
How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name - andyjohnson0
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name
======
mikepalmer
"Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability,
feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty,
created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they
are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We
have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to
remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist."

OMG have you guys tried to navigate the Apple Music iOS app?? You wouldn't
think they could make it _harder_ to use than iTunes... but they did! Almost
impossible to find features, and when you finally do figure something out,
it's hard to remember by the next time you run the app.

The bloated number of swipe gestures on iOS is ridiculous too... I am always
cursing after swiping in some direction by mistake.

(I am generally a big apple fan...)

~~~
jonahx
A good article with data from facebook and others on the value of discovery
over cleanliness:

[http://deep.design/the-hamburger-menu/](http://deep.design/the-hamburger-
menu/)

It contradicts current trends and the preferences of many designers.

~~~
iSnow
I think that guy is seriously wrong, not every hidden part of a user interface
is evil. The hamburger menu tells the user that he will find the first-level
navigation if he taps it.

It is about as bad as a right-click context menu on the desktop.

~~~
fkistner
Indeed, and that's why Apple discourages the use of a contextual menu as the
sole means to offer functionality as well [1]:

    
    
      Always ensure that contextual menu items are also available as menu commands.
      A contextual menu is hidden by default and a user might not know it exists, so it should never be the only way to access a command.
      In particular, you want to avoid using a contextual menu as the only way to access an advanced or power-user feature.
    

[1]:
[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/ContextualMenus.html)

------
sorenjan
I've long found it strange that the same company that didn't want a second
mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus
now hide so much functionality behind gestures with a varying amount of
fingers. This started while Jobs where still at Apple, so it can't be blamed
entirely on his successors.

~~~
mrks_
This issue has been getting worse in OS X, too. I find myself continuously
finding hidden functionality by holding in the option or command button while
clicking or dragging.

Frankly, and this may just be cynicism, I speculate that these hidden
functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform. If
someone spends a few years learning all the idiosyncrasies of OS X and iOS,
they may be too intimidated to switch to another platform, since they've
invested so much time into learning Apple's OS.

~~~
dpkonofa
I don't think so. The functionality is hidden on purpose to keep from
distracting novice users. Every program's basic functionality is accessible
without any modifier keys. If you're "finding" new features, it simply means
that you're past the stage of a novice user. Most of these hidden commands are
variations too, so they even make sense logically. I'm curious if there's a
specific "hidden" function that you're referring to that doesn't logically
make sense as a modification of an existing function.

~~~
rustynails
I think something has happened at Apple. I would consider a playlist or
dynamic filter (eg. Rock songs or Beatles songs) would be a beginner's desire.
It's one step beyond "play". Yet, the new Apple Music app is highly cryptic.
It's been engineered to steer you toward the new subscription service.
Usability for novices and pros has been crippled. I could say similar about
Apple maps. It just doesn't work properly. Google has really taken the crown
here. It's sad to see Apple lose focus when they've held the benchmark so high
for so long.

------
nostrademons
Much of this may be a reaction to the technology market maturing, with many
more people being intimately familiar with how to use technology and new
features spreading faster by word of mouth.

When the Mac came out, you had to teach people how to use a computer through
the interface. Few people had prior experience with them, and it was unlikely
that they'd be able to sit down with you and explain it.

Now, it is a fairly good bet that somebody you know has the product you're
about to buy, and will happily tell you what you can do with it. Apple has
sold more Apple Watches in the past 6 months than they did Apple IIs in its
entire production run from 1977-1993. If you don't have a friend who will show
off the latest features, you can easily Google for them, or read about them on
any one of a number of online blogs dedicated to surfacing cool features.

It's a different _social_ environment, not just a different technical one.
Design is as much about understanding the environment you operate in than it
is about the product itself, and the principles change as the environment
does.

~~~
Decade
No, no, emphatically no.

It’s not just about being familiar with computers. These fashionable user
interfaces are just objectively, measurably worse. They did scientific
studies, with video recordings and stopwatches and stuff.

I don’t know why Norman and Tog focus so much on back and undo. Undo is
inherently challenging in a world with mutable state. A knife has no undo.

For me, the emblem of bad design is: Buttons without borders. We had that back
in the early 1980s. Because we had only like 320×240 pixel monochrome screens.
Even Palm had visual indicators on their 160×160 screens. I have 720p on my
cheap phone. There’s no excuse for getting rid of hints about where you can
click and where you cannot click. This is much worse on Google’s Material
Design than Apple’s flat design.

There’s also predictability. How many people have _not_ sent a text message
mangled by auto-correct? And there’s readability. These days, Apple’s
advertising images have spindly white text on a busy background, sometimes
going all the way to white. I feel similarly about spindly bright red text on
a white background. A decent amount of contrast should be the default, not a
special “accessibility” setting that inevitably gets left out by developers.

We now have decades of research and common sense about what makes user
interfaces work, and the influential companies are simultaneously throwing it
all away. I don’t understand this madness.

