Most of these look MUCH better after the redesign. And, surprisingly, they look a lot like Android apps. For years and years Apple was way ahead of Android on app design, but now I think an app that follows the iOS 7 design guidelines and the Android design guidelines will look about the same.
Yes. Apple designs should be inspired from other fields (Russian cosmonaut style, 1950s minimalism, etc.) rather than being derivative of another phone's style.
If iOS 7 is not so derivative, they should speak to that so every article doesn't pin it as "Much [of] iOS 7 design inspiration came from others"
While I think individual several of the apps look better after the redesign I liked the consistency of UI between apps that the before shots gave. The after shots kind of remind me of running KDE apps in a Gnome desktop environment or something. They seem too radically unique to provide a good user experience to the system as a whole.
I agree but for a platform where all apps Run as full screen you can get away with less consistent design as long as the ux is good. The apps will never be run side by side.
I had the opposite reaction. In the large majority of these I think the original looks better, sometimes significantly so. But I'd be curious to see a poll of HN opinions.
The "after" screenshots don't seem to have anything in common anymore. Some of the apps look like Android, some look like Windows Phone, some look like Palm webOS.
The previous iterations at least shared a few button styles and navigation bar styles, but now it seems like everyone has taken the opportunity to reinvent those too.
It's certainly ok by me that app developers are taking more liberties in making their apps look unique. But if I were running the iOS show at Apple, I'd probably be worried about this development: if the visual presence of the OS disappears entirely from apps, it becomes that much less scary to pick up an Android phone because the apps won't look any different there.
To be fair it's a new style language. It's going to take time for people to normalize on designs. Eventually I think that there will be a more homogeneous experience, but right now everyone is trying to feel it out and explore. Design follows trends, but right now there aren't any trends to follow in ios7.
Previously, wasn't it just follow Apple's style guide or go home? If so, what's happened in iOS 7? Are Apple just being far more lax in enforcing a style guide or is the style guide out of the window now?
Nope, that wasn't really the case before. There were plenty of apps that deviated from Apple's styles, it's just that their UI tools made it easy to design your own app with your own interface. I think we'll see a lot of apps that look like stock iOS apps once the app makers that have been holding off/don't have a UI Team realize they need to update their apps to match the modern visual style.
I noticed that too. Lots of the new apps have a distinctly "Android" feel to them, even to the point of Fancy having what looks clearly like an Android menu button (though not in the standard Android location).
A fun flame war to start (i.e. let's please not) would be to argue whether this is due to app designers feeling an increasing need to target Android or whether it's because the truth is that iOS's "new look" seems distinctly Jellybean-like to an app designer.
The simple truth probably is the company that made the app designed their Android version first and didn't bother to come up with a complete new app design for iOS, so they just kinda ported it. You can also find a lot of Android apps that seem to be directly ported from its iOS incarnations, instead of using native UI conventions.
I think another thing that is true is that mobile visual vocabulary is stabilizing, much as the desktop visual vocobulary of menu bars, window title bars, etc. did. That makes for a more boring app world, perhaps, but one users can potentially find more predictable and useful.
I find this deliciously delightful after suffering the wrath of these stupid app developers historically on Android. I don't agree with it, certainly, but I feel some warped sense of justice.
That's always been a pet peeve of mine on Android, though now it seems both ecosystems will have a slightly more consistent user experience if one uses devices on both OSs a lot.
The "three lines to represent a menu" metaphor has existed for years now. It just hasn't been as widely used until probably in the last year or so. I wouldn't use it to assume that iOS apps are being designed from Android apps or vice versa. You're just making baseless extrapolations.
I can't say it is baseless extrapolations. If you are hesitant to associate hamburger menu's to Android, the whole idea of iPhone revolutionizing mobile industry would be baseless extrapolations. Everything is built up on shoulders of its predecessors. Hamburger menu and side drawer have become an Android design standard at this point of time and there is no harm in saying that most iPhone apps will look like redesign of Android apps.
I think it's simply a case of a lot of the current flat design examples out there being targeted at Android. Prior to iOS 7 most iOS apps went for the heavily bevelled and textured look. As a result most of the good examples of flat design were on Android and it's likely these designs served as primary inspiration for a lot of iOS designers.
Actually, Fancy's design is basically the same as before. They just have a slightly translucent header and the system icons have a dark grey background instead of the standard flat black.
