do something with it.
There may be more R&D and UX testing. But there's a hell of a lot more design going on, much of it small and one-off. And the research doesn't seem to be filtering through.
Too, as noted, the UX metric is frequently "engagement", which is not the same as usability.
>Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things.
This stereotyping of a profession is becoming a cliché and is being rude towards a profession who has contributed so much to make technology accessible.
The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one. This is perhaps a good example of how 'fragmentation devil' is coming back to bite iOS now - which probably is not factored in Apple's product development process.
Designers deserve every bit of this stereotyping. There was a time when designers were taught to value fitness for use. Now "design" seems to be exclusively about aesthetics. This may be rooted in how designers are taught or simply in how they now practice. Or it could be that managers insist on aesthetics-only, in which case designers need to push back hard.
Whatever the cause it's a failure on the part of designers and their profession, and they deserve criticism for it.
> This may be rooted in how designers are taught or simply in how they now practice
No course or degree on interaction design - free online to ivy leagues across the world - teaches 'design for aesthetics' and neither do designers in design departments of startups or of big corporates have design sprints where designs are shortlisted because one is more beautiful than others.
Infact 'Design Sprint' [0] 'Design Thinking' [1] are things because design is about problem solving. I understand majority in HN are engineers/developers but that is no reason to make this is a tech echo chamber.
I'll take your word for that, and I'm also encouraged by your comments. Nevertheless it's clear from their products that Apple in recent years became infected with an "aesthetics is all that matters" approach to design. So maybe my general complaint should be narrowed from "modern designers" to simply "Jony Ive and those who emulate him" while still admiring designers who carry on the traditions exemplified by e.g. Raymond Loewy, Ray Eames, and Herman Miller.
> There was a time when designers were taught to value fitness for use.
I've worked with designers who I saw specifically laying elements out so as to avoid the issue the article author's wife ran into.
There is a problem though. Phone screens are of variable height, and user's can change their font settings. While this issue shouldn't happen with default settings with OEM apps or UX elements, it is not possible to avoid it completely given the exact wrong set of circumstances lining up.
Of course, not hiding the scroll bar would be best, and ideal is having multiple affordances, such as partially clipped content and a scroll bar.
> The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one.
Strong disagree with this point. The device from the example is an older one (iPhone 8), and this is a brand-new OS. This was not existing software that's being applied to a new screen size -- it's the other way around.
The design spec should have taken the older device into account -- there are still millions of devices with this screen size out there* -- and noted exceptions or adjustments from the iPhone X/11 size.
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*And still being sold. And never mind the SE, another screen size which was still being sold just 12 months ago.
I don't understand your point. Shouldn't designers design the interfaces for all devices and screen sizes? If a designer fails to account for the specific sizes of an actually supported device then it is the designer's fault; perhaps just an oversight but nevertheless a fault. If the designer thinks it is fine to only design for iPhone X and above and let older devices suffer from inattention, it is most definitely the designer's fault that has made technology inaccessible to users that might not be affluent enough to afford newer devices.
It is a serious decline - Apple was literally the best there was at this in the past.
I noticed their design attitudes towards affordances and contextual clues changing around the time Ives made some claim about how phone users have been educated about touch UI sufficiently to start dropping them. That seems to have become an general excuse to lean towards 'pretty' over 'functional'.
And worse are third party apps. They always have been more variable, of course, but the old HCI guidelines were actually really good, so much so that people followed them because they were convincing.
UI decay isn't the only reason I use my phone and Ipad less, but it is one of them. (Current Screen Time: 24 minutes a day. That's mostly checking email while standing in line and mashing 2FA buttons.) The dynamic lists of recent activities and such mean I have to stare for a while to see what the options are this time, and generally be careful not to make mistakes. I've turned off autocorrect, because it makes enough enough mistakes that it is slower (and really irritating) to use.
Exactly. It's the same concept with buttons that give no visual indication they've been pressed, then 3 seconds later something happens. But depressed button state looks so dated!