~~~
unfamiliar
Button borders have been replaced by coloured text in iOS, and for the most
part I find it pretty easy to use and pretty easy to identify clickable
things. The problem is worse on websites which have no such rule regarding
whether something is actionable or not (well, they did use to - blue and
purple links - but apparently that doesn't look cool enough any more).

Much worse for me is the invention of a bunch of new UI elements which seem to
have no known rules about how they work (Apple Music app - the word "songs" is
actually a drop down list to change how the list below it is grouped into
artist or album? What?!). Or huge numbers of functionality hidden behind a
random choice of long press, force touch, context menu, swipe left or right,
or double tap. E.g.: Safari on iOS: long press the reload key to load the
desktop site, or type a word in the address bar and scroll down to "find in
page". How on earth am I supposed to find these things without having read
about them online in some frustrated help thread?

------
makecheck
Positioning of buttons on iOS is a big problem.

For instance, when on a phone call and you show the numeric keypad, there is
_no_ sane reason to make the "Hide" function a microscopic text label that is
a finger-width away from the _HANG-UP_ action. Functionally, these actions
should be on opposite sides of the display from each other. I don't even think
they placed it there for aesthetic reasons, since the Hide "button" just looks
like an ugly hack.

Then there's positioning of keyboard keys. If I had a nickel for every time I
deleted a character while trying to finish a word with "m", or every time I
accidentally _committed_ an action with incomplete text because of that stupid
blue key! Instead of moving dangerous actions to the _opposite end of the
screen_ where they belong, too much effort was spent trying to emulate the
precise layout of a real keyboard. I don't think users would complain at all
if the "action" key was instead in the top-right corner, and if "backspace"
was in the top-left corner.

The scrolling calendar widget is also a nasty example of poor positioning.
Long after it was "improved" in iOS 7, I _still_ can't create a single
calendar event without doing the accidental-screw-up-date-instead-of-scroll
action, usually with "helpful" automatic "corrections" for my change such as
synchronizing the From and To times to both reflect my accidental date-change.
Or if I'm really lucky, I don't even notice that I changed the time.

They need to step back and realize that design is how it _works_. Their
interfaces are incredibly error-prone right now.

------
andyjohnson0
(Re-posted at the suggestion of dang.)

As someone who develops on both iOS and Android, and uses an Android phone,
there was a lot in this article that I agreed with. Particularly Apple's
prioritisation of beauty over design.

One weakness was the discussion of undo and Android's supposed strength due to
its dedicated back button. This didn't convince me: the back button on Android
sometimes undoes operations, but often it doesn't [1].

[1] [http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2011/12/back-button-
android...](http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2011/12/back-button-androids-
achilles-heel.html)

~~~
qyv
Speaking of Undo, one of google's common features across several of it's
products is the use of undo instead of confirmation, I absolutely LOVE this.
If I archive an email in gmail (app or browser) it doesnt't ask me if I am
sure I want to do that, but it does give me the option to immediately undo
that action. This little feature is so wonderful when you think about it. It
allows you to complete an intended action in one step, but abort an unintended
action in two steps. That is great functional design.

~~~
mikeash
Apple does this too. Except they hide the undo command behind a completely
insane "shake the device" gesture, and half the time it fails to retrieve the
email.

~~~
dpkonofa
This is the biggest failure of Apple's design on iOS and the article nails it
perfectly. It's not _just_ that you have to shake the device, it's that you
have to shake it and answer a modal and that all apps don't treat it the same
way. You could be sitting there shaking your phone for 5 minutes wondering if
you're just shaking it wrong or if the app doesn't offer an undo feature and
there's not really any way of knowing which is the right answer.

------
Sfi81
Agree with much of the article. I personally find Apple iOS devices completely
unusable because I have to constantly try to guess what kind of action or
gesture will achieve what I want to do rather than being obvious. The same for
several apps which appear to have become successful first on iOS before being
ported to Android. I find remembering these gestures and actions an
unnecessary cognitive load.