Amusingly, I've talked to many companies that are making more money on iPhone, started on iPhone, but they do all their prototyping and new development on Android simply because you can release or back out a release immediately there. Heck, it even has staged roll outs now. So there may be some design priority for Android as well if that is a common decision, since it is the better place to implement new functionality. The iPhone functionality is then often just a port.
Apple realized it is better to copy Android in each and every respect. Apps, NFC.. Even copying colourful phones of Nokia doesn't hurt. Congrats Apple!
Perhaps, but overall it seems like bad strategy to avoid doing something because you're afraid it might help competitors. You do whatever you think is the best thing.
Plus, Apple has been doomed for a long time now. Ditto the iPhone and iOS. And yet...
On the contrary I think we're entering a temporary period of apps looking closer to each other than they did pre-iOS 7. Hardly any apps used the stock controls anymore as they looked so stale, whereas many of the new designs are taking Apple's lead, at least for now.
I can imagine that the same process will begin to repeat itself as we get used to this new style.
Not a lot (any?) of "top 50" most commonly used apps in this comparison yet. Plenty of examples of bad, non-standard design in the depths of the App Store.
Just as with iOSes before it, there will be skilled and unskilled interpretations of the design language.
I noticed this too, although to be fair I did think most of the "after" screenshots looked better than their "before" counterparts. It does seem that there's no real iOS 'presence' any more, but then I always thought the old iOS 'presence' looked hideous anyway so it doesn't look like a loss to me.
But look at, for example, "Days To Go". I think it's a very typical iOS 7 design, and it meddles the content with the UI: the caption looks exactly the same as the actual content.
On iOS 6, you knew what was the "window frame" (UI) and what was the "window" (content), and you could look through the frame without any cognitive effort. Now both parts look the same.
What I meant is this: On iOS 1-6, the UI is very clearly UI. The rectangle between navigation bars, tab bars and status bars is the content. It's like looking at a snowy landscape through a heavy, wooden frame.
On iOS 7, everything blends together and I don't see how this puts the focus on the content. E.g. in mail, the scrollable content has almost the same colour as the bars above and below it. How is it more prominent now?
I guess the biggest take away is that industrial design is not same as GUI design. I hope Johnny Ive will be strong enough to hire those Microsoft UX designers (Zune, XBOX etc) for iOS 8.
We shouldn't forget that these are all iterations on existing designs, and that at least partially the improved readability/understandability(there's a better word that is escaping me here) is in part due to this in addition to the flatness. It isn't just "flat" that's doing it here, a lot of these examples are also making better choices with whitespace and data presentation in addition to downplaying gradients (chatter moving to cards and ditching the tabbar for example).
Few of these look better, IMO. And I'm definitely not seeing a lot of consistency in design. That said, many of them weren't great in the first place anyway.
One clear trend: getting rid of the bottom tab bar. I will mourn that loss - the top left corner is the least accessible place on the screen, and Apple saw fit to put the most important button (Back) there. The bottom bar was a very accessible shortcut in many apps. Although many faulted Android for having a back button, it's actually incredibly convenient to have it accessible in all apps.
iOS7 has a swipe from the left gesture that will trigger the back event, for apps that support it. Long overdue imo and it helps some with what you're describing.
The issue with "swiping" gestures in general is that most users will never learn about them. Even if you introduce them visually in some kind of intro walkthough, they're too easy to forget.
The underlying problem that makes them a bad interaction paradigm, in my opinion, is that they have no affordances whatsoever. You just can't tell by looking at the UI that swiping left/right/up/down is going to have an effect.
The affordances for swiping through Springboard seem to work pretty well. More important than the dots is the physicality of the animation. You can wiggle the current screen back and forth with a small motion and transition with a more dramatic one, but either way there's a clear directness to the interaction.
All swiping should work that way, and Apple is emphasizing the importance of "physical" dynamics in iOS 7.
That's a great point - I think it does make it a lot better when there's some kind of connection between a physical movement and the response from the app. The worst kind of swiping gestures are the ones where you have to get it just right, and then a menu "magically" appears out of nowhere.
I think another possible way of indicating the presence of a gesture might be through clever use of shading - for example, a subtle gradient on the edge of the screen where you can swipe, giving you the impression that there's something "just off the screen". I haven't actually seen this in an app yet - not sure why this isn't done more, especially for the Pull To Refresh trick.
