I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
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.
(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.
>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
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.
We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.
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.
> they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
"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
I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.
IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because the hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions
Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.
And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.
Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.
This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".
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.
I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.
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.
This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy.
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.
> 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...
In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.
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.
Apple's own design guidelines said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again recommending against).
Couldn't they have just talked to the people who wrote the old guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Are they going to randomly forget in another 15 years and need to rerun the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
> 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...
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?
Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for information density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.
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.
Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.
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 think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
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.
The two things that pain me the most are:
(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
> No more clean, compact directory trees
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.
>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
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.
We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.
FYI it’s Chesterton’s Fence, named after writer G. K. Chesterton.
Fixed, thanks!
This Apple devotion is really something else..
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.
> they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
"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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.
But that was in a different millennium.
IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because the hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions
Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.
And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.
Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.
It’s the goomba fallacy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
In other circumstances, I'd be the first to agree, but you'll find people arguing for both sides in the same comment in this very comment section.
Which people are that? TFA links to their post where they complained about it, and linked to a Gruber post complaining about it too.
This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".
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.
I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.
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.
This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy.
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.
By recent, you mean since just after the iPhone 3s?
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise.
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
*3GS
It's the Reality Distortion Field.
Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
The conclusion is too forgiving...
> 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...
In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.
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.
Apple's own design guidelines said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again recommending against).
Couldn't they have just talked to the people who wrote the old guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Are they going to randomly forget in another 15 years and need to rerun the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
Microsoft has (and had) some amazing designers. They came up with Metro, which was the forerunner of the flat design that everyone loves/hates now.
When you say carefully considered, you're going with the the Aristotelian process that led him to argue that feathers fall slower than rock.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
> 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...
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?
1. Read the post
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
Honest mistake.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
I love KDE but they could take some notes from this!
Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for information density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.
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.
I use KDE and you made me right click everywhere and I can't find a menu without icons lol
Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.
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
where do you disable them?
System Settings > Application Style > Configure Icons and Toolbars
My favorite thing about this is a checkbox in Xcode's Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now) for menu items image — "Only for macOS 26".
You first? Lol
Art vs. minimalism in design
Icons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?
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