I've learned to just wait. That list that appeared to have rendered completely is going to refresh half a second later causing you to click the wrong item. That button did something, you just don't know it yet.
mainstream iOS app has tons of these kind of issues. Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things. I did UI design back in the 80's when it was actually a programmer duty more than an art thing. Of course back then were no phone sized screens and the UIs were much simpler in desktop apps. But the concept of making a UI usable for all sorts of people is still the same. Apple traditionally does not use user lab testing (which is not
The contacts in the share sheet annoy me.
Pixel also has this “direct share” that can’t be disabled and simply uses up real estate while being a privacy issue for me.
Samsung has an option in settings to remove it.
It took me a long time to figure out in the first place that I had to “share” to do actions that are not sharing, like saving to my photos. I was also surprised by this new wrinkle on the iPhone SE. I’d use android if I had a phone in this form factor.
My non techie friend experienced the same thing, upgraded to iOS 13, went to see him and he started cursing about "how the f do I save a photo from my messages why the f does Apple got to remove something like that WTF!!!!"
I immediately thought no way they would remove that he must be mistaken, I just upgraded too and hand't tried to do that action. Looked at his phone and sure enough it was gone, tried all sorts of things finally Googled it and oh wow you got to be kidding me scroll down but no indicator you can, that's bad, there is going to be a lot of confused people, why would they do that?
I am pretty sure that was one of the first things I tried and nothing happened. Just tried on my iPhone X and the long pressed showed that menu, is there any difference there between models, he has like a 6 or 7?
Either way long press has the same non discoverability issue especially for not techie people who are used to it working a certain way before.
570 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadThe problem with just showing a bar at the bottom is that iOS already uses a bar at the bottom to invoke the app switcher. Maybe a small triangle in the corner would help.
Common phrases heard on Linux Desktop software issue trackers and forums:
"Why would you want that?" "You don't want to do that, do it <the way I do it>." "Works on my machine." "PRs are welcome." "We've rejected your PR because there isn't any demand for this."
This is the community that thinks .desktop files are a good idea and largely uses the GUI as a really fancy tmux. They're hopeless.
Lots of people can’t tell the difference between something looking awesome and working well.
That's also what I suggested in my answer to onion2k below. I agree, it's not hard. But it does require their design team to overcome some instinctive minimalism.
Or Apple could do the right thing and go back to a 3.5" screen size on all their phones, no exceptions. Even a 4" screen size would be better than these clown-phone monstrosities. IOS could then just dead-pixel all pixels outside of the center 3.5" screen on all existing clown-phones for backwards compatibility.
People it's clearly an unpopular opinion, and those bigger screens literally fly off the shelves...
Right now I am looking at the Sony Xperia 1 as it seems to be the best "smallish" phone now a days.
Yes, I know I am in the minority.
Nope. A few years ago I used to really want a large-screened phone. Then I got one with a 5" screen and found out its clunky and awful to carry around. Standardizing the screen back to 4" or 3.5" would greatly improve my tolerance for carrying it around and, if the resolution were also standardized, would greatly simplify UX design.
How did they not test this on 5 different screen sizes, of which two it's entirely un-intuitive?
I find it annoying that I cannot turn it off. It's very easy to accidentally get close to sending a contact an image I do not want to send them
Both contacts are people I haven’t spoken to in months/years. One is my MIL who I never text and just occasionally receive a call from.
Meanwhile the people I message near daily don’t show up anywhere.
The top bar is completely and utterly useless, and causes common tasks to be cut off below a fold I didn’t even know existed until OPs post.
Apple. It just works.
Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and confusing.
But I feel like I look stupid. And it does not always work.
There has to be a better way.
Just keep shaking until you see the popup appear. The phone also "thumps" (with the vibration motor) to let you know it felt what you were trying to do.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to posit that this is a better way.
See: https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/04/gboard-te...
They need to rebuild their software development team.
From the main Messages window, swipe down and previously hidden search bar appears. There's no indication this is an option or it exists.
As far as I know it's been there since at least iOS 9.0 (probably longer) and 6 people hadn't found it yet.
The #1 thing that drives me crazy with phone UI is the huge amount of hidden functionality that you'll only ever discover if you find an article online or just randomly tap and swipe everything in the app until things happen. And then you have to remember that all in your head because there are no reminders anywhere about the functionality.