Homebrewed swipe gestures, sure, but I don't think it's that big of a problem to introduce an app-wide swipe gesture. The problem with discoverability only shows up when it's in your own homebrewed component.
For one thing, they're shown in Apple's promotional videos. How are users supposed to learn about any feature not represented by a button on screen? I'm thinking of the notification tray, control center, double-tap home button for multitasking, press home+power for screenshot, hold home button for Siri, and even older features like pinch to zoom and rotate.
Back events as a whole are problematic. Android's OS back button behavior is application defined up until you're at the base "level" of the app, at which point the behavior is OS defined and it takes you to the home screen. That kind of state management isn't intuitive, and even though you should be able to just hit the app icon to go back(assuming a properly coded app), it's still an inconvenience if you fat finger the button one too many times. Discovery of what the button does for each app is also an annoying process as well.
The change to a swipe might reduce the accidental fat finger, but discovery is a nightmare for both the gesture itself and application specific behaviors for the back event.
I prefer an application button in both cases, especially because it makes it clear that this is something that will only effect the app, and will not have a weird OS interaction, taking me out of the app.
Ever since I switched to operating my phone using my left hand, it makes the left corner really easy to navigate. I made the switch because my right wrist has some residual injuries on it from high school.
The new tab bar is spindly, low-contrast crap with no clear demarcation between it and the rest of the screen above it. If you had glyphs amongst the scrolling screen content above it, there would be NO distinction.
Personally, I like the redesigned "flat" app design. However, in the case of Photo Investigator, it seems that the "flat" design is worse off. The buttons are no longer visible due to the cluttered background.
Oh, of course, and I didn't mean to imply anything about those people either. I was liberal with their interpretations. I just found it amusing and got a good chuckle out of it. =)
How? In some cases they added new information to the screen, but that has nothing to do with the iOS 7 motif. Otherwise, the "information" is generally obscured and no longer distinguished from controls.
Because very fiewof these developers have actually read the guileless or followed by example. They've all given a very 'unique' interpretation of the style and screwed it up royally.
Some of these don't seem "iOS 7ish" at all. Content in shaded boxes (within yet more shaded boxes!) is very much not the iOS 7 way. And strong lines separating content are rarely a good fit with the new look.
The ones that seem like they "get" it look much better to my eye. Lighter, cleaner, simpler, more open.
Maybe it's just me but a lot of these apps look really shoddy and half assed. I can't believe these are real apps that people expect customers to pay for.
Well, it's flat design. While with the pre-7 design you could have substance - really polished apps that shine by using textures, lighting, shadows, etc. with flat you only really have colored rectangles to show.
And as you can't make more appealing colored rectangles than your competition everything starts to look the same.
that's one of the problems of flat design ,it's so flat and dull it's hard to remember anything about it. Which app shown here feels like it has an identity? none.
There are some who believe that iOS 7 represents a grand
reset of the app market, and a new land grab is afoot.
Personally I question that: Most users have no clue about iOS 7, and quite simply don't care. One day they'll get a system update notice, and from then forth every now and then apps will change incrementally. I don't see users changing apps just to get a new general style.
My first reaction was that there was no curation, no filter here, given the broad range of UI quality (both before and after), but then I realized this collection was even more interesting because of it.
While Hipmunk, for example, clearly has a team of UX and UI designers, and RecordOrders is almost certainly the design work of a single Cocoa programmer, I'd say the latter actually improved by a greater margin. Hipmunk already had a very nice pre-7 approach which they translated expertly to the new design language, but RecordOrders' awkward color fields and cramped buttons benefit greatly from the enforced minimalism.
These mostly look average at best, downright bad at worst. Before and after.
And, kids: "Making something look like iOS 7" does not absolve you from your duty to use good UX and to think about the "why" behind your visual design. Shitty design skinned to look like iOS 7 remains shitty design.
One thing I'm seeing on Hipmunk specifically is lower contrast and lack of shading has to be made up for by white space - the after seems to have a lot less information on screen, while still being (at least in my perspective) harder to read at a glance.
I consider myself rather forward-facing developer when it comes to design, and have, as a general rule, enjoyed the new interface design choices in iOS7. However, I'm worried that this Oddysean journey into "flat design" is counter-intuitive to some basic UI principles.
