
Apple's Products Are Getting Harder to Use - milen
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/apples_products_are.html
======
toddmorey
Look, it's not without its faults, but iOS makes for a _much_ more
approachable device than a 1993-era Mac. My young son cannot read, write, or
speak, and I'm amazing at how productive he is on the iPad. For example,
without instruction, he's organized his programs into folders, a task that I
know he still can't perform on a Mac, complete with all its menus.

Probably the most compelling advancement of iOS is that it has a "home" state.
No matter how far you go or how lost you get, you can always press one
physical button to get back to a familiar starting point. I didn't realize how
big that would be, and how much it would do to make users feel grounded and
encourage exploration. For all types of users, I think that's a great
advancement.

As for the gestures, there really are some confusing advanced ones, and I'd
bet they have very little real-world traction. Happily, tap, swipe, and pinch
are pretty much the only ones you need, and most users can pick those up in
the first few minutes.

~~~
lordleft
That insight about the home button is brilliant! I never realized how
important it is to have that.

------
cpcallen
The trend of choosing minimalist styling over usability has been obvious for
some time. Apple is one of the worst offenders - particularly in light of
their previous commitment to usability - but sadly not the only one.

My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour
and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual
button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still
hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going
to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-
white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations?

(I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally,
be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the
colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch
would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still
used in other parts of the UI.)

~~~
fluidcruft
This was also one of my biggest issues with Windows 8 (became slightly better
in 8.1 and so far seems much better in 10).

There were so many things that were hidden behind what I would call "right-
click in the middle of nowhere" and had no other way to access them (I assume
that's supposed to be equivalent to the long press in a touch UI) that I never
figured out until I gave up and went to youtube to figure out how the hell
things work. Apparently you were intended to just go around right clicking on
anything until something happened? I don't necessarily mind that they changed
the UI, but I shouldn't have to go wade through a morass of bloated youtube
videos just to figure out how to do anything. Even the Microsoft website never
had instructions. And of course using builtin search (which used to be great
on Windows) never explained shit about the modern UI.

------
WorkingClassDev
They are also getting more broken imho.

Case point, multiple Apple TVs on the same network, quite often broken. iTunes
WiFi sync often breaks without a plug in and fiddle session, I guess they
really want you to use iCloud.

App crashes on iOS are quite significant now where they used to be very rare
imo.

~~~
emsy
OS X is even worse. Up until Mountain Lion I could easily left my Mac on for
weeks without needing to reboot (except for crucial updates). Since Mavericks
and even more so Yosemite it has gotten out of hand. I need to reboot _at
least_ once a week, WiFi is broken and Finder regularly hangs up on me.

~~~
joshuapants
I'm playing with the El Capitan beta right now on a ~4 year old MBP and I will
say that it seems very snappy and I haven't needed to reboot except for
updates, and I haven't had any wifi issues (had a lot on Mavericks). That
said, it's a clean install and I've been pretty gentle with it. I'm cautiously
optimistic that they're improving these matters.

------
MrBuddyCasino
I agree with the observations. On a more technical level:

I find it astonishing how bad AirDrop is. I am typing this on a brand new
MacBook Pro, and I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6. I tried,
multiple times, it simply doesn't work. Googling the issues tells me I'm not
alone.

Not a huge issue, but there was a time when this would have been unthinkable.
Also, iTunes. Just give it the bullet. Please. Oh, and Finder - kill it with
fire will ya? Windows Explorer is still better, which is embarrassing.

~~~
newjersey
> I can't send files to my equally brand new iPhone 6

I think the main issue is that Apple wants to abstract the idea of files and a
filesystem away... at least on iOS devices.

While Apple does not say it in as many words, here is a quote straight from
the horse's mouth:

> The iOS file system is geared toward apps running on their own. To keep the
> system simple, users of iOS devices do not have direct access to the file
> system and apps are expected to follow this convention.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileMa...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/FileSystemProgrammingGuide/FileSystemOverview/FileSystemOverview.html)