And what do they do with all of the space they save by not having indicators? Absolutely nothing at all. Tons of whitespace is added to the app so you are always scrolling around anyway.
Or when podcasts are buffering, instead of giving an indication, the play button stays on pause. Confused me until someone on the internet told me.
The UI is unintuitive, but for work purposes it was fine.
Found the near daily updates I had to "sign in" AND enter passcode for annoying. Especially when I was in work crisis mode.
Not sure why Android doesn't have these problems, but I don't understand why anyone would get an iPhone, they feel years outdated.
But my girlfriend recently got the latest one (11?) and I was shocked at how bad it is. It feels absolutely massive for a start. Has weird software. But it has a huge design flaw that I really struggle to believe actually exists. I've pinched myself several times and I'm now convinced that it's true. Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface. The cameras bulge out of the back such the whole thing rocks like a table with a short leg when you use it. If anyone can explain how that is considered OK I'd love to know.
The iPad is worse. Camera bump sticks out so that it doesn’t sit flat, and no one should be using a 13” tablet as a camera so I’m not sure why they thought adding a good camera was important enough to make it not sit flat on a table.
On pictures, iPhone looks sleek, easy to brag about.
In spec sheets, iPhone is impressively thin.
In real life, iPhone is expectedly fragile, so people put protective covers on it. It also solves the problem of uneven shape.
In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this at no expense to Apple, which can continue to pretend they don't exist.
Absolutely. I'd go one further and say many owners don't want Apple to "solve" it. The cover can be more than utility, for some it's an expression of themselves. Plain covers. Sports team covers. Franchise covers. Utility covers with e.g. battery packs also say something about you. Covers are a feature, and I'm glad there's a healthy 3rd party market Apple doesn't control.
For iPads though, the only reason mine has a hard case on the back (instead of just a folding screen cover) is the stupid camera bump. I've literally never dropped it once, it doesn't need a case except for the fact that it's not flat. And I don't think people treat tablets as quite as much of a personal expression as their phones, there's really no good reason for most people to need an iPad case.
I'm not saying the phone shouldn't sit flat (though I personally don't care). But just in looking around most people seem to want to customize their phone by adding a case so at least in Japan it's a non-issue.
I always get thick, rubberized cases. The high friction makes phones easy to hold, and they've never been damaged from drops (like I'm sure OEMs, especially Apple, would like for repair/replacement $$$). :3
And I've realized: regardless of how thick the phone is, people are likely to drop them, and give the materials nature of these things, a case is going to be required. So I'd rather start with something as thin as possible, given that I'm going to add a case either way. The end result is therefore as thin as possible.
Case gives you options to personalize your phone too. If you want your phone to be as small as possible, don't use a case. Some people actually love large heavily stylized cases. To each their own.
That's a feature, not a bug.
When placed on a surface, the phone becomes a tripod, so that any hard dirt or crumbs can't scratch the majority of the surface. It reduces the potential surface area and the parts of the phone that will most likely be scratched by being placed on a dirty surface are confined to the bottom edge and the edge of the lens protrusion.
With all the things mentioned in this thread so far, how are you supposed to discover them if you are a new user?
But
> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.
Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).
You can also Settings > Sound > Do not Disturb where you can change automatic settings, allow priority notifications which break through, etc.
Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears.
It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back.
Of course users can also arrange apps on their home screen however they want and ignore the launcher altogether.
> Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it!
I haven't witnessed this, but anecdotes are useless! I've had to show iOS users how to force kill misbehaving apps. Back in the days of 1 button knowing the right sequence of taps / holds to activate any of the button's many features was, well, the exact opposite of intuitive. Not that the modern practice of various arbitrary swipes around the screen to do stuff is much better.
On stock Android, one button is switch task, one button is go home, one button is go back. Three of the most common things users want to do, all right there.
A quick access menu + notifications can be pulled down from the top. Pull down once to get notifications and common shortcuts (Wi-Fi, flashlight, rotate, Do Not disturb, shortcut to settings), pull down again to get less commonly used options (Airplane Mode, BT Toggle, manual brightness adjustment)
Media playback stuff is done in the same UI as notifications, media playback apps pin a card to the top of the notifications list. No separate UI to learn, everything is in one place.