~~~
jakejake
If you put an iPhone in any 5-year olds hand they seem to have no trouble
figuring it out.

~~~
scintill76
This is a common refrain, but is it possible that adults have learned valid
paradigms that make using the iPhone as it is today, more difficult? If you
want to design for 5-year-olds and have them retain that forever, I guess it
can work, but maybe it's a design failure if the people who actually buy your
product have a harder time using it.

To use another analogy, it's somewhat like saying "Well, people literate in a
left-to-right language have no problem using it." Great, but presumably Apple
was aiming for a global audience, so pointing out success stories in some
subsections of that audience does not mean they succeeded overall.

~~~
jakejake
I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is
probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable." Also my 93 year
old grandmother took to her iPhone almost instantaneously. As did my
technically challenged parents, all of their friends and pretty much any of
the hundreds of people who I have ever seen pick up an iPhone. I have actually
never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't
figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post. And on a tech forum no less
- what are you even doing here?

Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?

~~~
scintill76
> I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is
> probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable."

But Western 5-year-olds have already had 5 years to watch their parents use
contemporary technology. I'm not sure there's such thing as a "blank slate"
here. And I doubt the average 5-year-old from a rural town in a third-world
country is going to pick up an iPhone as easily as an American one. You're
picking like 1% of the world population and making them the benchmark for
universal design. I suppose the ultimate end to this line of reasoning is that
there is no such thing as perfectly universal design, and I'm OK with that.

> I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone
> and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post.

When did I say that? You might have me confused with the GP poster.

> Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?

Why not? Many 5-year-olds probably could use rotary phones just fine back in
the day. Maybe Apple doesn't actually have a monopoly on making it possible
for 5-year-olds to use technology.

------
jlg23
The article describes the issues I had with discoverability very well: As a
European I always refused to pay the insane prices for apple products there.
When I finally needed a mp3-player to survive daily commutes in public
transport, I got an ipod touch. Without _any_ printed documentation, I had to
ask experienced apple users how to perform certain actions.

~~~
mcintyre1994
As a new Macbook user this year one of my favorite examples of this is
screenshots. On Windows I've always had a prt scrn keyboard button, Macbooks
forego that. As of windows 7 I think, there was a program to screenshot a
portion of the screen or a specific window, Apple don't have one of those. All
the screenshot commands (screen, window, portion) are behind a 3 key keyboard
shortcut that I have to look up all the time.

Edit: Csydas, I got a HN notify with a reply from you, it's a shame you
deleted it - you brought up good points and I agree with you. If you were down
voted before deleting it wasn't me.

~~~
marssaxman
Wow. Context is everything. It's been the same 3-key shortcut since 1984, so I
never have to think about it. The command-shift-number pattern was used for a
good handful of common system-wide functions on the classic Mac OS, so it was
just a matter of remembering which digit corresponded to which action. They
were basically function keys, since the original keyboards didn't have
physical function keys.

~~~
dpkonofa
I'm in the same boat. I've used both Macs and PCs for years and I find the
Mac's shortcuts to be easier to remember and, overall, more useful than the
PC's. PrintScreen to capture the whole desktop is nice and easy, but anything
outside of that is a pain in the ass. I love that Cmd+Shift+4 lets me select
an area of the screen with 1 hand. I'd be hard-pressed to remember, much less
find, if Windows has suddenly added that capability and, even if it did, you'd
have to use 1 hand for modifiers and one hand for PrintScreen. Macs have
always had it so it's muscle memory now. If Windows added it, it was recent
and requires 2 hands.

~~~
spronkey
Most of the time on Windows you want full screen (PrtScrn) or a single window
(Alt+PrtScrn). Windows definitely wins here vs Apple's Cmd+Shift+3 and
Cmd+Shift+4, with the additional modifier to copy to clipboard instead of save
to desktop.

On the other hand, Apple's accent input (old style, not the new style that
stops key repetition grrr) is vastly superior than alt codes. Yeish.

------
brandonmenc
> Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and
> elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity.

Case in point: calendar.

I simply cannot tell where one month ends and another begins in the flat UI.
Sure, the skeuomorphic version looked corny, but it was a lot easier to use.

