I remember as a child showing my mother how to do stuff on our family Mac with OS 7.5 and being baffled that she didn't 'get' the UI.
A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously.
Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and is becoming slowly less usable to me.
When I read the HIGs -- whether long ago on the Mac or Amiga, or later OSX it made sense, and the rationale for why something was some way made sense. It was actually quite easy to code something to fit, as the rules were clear, simple and (mostly) logical. There felt like an internal consistency that has slowly eroded over the last decade. Mainly thanks to phones.
Both Android and iPhone have internal inconsistencies along with hidden features that annoy or are gratuitously clever, often added in the yearly fit of featuritis and change for yearly change's sake. Windows and MacOS want to move further away from the desktop metaphor to phone+.
End result is I think just about everything - laptop, phone, tablet, stereo in the car :) is getting worse for usability. Peak on each was half a dozen versions back.
Do they even read the HIG themselves anymore? The latest iOS is a shit-show and full of inconsistencies between iPhone, iPad, and whatever you think would be considered “common sense”.
Apple's "services" apps–App Store, Music, Podcasts, TV–are the worst apps on the platform, period. They're so awful that I cannot understand how a sane developer could ship something like that.
To enable/disable shuffle after selecting a song, you must tap a bar near the bottom (which gives no visual indication that it expands); once expanded, you must then tap an unlabelled button with a “list” icon. This will show your upcoming queue, but also holds the control for shuffle and repeat. These are also unlabelled, but at least the icons are fairly unmistakable.
That was fun to look at, but I see you also have an issue with UI/UX on your website: you cannot easily reach the footer when scrolling down because of that infinity scroll.
I don't know if android is immune anymore. The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons and I didn't figure out how to get them back.
If you're still wondering how to get the icon labels back on your tablet, one way is to install a third-party home screen app. (Unlike on iOS, on Android the "desktop" is just another app. If you don't like the one your device comes with, you can download a replacement on the Google Play Store.)
Apps like this are usually called "launchers". Personally, I've used and liked Nova Launcher, an app that tries to be like the default Android launcher but with more settings to customize everything: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoils...
LOL, this is exactly the problem. You shouldn’t have to download a third party launcher, desktop, app screen to use the device efficiently.
I think iOS and Android are both shit shows. I pick up an android device and it’s a pain in the ass to figure out. That’s terrible design.
iOS seems to break their own rules and hide more and more in the name of minimalism. It’s asinine. 3D Touch was moronic. More than three gestures is moronic. Context sensitive swipes off the screen are moronic.
All of this became abundantly clear seeing my 77 year old grandma, who used a old android phone for years, have so many WTF moments on iOS 13. It’s not clear what is a button. She accidentally gestures and thinks her phone is busted.
My father literally can not send an iMessage without triggering "gentle effect." It has been highly annoying getting that every time he sends a message for the past three years with no way of disabling it.
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This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.
I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.
I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI.
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A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously.
Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and is becoming slowly less usable to me.
Suddenly I feel old.