Apple's design 'drives up support costs, makes gadgets harder to use' Apple's design has fallen from the high standards set by Donald Norman and Bruce Tognazzini, reckon... er, Donald Norman and Bruce Tognazzini. The two UX gurus and former Apple alumni now think "Apple is giving design a bad name". Nothing new, you might think. But because Apple is now so influential, poor design from Cupertino …
"Everyone and their father seems to prefer them to Windows/Android type GUIs, but I don't get it."
I confess I don't.
The iOS interface drives me wild; why do I seem to have to press a physical home button to go back? I gather there are swipe gestures but they aren't exactly signalled.
But then I sighed with relief when my 1 button mouse was replaced with a three button mouse.
Thought I'd do SWMBO a favour and rip a couple of DVDs to her iPad. Easy enough you would think - until you try to put them on without using iTunes!
Apple decided to sandbox the application data - so while I could FTP them on, I couldn't see them from the chosen player app.
The screams that accompanied the headache - for the most counter intuitive interface/system that it has been my misfortune to work with.
@TRT, & Steve Todd
It is a design flaw - it's her device, her data, her choices on how data should be handled. We are not talking about one app messing up the running files of another. We are talking about the data - the consumer information. Their's to own and use/screw up as they see fit.
Oh Just use iTunes... Why? It's not my iPad - why should I have to use a bloated piece of software from Apple just to transfer files and make them usable, If I have successfully got the files on board - as I did with ftp then I should be able to use them as I see fit.
This all goes back to working with customers/consumers to see how they try to use the device - and making design choices accordingly.
SUSE did this with Linux years ago something in excess of 10000 hours of usability studies across different generations and abilities. And at that time there was a step improvement in the interface and the usability - but it's an iterative process - study how people use it, make changes, stick with some aspects for well documented and considered reasons. Rinse and repeat. Redhat have done similarly.
I just don't understand why it is that consumers have to accept the "We will tell you the only way to use it, You're holding it wrong!" approach from manufacturers.
Ah well - back to my mixed bag of MS/Linux/Android for the rest of the day...
"Thought I'd do SWMBO a favour and rip a couple of DVDs to her iPad."
Possibly an illegal format shift, depending on the content owner.
"Unable to view with the chosen player app"
Does that player app have a means of getting the files onto the machine? Does it include an FTP client? If it doesn't, why are you raging at Apple instead of at the player app author?
Sandboxing App storage is a good idea. All requests for other data are mediated by the iOS and have to follow strict request protocols instead of just being a free for all file system. It's containers with ladders from the ground up by design, not a set of holes over an open arena.
@TRT
Possibly an illegal format shift, depending on the content owner.
Right - let's start at the beginning. Format shifting is a matter of law not content owners preferences. For example, US copyright law embodies a concept of fair use which is believed by many lawyers to encompass format shifting. The matter is not fully settled - so this may change in the future.
In the Netherlands, citizens are allowed to make copies of their legally bought audio and video.
In Spain, provided that you retain the original media, you can make a copy for private use.
Similarly in Australia and New Zealand, copies can be made for personal use.
The UK government tried to introduce a provision for format shifting - but as per standard operating procedure, they screwed it up. Specifically, they did not provide any compensation mechanism for the content owners (e.g. such as a tax on MP3 players) and were adjudged to have unfairly deprived the content holders of their property rights without compensation.
That the format shifting card was played at all points to the overall weakness of the position being defended - we are talking technology not law.
So - for the purposes of this discussion, the DVDs are of home video, previously recorded on a Sony camera and transferred to DVD .
Back to the tech issue.
The player that I settled on does have a transfer mechanism built into it. So, the files are on the iPad and can be played. However, if in two months time a new wizzy player emerges and becomes the favoured player of choice then these two 'king huge files cannot be played by that new wizzy player. They are as useful as a dead parrot - you know
"'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!
'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies!
'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig!
'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!
As it stands, there would appear to be no way to make them accessible to the new wizzy player without loading them though the new player - that that is just plain daft.
It may be argued that it is "Safer" but my contention remains - usability studies are an essential part of design - and based on said studies, the design should evolve - evolve to accommodate new paradigms of working and evolve to fix decisions that might no longer stand the test of time.
Even if they were only to offer the option of "I think I know what I'm doing and I understand the risks - but let me pretend to be an adult and try something!" with 14 layers of "Are you Sure?" "Are you really really really sure?"
Anyway - at this stage it's now a philosophical argument - the experience has dissuaded me from ever spending my money on an iPad.