~~~
err4nt
and iTunes went from a fully featured media library that focused on managing
the media on your hard drive. iTunes STILL manages the media on your hard
drive, but it's nearly impossible to manage the files through the stripped-
down iTunes interface.

iTunes used to be a power-app, now I can hardly use it.

~~~
DanBC
> iTunes used to be a power-app, now I can hardly use it.

This happens to a lot of software. There used to be lists of "last good
version of ..."

The Usenet group alt.comp.freeware sometimes used to recommend the last good
version rather than the latest version. There's probably a Reddit subreddit
for it.

ACDSee and Nero burning rom are well known examples. I guess Imgur is at risk
of this, but they seem to be keeping stuff in check.

------
braythwayt
JM2C, “The plural of anecdote is not data," &c.

Most of these things annoy me, but nevertheless iOS devices continue to be
“good enough,” and with the exception of Surface, I have been given no
incentive to go through the agony of switching.

I would hazard that Apple is giving competition an opening, but it won’t be
easy to overcome the kind of inertia they have. Most people fear switching
costs. The easiest way to beat them is in an entirely new category, just like
Surface vs. iPad Pro. Or wearables. I have the Apple Watch, and it’s a fine
extension for my iPhone. And I don’t regret the purchase. But it fees like
there is lots of uncertainty in how the wearables game will play out.

When do I get a ring that starts my car, opens my front door, unlocks my
laptop and phone, and pays for my coffee? For that matter, why the hell do I
need to log into my MacBook when I’m wearing my unlocked watch?

~~~
quadrangle
> The plural of anecdote

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata)

> When do I get a ring…

[https://twitter.com/internetofshit](https://twitter.com/internetofshit)

------
binaryapparatus
As a side effect, result from all the tiny 'improvements' since Snow Leopard,
I have moved everything from stock apps and services. Ecosystem is simply not
something I would rely on. Mutt/offlineimap for mail. Baïkal (on my own
server) for contacts and calendar. My photos are outside of Photos. My music
is outside of iTunes. As a final result of the process, my iCloud account has
all the checkboxes unchecked. I would not strive to be OS agnostic if Apple
didn't bend over backwards to tie me in into their services. So yeah I agree
with other comments, half of the hidden gestures are there to tie us in. Bad
move.

------
pasta_2
>One of us, Tognazzini, worked at Apple with Steve Jobs in the early days.
Norman joined Apple shortly after Jobs departed and then left shortly after
Jobs returned in 1996. We were not present during the shift from the days of
easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products (where Apple could honestly brag that
no manual was necessary), to today’s products where no manual is included, but
is often necessary. We do know that before Jobs returned, Apple had a three-
pronged approach to product design: user experience, engineering, and
marketing, with all three taking part in the design cycle from day one to when
the product shipped.

>Today’s Apple has eliminated the emphasis on making products understandable
and usable, and instead has imposed a Bauhaus minimalist design ethic on its
products.

I actually love this article because when people look back with rose tinted
glasses about how things were great when Forstall was around, I can send them
this article about how Apple's usability suffered when Jobs came back, an era
where they claim that Apple's products was the best they ever were from a
usability stand point.

------
bhanu423
I have tried to use a Mac on several occasions but I see so much to adapt to.
The apps still crash, some applications still feel slow, gestures/click
pattern using 1-2-3-4 fingers, window system is not really obvious. It can
obviously be learned but I find linux to be more much obvious and user
friendly than Mac specially GNOME which is my current favorite. In any case
windows has come a long way from windows xp to windows 10 to complicate things
and hide features in crappy manner and still busy fixing things that are not
broken.

~~~
unfamiliar
I can't speak for Windows, but Linux is miles behind OS X in terms of
usability in my opinion. The trackpad gestures are fantastic and very
intuitive for me to the point where I hate using a crippled trackpad on linux.
I can see the appeal of Gnome, which is very simple and intuitive to use. But
modern gnome is adopting more and more features of the OS X window management
system, like ctrl-tab switching applications rather than windows, the addition
of indicator applets, the windows-and-dock overview screen (whatever they call
it). From all the complaints I hear I don't think there's anything
particularly difficult about OS X file management and window management other
than "its different from what I'm used to."

~~~
bhanu423
Hmm I guess you are right on when you say "its different from what I'm used
to" . Also I am more of a keyboard guy so I have limited trackpad usage,
keeping it limited to just scroll and click works for me. Anyways the default
way to switch applications is Super + Tab, in mac super key is command key
whereas in windows laptops its the windows key.