~~~
arrrg
Air Drop not working is a technical bug. It should work (but often randomly
doesn’t for no discernible reason).

~~~
mercer
Agreed, but I think quite of these bugs are very much the result of Apple not
really caring enough. They have their focus, and sadly for many of us, it
appears to be iOS over mac, and the iOS approach to files over a filesystem.

I don't think this is a new thing. The Finder is terrible, and has been for a
long time. iPhoto hasn't been great for me either, nor iTunes.

But if I look at how most of the less-geeky users (and I suppose the majority
of Apple users) around me use their macs, I kind of get it. They don't use
iPhoto, iTunes and Finder the way I do, so they don't generally have issues or
miss features that I do miss.

For the most part I can live with this situation, because the upside is that
Apple's focus (and resulting neglect of other things) can lead to really great
things. I love iOS and even though I have and would happily use an Android
device, I am still willing to pay a premium for an Apple device. A lot of the
most common use-cases, for me at least, are still superior within the Apple
ecosystem. I'm enough of a 'common user' most of the time to accept the
horrible experience whenever I step out of this role.

For now, Apple feels a bit like those (new?) companies/startups that send you
packages of ingredients with recipes once a week so you can cook a few quite
good (but relatively pricy) meals throughout the week with little fuss. The
experience is good, the result is healthy and fresh even though it feels a
bit... extravagant/excessive sometimes. But for people like me who don't want
prepackaged meals, but who also don't like cooking from scratch all the time
(especially not just for myself), it's a good solution.

The problem Apple is facing right now is that for whatever reason too much of
the stuff they _do_ focus on, and too much of their essential functionality,
has been slipping, and if the continue on this track, they'll turn into
McDonalds. And I don't go to McDonalds, because it's both unhealthy _and_
strangely expensive. I'd just go back to cooking from scratch.

------
tomelders
I think Apple still is "The Best", but like many others, I feel it's fast
becoming "The Best" of a bad bunch, which isn't good enough for me, and
hopefully isn't good enough for Apple.

I blame UXers.

------
alialkhatib
It's probably worth pointing out that the author is Don Norman - one of the
pioneering thinkers in user-centered design and Human-Computer Interaction in
general. He wrote _The Design of Everyday Things_ , which I would argue is
required reading for anyone interested in HCI (admittedly a bold claim,
considering how broad the field is).

I'm tempted to agree, but I'm not sure whether this is entirely Apple's fault
(some of it is, certainly), or whether this is partly the fault of developers
(or maybe shifting the blame back to Apple, Apple's fault for not imposing
even stricter interface guidelines). Some apps in iOS have this affordance
where you can go back if you swipe from the left edge of the screen inward,
but frustratingly _some don 't_. Is this what Norman is talking about? It's
not clear because he avoids giving specific case studies, which isn't his
style ( _DOET_ is a veritable plethora of strong examples to illustrate his
points), making me think he's saving them for his later critique.

Norman mentions research that users can't remember more than a small number of
icons, and I'd like to know what research in particular he's referencing, but
coming from a cultural anthro background and with some very superficial
knowledge of semiotics, that seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete; maybe
he's talking about people learning icons in a very constrained timeframe?
People learn to identify countless icons throughout their lives and (within a
given culture) you can reliably show people hundreds of iconic symbols and
images that they would recognize immediately.

I agree with the general argument that Apple (and others) are overloading us
with iconography that we need to internalize (iOS emoji in particular seems
like too much too quickly, but maybe that's just me), but I think the answer
to this is that it takes time for cultures to adopt icons into their lexicon.

I would argue that helping the user form a consistent and "accurate" mental
model for how things work is the most important thing a designer can do. He
points to this in some examples (swipe gestures in particular, which evidently
are inconsistent between iPhone, iPad, Trackpad, and Magic Mouse), but he
doesn't name the overarching point as such (or if he ties it all together, I
missed it).

At the end, Norman previews that he and Bruce Tognazzini are writing a
critique on "How Apple ruined design", giving me the sense that this post was
about drumming up interest for that. If that's the case, mission accomplished.

~~~
kps

      > Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe
      > from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. 
    

Interesting example. If the phone is set to a RTL language, do you swipe from
the right to go back? Or is the answer _some do, some don 't_?

------
keepitsurreal
Is this really an issue? We're now living in a society saturated with
smartphones, tablets and PCs. Kids today are born with iPhones and iPads.
Older populations don't seem to be having problems using these devices, heck
my 80 year old grandmother can use her iPhone, Mac, and iPad perfectly.

