Posted by riffraff 1 day ago
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)
Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.
I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.
Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
It's no help at all that people expect Apple to be fashionable, like if you read a review of an "operating system" in Arstechnica you'd think it's all about little details on the scrollbar, not about filesystems and microkernels and namespaces and stuff.
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
Hell your average developer probably doesn't either anymore
Further, it's arguably become worse with touch screens in cars where, while you're driving, you get to discover a designer has moved a widget somewhere else and now your distracted. Self driving cars might solve that but even just walking around using your phone, every UI change is another distraction that might have consequences.
We came from CLI with white text on black. Now dark mode is all the rage for the last couple of years.
I know OLED and all but interfaces feel just like fashion now, to hell with affordances and improving how things actually work let's just make things pretty for that micro dopamine drip and change it up just for the sake of it because jazz hands looks new makes $$
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.
The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.
Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.
Its U/I design since Windows 3.11 came about because of agile, not in spite of it. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.
The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.
This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.
Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.
Around the time Facebook figured out what it's business model was platforms suppressed virality and people got used to the idea that you have to pay for traffic. You'd think that people would think "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't. Like zero interest rates and some people are just made of money and some people in business are lazy and, if their business is profitable, won't pursue cost reductions unless competition makes it life or death. Or something.
So I am appalled at so much bad software marketing that makes me think "is there anyone left who's had to tune up a marketing funnel?"
Like you see 200+ bug reports on Adobe's tracker about how Acrobat displays a total of 8 distracting UI elements to promote AI summaries the instant you open a document. And you can't clear them. And that's enough to make people see red.
But if you actually click on one of these stupid links you see a series of ads for things that are not AI features and that they don't make a serious effort to explain or sell. Then finally there's an ad for Acrobat Pro which maybe has the AI Summary but do I want to find out? I heard somebody somewhere did manage to try the AI Summary and of course it didn't work.
Like I could be annoyed by rapacious behavior but at least understand that people are motivated to make money for their shareholders. But to annoy everybody when they have Adobe CC subscriptions to lose and no clear path to convert? Where's the profit in that?
And that's totally ordinary. Like Meta solved so many tough problems to create the Meta Quest 3 and supposedly they are leaders in social software but they get the easy things wrong: they keep changing the interface that I'd use to "friend" people in games and make the process so terrible (at least the spammers who try to follow me on Instagram stole pictures of blonde women but nobody has a profile pic or the slightest bit of information to help decide "why would you follow me?") Supposedly Zuck wants to succeed at VR so bad... or is it just "we're #1 why try harder?"
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
But that was in a different millennium.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
Full clip slightly longer, worth watching.
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world.
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
Your assumptions only work until they don't. It's not like we live in a static situation. What didn't work yesterday might work today
Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
Apple knew this was bad 20 years ago. They just don't bother to read their own documentation:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2008) [1] p. 170:
> If you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value; don’t include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read.
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.
Or is that how you meant it?
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.
"Hey our metrics show that menu items with icons are interacted with more often."
"Oh we should put icons on every menu item and get our usage numbers up."
"I agree, bigger numbers are more impressive and will get us promotions or bonuses."
One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.
For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.
On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
Icons can genuinely help convey meaning/understanding. They can also be clutter. It comes down to how you use them.
Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.
Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise
I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.
I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.