------
pvg
It's odd that these titans of design gloss over one UI tenet - direct
manipulation. This seems to somehow make up for a great deal inconsistency and
violations of the design principles they pioneered. Nobody said 'my four year
old and/or my mother-in-law just took to the Mac' as often as they say it
about an iPad.

------
ThomPete
All interaction is learned nothing is purely intuitive and so their critique
seems awfully nit-picky but ultimately trivial and based on an older paradigm
than the one I think apple is trying to achieve. I am frankly surprised that
people I normally admire would launch such a critique.

The touch display did more good for usability than any interface design or
metaphor did the previous 20 by simply removing the layer of abstraction
between the object on the screen and the user wanting to manipulate it. No
more mentally translating hand-mouse coordination with eye-screen
coordination.

I am not defending apple but I understand what they are trying to do which is
to remove the need for metaphors by allowing you to manipulate the objects
directly. I.e. the content is the metaphor for itself. Just like i don't need
a metaphor for picking up a pencil i just do. Maybe they are not there yet but
thats I price I think is worth paying.

Apple have far bigger problems than their interaction design IMO.

~~~
Arcanum-XIII
The strangest thing for me is that my 17 month old seem to pick the
interaction with an iPad or Apple TV way more naturally than I could. She's
not afraid of experimenting, and she's not overthinking what's happening or
not — and since other children (same age or older) seem to "get it" as fast, I
would say they're on something. I'm more weary of the ergonomics of their
products : what's good for a toddler (the Apple TV remote for example) may not
be the perfect solution for a grown up hand. Likewise, their pen for the iPad
Pro seem to be designed for look over function, or their mouse, or... But
we'll see.

~~~
ThomPete
No only that it's also your parent's who know don't have to work through
layers of abstraction to understand how to manipulate something.

Meet my mom:

[http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-
com...](http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-computers)

~~~
nommm-nommm
My mom once called me up with a computer problem.

"My fox fire[sic] isn't working."

Turns out her problem was Windows wasn't booting. All she knew was she wanted
to get to a website and she couldn't.

------
PhasmaFelis
> _It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always
> possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select
> that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action,
> and have the power to reverse that action—to undo it—if the result is not
> what was intended._

I think this is the best summation I've seen of the value of a well-designed
GUI interface as opposed to the most common implementations of the command
line. Obviously not everything can be plausibly translated to CLI, but I wish
there was more effort to combine the power of CLIs with, especially, the
discoverability and feedback of GUIs.

------
chrisra
I'm surprised at how many people are agreeing with this article.

I need a new phone soon, and all of my family members have iPhones, which is
nice for group chat (maybe photo sharing too). I worry about getting an iPhone
because I feel like Apple is going nowhere these days. If your biggest
innovation is "make it bigger", "make it smaller" (macbook air, iPhone, iPad,
Apple Watch), we've got some things to work on. I felt like everyone struggled
with Yosemite, too.

------
molecule
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932)

------
eprom
"Unfortunately, visually simple appearance does not result in ease of use, as
the vast literature in academic journals on human-computer interaction and
human factors demonstrates."

This lines up with my own anecdotal experience, but isn't something I've read
about. Can anyone suggest further reading on this research?

------
abecedarius
So, on discoverability in gestural interfaces: what are some good sources? I'm
working on a touch interface right now and I'd love to learn how to make it
better.

------
userbinator
This reminds me of the article about Apple's internal iPhone UI, and how I
thought it actually looked _better_ than the release version:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414149)

A heavy, very readable font, along with buttons that actually look like
buttons.

------
stretchwithme
Are features less discoverable? Or has how you discover features changed from
discovering through menus to discovering through swiping and tapping?

I'm going to be using a feature in much the same way I discover it. Menus are
harder to read and use on a small device. This is not a desktop.

------
yuhong
I thought Firefox was facing a similar problem for a while now, with the
merging of the back and forward buttons for example. I wonder who is
responsible.

------
oldboyFX
Good. I always felt weird for not knowing any of the advanced gestures. I also
didn't know that shaking == undo.

I've been using iPhones since 2009.

------
peter303
An ironic piece where I had to wade through a preview ad and three poorly
placed overlay ads to even this article.

------
bsg75
What Apple has been focusing on in later releases is not design, but fashion -
form without function.

------
revelation
I'm guessing design is now random pictures with splashes of color added on
top? Is this aiding the article, because right now it's "giving design a bad
name".

Some GIFs would be much more convincing.