As our society adopts basic principles of computer interaction we can make
them more advanced while keeping the same relative level of simplicity.

~~~
rymndhng
That's what I wonder as well. We've been inundated with mobile interaction for
the last 7 sevens that maybe it's ok to start peeling off some of the layers.

If you started with the flat iOS UI from the beginning it would have been very
difficult to get accustomed to. Nowadays, we don't rely on those skeuomorphic
affordances because we assume touch interfaces are the defacto.

That said though, I do agree that we should think critically about seasoned vs
beginner interfaces. We should strive to accommodate both without causing
detriment to one group or another.

------
musesum
The Apple Watch has been getting a bad rap for complexity, even though it is
simpler than the iPhone.

What are the main gestures, today, for the iPhone? Home-button-press(once
twice long-siri thrice), home-button-double-tap, home-screen-swipe(left right
middle-down mid), bottom-up, top-down (Today Notifications), three-finger-
swipe, pinch, shake. What did I miss?

Compare that with the original iPhone. We started simple, and then year-by-
year, a new gesture is added, which seems natural because it's only a small
change from what was done before. The UX has been boiling the frog.

So, then the Apple Watch comes along. It is less complex than the iPhone 6,
but more complex than the original iPhone. Because it is starting from
scratch. It highlights how complex iOS has become.

Would love to see a UX reboot. But, who at Apple has power to do so? Would it
turn out like Window's tiles?

~~~
dingaling
I had a colleague recently who handed me his iPhone ( a 5, I think. Tall and
skinny. ) and asked me to look-up some astronomical data while he was busy.

Not having used one before, I can say the the interface is far from intuitive.
I couldn't find the way to switch between running apps, I kept having to go
back to the home screen and hit the app's icon.

I've just searched now out of interest and apparently I should have swiped
four-fingers to the left. How is that in any way discoverable? Or even easy to
do when walking.

~~~
scott_karana
FYI, double-tapping the Home button shows you a list of recent applications.

That would be the most commonly used way of switching apps, and it's one of
the first tips that is shown to a user on a "new" phone by the OS.

Four finger swiping is an optional feature that power users can turn on.

Discoverability is still a valid issue, of course.

------
kleer001
Author seems to me to mainly focus on the gestures of an interface. I'm not a
big fan of greasy fingered swiping on a tablet or phone. I'll use it if I have
to, but won't prefer it.

Three fingers swipe up is back and two fingers in a circle is save?! Not
literally, but there's usually a dozen different gestures all with ambiguous
meaning. At least ambiguous to me. But I don't have an immediate fix for the
tablet interface.

I guess I'm an old fogy and prefer typing on a keyboard with my withered
vestigial arms.

------
mkozlows
I think any observation that imagines that old-school dropdown-menu-based
applications are easier to use than iOS/Android applications is empirically
off-base. More people use, more fluently, phone apps than ever used those
desktop ones.

That's not to say that iOS-style interfaces are perfect -- obviously there are
flaws there -- but if your starting premise is that MacOS was easier to use
than iOS, you're just fundamentally at odds with reality, and need to figure
out which of your premises are wrong.

~~~
ehvatum
Compare the usability of newer versions of iOS with older versions, then. In
my opinion, there's been a lot of regression.

------
fimoreth
It could be just because we're coming from Android, but my friend and I
experienced an approachability problem with the iPad about a month ago.

I was using an iPad on a flight (the in-flight entertainment was broken) and
it took us, both computer engineers, a good ten minutes to figure out how to
turn down the brightness. It was a painful experience trying to find the
settings - swipe down? No.. swipe other directions, nope.

It took us forever to discover that 'settings' is just an app on the tablet.

Maybe it was just because we are part of the Android ecosystem, but using one
didn't seem very logical.

Note: Neither of us specifically avoid Apple products, but just found them way
too expensive with university for purchase.

~~~
skygazer
As an iOS guy, I've had an exactly reciprocal experience struggling to
navigate Android to change seemingly basic settings. I think our mutual
difficulties make more sense if we assume "intuitive" is secretly a synonym
for "familiar." We've quietly absorbed our preferred platforms preferred
metaphors and idioms over time, and they're intricate and (hopefully) self-
consistent.

Without intending to sound too flowery, what I find most interesting though is
that the competition between the platforms seems to simultaneously drive both
convergence and differentiation that's almost — musical. If you step back and
watch the entwined evolutions you can see a lot of mutual love and hate.

------
hellofunk
It would probably be fairer not to compare Apple's products today with Apple's
products from yesterday, but its products today with other companies' products
today. As technology and tech culture and users evolve, so too do the
interfaces. Now I have not used a Windows computer in a couple of years, but
when I made the switch to OSX, I found it _much_ easier and more instinctive
to use. I'd probably say the same about a Windows computer from 2 years ago
vs. an Apple computer from 15 years ago, which like in this article, is an
unfair comparison.