I find that the bottom toolbar is harder to read now, and requires more eye-scanning to figure out what the different icons do. It's not as pronounced and grounded anymore. Also, the top navigation is less intuitive, and more subtle. I'm also finding information and text presentation to suffer as well. As much as I hated the beveled edges and skeumorphic design of the previous iOS, it was much easier to navigate. I'm sure companies and designers will work some of these early-stage kinks out of the interfaces, but I can definitely see a drop UI flow quality and information presentation with the move to this new interface design.
the shadows and gradients were very good and directing your eyes on what is import and what is not important.
the flat design gives more elements equal footing. instead of the interfacing being able to accentuate the important areas to look at, you now have to know the app (or screen) and know where to look.
Don't care for the white backgrounds everywhere. Going to be even more difficult to use at night. Wish there was a way to choose a theme, like we had in the 90's.
Most utility apps that aren't supporting an existing brand will often support both themes. However I've noticed that apps that are already branded will go along with only the theme that works best with their brand.
Thanks, I do remember that. There is the problem though of those apps which use a dark theme, that therefore become light upon negative view. Hence, why I'd prefer a single theme enforced.
Fascinating. The new designs seem to look very W8 Metro.
I confess an idle curiosity as to why the art style shift and if there's a genuine change in design philosophy (e.g., Modern vs. Romantic type watershed moments) or if it's just a flavor of the day shift (I can often date websites and books by their visual design elements, but it doesn't mean that there was a fundamental philosophy shift).
With Metro I think that Microsoft did something really unique, it had a digital design language that spoke to a lot of UI designers. Thats not to say they executed it particularly well, because even if it looks good that doesn't mean it is particularly easy to navigate.
It didn't look like any UI that had come before it mostly because it striped everything out of the design, and it that way it was really interesting. Designers had still be struggling with the move from page design to digital design and flat seemed like a good answer.
Side note: Its interesting that everybody is shouting about it looking like Android when they should really be saying that everything looks like Metro
I can't be the only person to think that iOS 7 does not look good. Right? A lot of the "after" screenshots do not look any better. I'd say some of the after screenshots look worse!
For me, this is good. Generally speaking, I like the right side more, although there were one or two (notably Salesforce and Hipmunk) which I thought regressed a little. In both cases, the lower information density on the right hand side is the problem.
I doubt Android will be making any more large style changes - Google has finally found an identity for Android, and 4.0 made large changes that the majority of the Android user base seem to be happy with ( I know I am ).
Regardless, I think both iOS7 and Android both look very pleasant now.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadIf iOS 7 is not so derivative, they should speak to that so every article doesn't pin it as "Much [of] iOS 7 design inspiration came from others"
If I looked at the after first, before scanning back and forth, I preferred the after.
Not sure if this is a known cognitive quirk, or even if others would have the same impression.
The previous iterations at least shared a few button styles and navigation bar styles, but now it seems like everyone has taken the opportunity to reinvent those too.
It's certainly ok by me that app developers are taking more liberties in making their apps look unique. But if I were running the iOS show at Apple, I'd probably be worried about this development: if the visual presence of the OS disappears entirely from apps, it becomes that much less scary to pick up an Android phone because the apps won't look any different there.
No, it never was that way. In fact, Apple has even given Awards to third party apps with totally unique UIs.
A fun flame war to start (i.e. let's please not) would be to argue whether this is due to app designers feeling an increasing need to target Android or whether it's because the truth is that iOS's "new look" seems distinctly Jellybean-like to an app designer.
I think another thing that is true is that mobile visual vocabulary is stabilizing, much as the desktop visual vocobulary of menu bars, window title bars, etc. did. That makes for a more boring app world, perhaps, but one users can potentially find more predictable and useful.
had everyone put effort in browser integration like webos was doing, the end user would be much better served.
but lack of lock-in doesnt sell in the corporate world...
5 points, must troll harder.
Plus, Apple has been doomed for a long time now. Ditto the iPhone and iOS. And yet...
I can imagine that the same process will begin to repeat itself as we get used to this new style.
Just as with iOSes before it, there will be skilled and unskilled interpretations of the design language.
On iOS 6, you knew what was the "window frame" (UI) and what was the "window" (content), and you could look through the frame without any cognitive effort. Now both parts look the same.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5330/9023342228_8341c60043_b.j...
On iOS 7, everything blends together and I don't see how this puts the focus on the content. E.g. in mail, the scrollable content has almost the same colour as the bars above and below it. How is it more prominent now?