Don't get me wrong, Android used to be terrible. It was slow, buggy, and background apps had free rein to thrash the system to the point of it being unusable. But now days it is pretty good.
Also I can set my own animated wallpapers, so that is pretty nifty.
(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
Was that the one with all the floating "tiles" on the screen? IIRC it was influenced by the Zune UX. I remember when my father purchased a Windows phone as his first smartphone. It had already been announced they'd stop supporting them, but the Verizon guy didn't tell him that. I actually rather liked the UX and OS; the thing about Android's "desktop" that I dislike is its "pagination" - i.e. you can fit 12 icons on one page, and have to flip through them. So I have my calendar on one page, 8 icons or so there, my work email on one, my personal email on the next. I can navigate it quite quickly, but compared to the Windows tiles it seems antiquated for some reason.
Everything was laid out so that further content was partially clipped. It was awesome. The OS was butter smooth and great on battery life.
Seriously though, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the control center will appear, a button to turn the flashlight on or off should be there.
We're in an office park, so I could still get into the building, just not into our office.
Wandered around a while hoping to find someone that would let me use their computer. Eventually found someone I'd seen a couple times before. Told them I was locked out and asked if I could use their computer to contact someone who could come let me in.
Instead of their computer, they handed me their iPhone and said they'd be back in a few minutes. I had absolutely zero idea what the heck was going on. Eventually did manage to find a browser. Took probably a minute to figure out how to open a new tab.
Finally managed to navigate to the Slack page and sign in, only to be greeted by a notice that I couldn't actually use Slack from the website, I had to download the app for "optimal experience". I wasn't about to install an app on some random person's phone, so instead I just accepted defeat.
Handed the phone back when they came to check. Told them no luck but I'd figure something out. Ended up just walking two miles to the coffee shop I was planning to meet my wife at for lunch and waiting.
End slightly related rant.
All told I lost maybe an hour of my day. Not really a big deal.
"she couldn't figure out how to share photos, so I called her"
Could this not wait until later?
And yeah, it pains us to no end :)
2. It’s a challenge because someone would need to approve submitted content, but I hope we’ll figure something out
https://pic.t0.vc/ZYIU.png
They even trip me up sometimes, and I write posts there :)
I already mis-swipe in my Reddit app and downvote instead of upvote... the "small" vs "large" swipe option feels like something that gets mis-input a lot. Okay for something inconsequential like votes, but I can't imagine deleting something I wanted to save because of it.
[1] https://twitter.com/darkpatterns
(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions, which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)), went. Oh well...)
Look at us trying to appease the machine spirits.
This function is already available (with the minor difference that it speaks to you using, you know, words and stuff). It's called VoiceOver. It's designed for blind users.
I took screenshots of my share sheet[0] and my text size settings[1].
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/PNH8zKk.jpg
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/Y07lEQE.jpg
I've also wondered where the functionality went.
Without this article I would never know that it's actually there but hidden.
Somehow I feel really bad about that.
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1) I don't remember if I've tried to adjust the font size. My pet peeve regarding that is the font in the Notes app which has a and o similar enough to allow false reading of anything that is not plain common words.
I took screenshots of my share sheet[0] and my text size settings[1].
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/PNH8zKk.jpg
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/Y07lEQE.jpg
I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.
I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI.
On iOS, if I want to use Siri, I'm stuck with Apple Maps, etc.
iOS has always had some very explicit misses on affordances. Force touch led to a lot of them.
This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like 3.1-3.2 elements.
Edit: example, you can see how this is used in apps as well as screenshots: https://www.androidcentral.com/play-store-getting-material-d...
Yes, but you normally cannot control that :)
The problem here is that Apple used no visual affordances. Scroll bars are the wrong choice, but there are others.
In this case it's not in a fluid container. All of the elements shown are of a fixed size—the photo, the row of contacts, the row of apps, and then the actions. (Well, the list of actions is fluid, but those are mostly off-screen).
Plus, one of Apple's advantages is that they have a small set of possible screen dimensions, because there are only a few phones. This should absolutely have gotten caught.
These don't have to be scrollbars. A pattern I've seen lately is a semi-opaque white gradient to indicate "you can scroll more."