~~~
hnal943
When I switched from Windows to OSX, I was constantly frustrated by the way
Apple chose to organize things. I hated having the menu bar be on the top of
the screen and not part of the window for example. Trying to take a screen
shot was impossible without google. It was just as least as difficult learning
to be productive on a mac as it was when I transitioned to Ubuntu.

I've come to believe that there is no such thing as a universally intuitive
interface - consistency is achievable, but everyone comes to your interface
with a different background and therefore a different sense of what is
intuitive.

~~~
hellofunk
I find Apple's use of the trackpad for swiping between desktops or between
full-screen apps to be much quicker for navigating an environment than the
alt-tab or mouse use on Windows. Perhaps Windows has improved to offer similar
Apple navigation techniques, but I really like that when I switched to OSX. I
also think Time Machine is one of best native OS tools I've ever seen,
painless incremental backups with no effort by the user.

~~~
hnal943
I came to like things about OSX also. In particular I liked the Ubuntu-style
Spaces. That doesn't mean they were intuitive; it took effort to learn the Mac
milieu.

------
cmiles74
This article is a bit weak on detail, leaving us to fill in with our own
anecdotes. I have one, last night my partner couldn't figure out how to add a
new item in the "Reminder" application. Looking over their shoulder, it wasn't
obvious to me either. The answer: click on the blank line. Kind of elegant and
at the same time, confusing. After years of pressing the "plus" icon, Apple
has switched gears and left us behind.

In my opinion, the problem is Apple's departure from the hints they've been
training people on since the first iPhone.

------
dont-say-that
I guess this isn't up for discussion on HN.

Blasted from the top page straight out of the top 1000!

------
alec626
You could not be more wrong. They're still very easy to use, and way easier
and less confusing than Android. The gestures for swiping between full screen
apps are the same on the mac and iPad. They're both 4 fingers. And if you can
fit 4 fingers on a magic mouse, I commend you because it's so small!

I really don't see how they're getting harder to use. And I help people with
it all the time, and what I hear all the time is, "wow that actually makes
sense." It's the logical way.

So, I completely disagree and I'd be willing to say the majority would also
agree.

~~~
molecule
_> The gestures for swiping between full screen apps are the same on the mac
and iPad. They're both 4 fingers._

Not sure about iPad, but on OSX, it's three fingers for the track pad and two
for the magic mouse: [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204895](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895)

~~~
arrrg
One finger more than the scroll gesture … I’m not sure how you could do it
differently. Requiring three fingers on the mouse would just be weird (I’m all
for allowing three fingers additionally to two fingers, though!) and requiring
just two on the trackpad is kinda not possible (scrolling is obviously more
important and scrolling with two fingers is obviously superior to every other
implementation of that on a trackpad).

And it’s literally only the number of fingers that’s different. And the only
non-obvious gesture is probably to swipe up to invoke Mission Control.

Also, the way OS X is set up, those gestures serve as shortcuts (like hot
corners used to, in the olden days). Nearly every single functionality can be
reached via just clicking (Notification Center, switching from desktop to
desktop or fullscreen app to fullscreen app) or buttons on the keyboard
(Mission Control, Launch Pad).

Just relatively less important and central functionality is relegated to
either the context menu (the ability to look up words in a pop-over can be
activated via the context menu or three finger tap) or keyboard shortcut and
gesture (swiping down for App Exposé).

Accepting an arbitrary number of fingers … sure I’m all for it. But those
gestures aren’t really anything worth criticising. They are shortcuts that
have to be explicitly learned. That’s why there _are_ videos in the control
pane. Apple knows that those have to be actually taught. That’s why the UI has
non-gesture alternatives that are obvious and in your face.

This is not to defend Apple – I just want to point out that little personal
pet peeves like these aren’t necessarily indicative of actual problems actual
users have, especially if they come from an expert. (I also think you can
always improve things and that’s certainly also true of how OS X implements
gestures. But that’s just a truism that will never be wrong. As someone
working in the field: Luckily. There are probably juicier targets than
gestures in OS X, though.)