-- iOfficeSpace
One clear trend: getting rid of the bottom tab bar. I will mourn that loss - the top left corner is the least accessible place on the screen, and Apple saw fit to put the most important button (Back) there. The bottom bar was a very accessible shortcut in many apps. Although many faulted Android for having a back button, it's actually incredibly convenient to have it accessible in all apps.
The underlying problem that makes them a bad interaction paradigm, in my opinion, is that they have no affordances whatsoever. You just can't tell by looking at the UI that swiping left/right/up/down is going to have an effect.
All swiping should work that way, and Apple is emphasizing the importance of "physical" dynamics in iOS 7.
I think another possible way of indicating the presence of a gesture might be through clever use of shading - for example, a subtle gradient on the edge of the screen where you can swipe, giving you the impression that there's something "just off the screen". I haven't actually seen this in an app yet - not sure why this isn't done more, especially for the Pull To Refresh trick.
The change to a swipe might reduce the accidental fat finger, but discovery is a nightmare for both the gesture itself and application specific behaviors for the back event.
I prefer an application button in both cases, especially because it makes it clear that this is something that will only effect the app, and will not have a weird OS interaction, taking me out of the app.
The iOS 7 GUI is an unmitigated debacle.
1. Hate it. 2. Meh. 3. Love it.
Yes, I'm summarizing, but I just found it highly amusing.
I don't know which button state is worse, selected or unselected. I can't read either of them in the iOS7 version.
Here's a screenshot of Apple's (just-out-of-Beta) Find My iPhone on iCloud.com showing exactly the same scenario but designed properly: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/709013/Screenshots/fmi-i...
It's much clearer, and in my opinion looks much better than the original toggle shown in the "before" screenshot there.
The ones that seem like they "get" it look much better to my eye. Lighter, cleaner, simpler, more open.
And as you can't make more appealing colored rectangles than your competition everything starts to look the same.
Personally I question that: Most users have no clue about iOS 7, and quite simply don't care. One day they'll get a system update notice, and from then forth every now and then apps will change incrementally. I don't see users changing apps just to get a new general style.
While Hipmunk, for example, clearly has a team of UX and UI designers, and RecordOrders is almost certainly the design work of a single Cocoa programmer, I'd say the latter actually improved by a greater margin. Hipmunk already had a very nice pre-7 approach which they translated expertly to the new design language, but RecordOrders' awkward color fields and cramped buttons benefit greatly from the enforced minimalism.
And, kids: "Making something look like iOS 7" does not absolve you from your duty to use good UX and to think about the "why" behind your visual design. Shitty design skinned to look like iOS 7 remains shitty design.
It sucks. I wish the kids would get off that particular lawn.
I find that the bottom toolbar is harder to read now, and requires more eye-scanning to figure out what the different icons do. It's not as pronounced and grounded anymore. Also, the top navigation is less intuitive, and more subtle. I'm also finding information and text presentation to suffer as well. As much as I hated the beveled edges and skeumorphic design of the previous iOS, it was much easier to navigate. I'm sure companies and designers will work some of these early-stage kinks out of the interfaces, but I can definitely see a drop UI flow quality and information presentation with the move to this new interface design.
the flat design gives more elements equal footing. instead of the interfacing being able to accentuate the important areas to look at, you now have to know the app (or screen) and know where to look.
Most utility apps that aren't supporting an existing brand will often support both themes. However I've noticed that apps that are already branded will go along with only the theme that works best with their brand.
http://lifehacker.com/5957534/invert-your-phones-colors-for-...
Another thing that really helps is f.lux for iphone:
http://justgetflux.com/ios.html
But this sadly requires jailbreaking.
I confess an idle curiosity as to why the art style shift and if there's a genuine change in design philosophy (e.g., Modern vs. Romantic type watershed moments) or if it's just a flavor of the day shift (I can often date websites and books by their visual design elements, but it doesn't mean that there was a fundamental philosophy shift).
It didn't look like any UI that had come before it mostly because it striped everything out of the design, and it that way it was really interesting. Designers had still be struggling with the move from page design to digital design and flat seemed like a good answer.
Side note: Its interesting that everybody is shouting about it looking like Android when they should really be saying that everything looks like Metro
Regardless, I think both iOS7 and Android both look very pleasant now.