What's worse is that if there's enough of a bottom boundary to the last visible bit of content in the viewport, it doesn't look like there's anything below it at all, which puts you in the same position.
I just did some testing:
• Play Store uses scroll-snapping for the horizontal scrolling
• Play Store doesn't use scroll-snapping for the vertical scrolling (they should adjust white space to ensure you see 0.1 of an item at the bottom). Fiddling with text size and display size in the display settings can cause vertical items to exact fit (unobvious that vertical scrolling is available).
• There is a CSS feature for this: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-snappoints
At the end we asked a guy in a shop near the spot we were waiting, for him just to swipe the ride type right to left. Felt like an idiot, because the three types available at were perfectly centered and aligned.
I ran into this with an apps verification system. Because of the positioning on an iPhone 7 you couldn't perform verification. When I contacted them I learned they don't test on iPhone 7's because they are too old. This was prior to the 11 coming out.
I've also had to help someone with this problem on their older device.
A casualty of always chasing new is design and QA for older devices.
However, it appears this changes based on the app? If I long press an image to save it from the browser or from the Toot! (mastodon) app, I get the regular save image dialog that I've always gotten on iOS.
If I long press an image to save it from Twitterific, I get the share sheet.
Ugh. The share sheet annoys me too. I get the convenience of having "most common" contacts at the top to send things to, but most of the time this is in the way for me and I'd prefer it completely off and as expected with Apple's "features" they rarely provide options to turn them off.
While I prefer iOS over Android, it's stuff like this that I realize is a big trade-off for me.
Edit: Looks like I can at least re-order so "Save Image" is the top option... but it's still buried beneath the contacts and apps
Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a Win95-styled UI.
Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these inconsistencies.
I haven't used KDE much but from my little use i found it better than GNOME - mainly thanks to Qt - but still leans a bit too much into the flat trend (especially some newer things that use QML instead of Qt Widgets). Still, if i absolutely had to choose between the KDE and GNOME i'd choose KDE. Fortunately there are more choices and if i had to go with a desktop environment that currently exists (as opposed to my fantasy one :-P) i'd go with XFCE.
Though in practice i use Window Maker, but that is mainly out of habit as it doesn't exactly match what i'm talking about. But I do use Thunar as a file manager and Mousepad as my notepad-like text editor.
The way i see it, things that can be interacted with the mouse should have specific styling rules (not necessarily 100% the same), things where you can input text with the keyboard should have their own styling rules that make them distinguishable and things that are static should also have their own rules. Things that group other things (group boxes, tabs, etc) should have their own rules, things that represent multiple options that are visible at the same time should have their own styling rules that clearly show the selected/unselected state. Some of these rules should not interfere with others since some elements may need to mix them (e.g. tabs can be interacted with the mouse, group elements and show multiple options that are visible at the same time). There also other cases that may be helpful, e.g., things that you can navigate to using the Tab key (buttons in a dialog) may be styled differently than things that you can only navigate via clicking (buttons in a toolbar). Similarly with shortcut keys - Windows made the Alt+<key> letter not be underlined unless you press alt, which i always found a bad idea. On the contrary, i'd like to see not just Alt+<key> be visible in a dialog but also other keys that would affect the dialog, like placing a small graphic for Return and Escape in buttons that are equivalent to these keys (nextstep had the return graphic, but AFAIK not the escape thing).
Of course i have not a clear idea of exactly what i'd do, these are just rough ideas. It is something i'd explore if i ever worked on such a thing :-). And yeah, some of it might be information overload and/or look ugly but i think it is better than the information underload we get with current looks-over-anything-else approach :-P.
Way to throw Bob under the bus...
I'm completely serious. Minecraft is relatively intuitive, the space is completely malleable, human minds are already tuned to navigating such spaces...
There's even some precedent in Bob and PSDoom, among others.
I agree that it's relatively intuitive. Emphasis on the "relatively" part - I'm thinking here that it's intuitive compared to the UX changes and kippleization that iOS, Google web apps, things like that have undergone over the same time period. That's not exactly a high bar to clear.
Menus are so wonderfully discoverable. The first thing I did when opening a new app (on PDA or desktop) was drop each one down to find out what tools I have available. Like a pilot looking over his cockpit or a craftsman laying out his toolbox.
It seems a lot of the last 10 years of UI "progress" has been about burying things in order to "simplify" (aka dumb down) interfaces for audiences developers think of as kindergartners.
Zen of Palm showed us streamlined, clutter-free minimalism is possible to achieve without making your app stupid.
In reality, most design work these days is shifting to research and usability testing. Any designer who doesn't consider these things is just not a great designer and has much to learn.
This link is a great example of bad design, though. They don't even have to design for infinite viewport sides like you would on the web, there's a limited number of screen sizes this UI will appear on. In my work it's common practice to view your design at numerous different sizes and in the past issues like this were something we would specifically look out for when you have content of dynamic height that includes calls to action.
The solution is usually to programmatically ensure it is never perfectly cropped or, ideally, include hints there's more content or you can scroll.
But you are right, it's likely that modern metrics are things such as engagement, and whether the user is doing actions that are high-value for the company, such as sharing content with their social networks.
I would be fairly surprised if startups regularly tested their UX the way e.g. Microsoft (used?) to test some of their products: give it to a room full of old people who have never touched your app and ask them to do something with it.
Too, as noted, the UX metric is frequently "engagement", which is not the same as usability.
Also: Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
This stereotyping of a profession is becoming a cliché and is being rude towards a profession who has contributed so much to make technology accessible.
The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one. This is perhaps a good example of how 'fragmentation devil' is coming back to bite iOS now - which probably is not factored in Apple's product development process.
Whatever the cause it's a failure on the part of designers and their profession, and they deserve criticism for it.
No course or degree on interaction design - free online to ivy leagues across the world - teaches 'design for aesthetics' and neither do designers in design departments of startups or of big corporates have design sprints where designs are shortlisted because one is more beautiful than others.
Infact 'Design Sprint' [0] 'Design Thinking' [1] are things because design is about problem solving. I understand majority in HN are engineers/developers but that is no reason to make this is a tech echo chamber.
[0] https://www.gv.com/sprint/
[1] https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/what-is-design-think...
I've worked with designers who I saw specifically laying elements out so as to avoid the issue the article author's wife ran into.
There is a problem though. Phone screens are of variable height, and user's can change their font settings. While this issue shouldn't happen with default settings with OEM apps or UX elements, it is not possible to avoid it completely given the exact wrong set of circumstances lining up.
Of course, not hiding the scroll bar would be best, and ideal is having multiple affordances, such as partially clipped content and a scroll bar.
Strong disagree with this point. The device from the example is an older one (iPhone 8), and this is a brand-new OS. This was not existing software that's being applied to a new screen size -- it's the other way around.
The design spec should have taken the older device into account -- there are still millions of devices with this screen size out there* -- and noted exceptions or adjustments from the iPhone X/11 size.
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*And still being sold. And never mind the SE, another screen size which was still being sold just 12 months ago.
There are millions of iPhone 8 and 7 devices actively being used.
I noticed their design attitudes towards affordances and contextual clues changing around the time Ives made some claim about how phone users have been educated about touch UI sufficiently to start dropping them. That seems to have become an general excuse to lean towards 'pretty' over 'functional'.
And worse are third party apps. They always have been more variable, of course, but the old HCI guidelines were actually really good, so much so that people followed them because they were convincing.
UI decay isn't the only reason I use my phone and Ipad less, but it is one of them. (Current Screen Time: 24 minutes a day. That's mostly checking email while standing in line and mashing 2FA buttons.) The dynamic lists of recent activities and such mean I have to stare for a while to see what the options are this time, and generally be careful not to make mistakes. I've turned off autocorrect, because it makes enough enough mistakes that it is slower (and really irritating) to use.
I like my laptop a lot more these days.
I immediately thought no way they would remove that he must be mistaken, I just upgraded too and hand't tried to do that action. Looked at his phone and sure enough it was gone, tried all sorts of things finally Googled it and oh wow you got to be kidding me scroll down but no indicator you can, that's bad, there is going to be a lot of confused people, why would they do that?
Either way long press has the same non discoverability issue especially for not techie people who are used to it working a certain way before.