‘it’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me out,’ saidzaphod, whose love affair with the ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. 'every time you try and operate these weird white controls that are labeled in white on a white background, a little white light lights up in white to let you know you’ve done it.’
Tell it like it is!
I often wondered why the GUI muppets at Gnome, Firefox, Google, MS, etc, all seem to go down the same route of removing functionality and discoverability. They need a course in GUI design which consists of taking the odd granny/granddad or two off the street and giving them a simple task to do on the device. If they can't work it out in under 2 minutes the designers get beaten with rubber hoses until the elderly folk succeed.
A couple of lessons and I am sure designs would be so much more usable...
As I keep telling students "If you need lessons on using a GUI then there is something fundamentally wrong and who ever wrote the GUI needs lessons on writing them"
The whole point is that they should be intuitive.
Now everyone writing them seems to think that the whole point of a GUI is to out weird the other guys writing them.
Unfortunately, I think designers are hearing "intuitive" and interpreting that as a mandate to hide everything that could possibly be confusing. To a very limited extent this works, if you're only interested in using a program for the very most basic task it was designed for, one of these interfaces where everything is hidden might well be less daunting to a less technically inclined user. But the second the user wants to do anything more, like format text in a word processor or attach a file to email they're going to be even more lost .
Er Ummm we used to do that a long time ago. It was very instructive and did influence how our GUI's worked.
MS clearly didn't do any of this with METRO and those idiotic 'charms'. I am sure that the MS fanbois will hate this idea but they (MS) made an interface that was a huge retrograde step backwards when in a non touch environment.
I'm an MS fan and I think the 8 interface was horrible and one of the most stupid industry decisions made. Ever. And it was a costly one too. Giving away 10 to fix it is a multi-billion dollar fix.
I suspect politics more than user input led to that disaster.
As for Apple. Yes, one of my biggest complaints about that OS since X came out was that it was impossibly un-intuitive. I still battle with portions of it when I am unfortunate enough to have to use it.
Gah! There's that word being used, yet again, to mean something else entirely. Invariably when someone says intuitive they usually mean "simple", "discoverable" or "familiar". Unfortunately when some bright spark says that a UI should be intuitive (meaning discoverable) another understands it as intuitive (meaning simple) and we're stuck in the bovine feces of UIs that are impossible to be quickly productive with. The sooner the word intuitive banished from the land of computing the quicker we can get back to a better UI.
I'm a fan that makes funny noises as it turns. The design of the MacIntosh (hard- and software) was impossibly un-intuitive and drove up costs, whereas the PC and its OS were an example of functional, cost-effective design and easy to use. The down side was that it was a good fit for the requirements of 1980, not those of 1990.
Paul Crawford wrote:
I often wondered why the GUI muppets at Gnome, Firefox, Google, MS, etc, all seem to go down the same route of removing functionality and discoverability.It seems only those working on Mint Mate/Cinnamon still have their heads screwed on and are interested in designing a usable GUI, rather than a bloody fashion statement.
As an aside, the Web has been an excuse for most companies to go 20 years backward and present us with terribly designed web pages and native applications.
Just look at YouTube, and how terrible it is to do anything else than the most basics use. Try to go backwards when using infinite scrolling, try to change language or country, try to scroll through the long list of videos of a channel. And it's just one of many examples, WordPress which I dearly love is pure s.ht GUI wise, and I hate Microsoft becoming enamored with the hamburger.
For all their faults, Microsoft's WP7 & Windows 8 had some brilliant design ideas, such as the use of type in the GUI, that are mostly gone in Window 10 and MS new apps.
I'm not sure I'd agree with the priority differences between OSX and iOS for 2015. Is this from Apple, or just a guess at their priorities from what they've done?
But I agree with them that Apple did lead the change in User Interfacing, are still leading the field, and have dropped the ball. Not being able to burn a disk image in Disc Utility now?! Come on!!!
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Where I generally get and to some extent agree with what your saying,
why is it, a 3 year old can pick up a ipad etc and just run with it, if its so hard to use?
and why is it there are more seniors and non computer users that ever in history using these devices?
statistics kinda go against everything you say here.
That being said, labels which your not sure if you can press or not is bloody annoying!
but watching a 3 year old pressing the TV screen and wondering why it wont change is funny,
so swings and roundabouts.
Because Apple treat their users as simpletons?
I don't know! But I wish someone would explain!
For example - why did they deliver a system without an obvious back button? This goes to the heart of the article/observations by the old designers. Why is it so difficult to reverse out of something.
Like so many others, I make mistakes, pick the wrong option, change my mind - but there's not a simple back out.
Or I want to share data between apps - a process that would seem intuitive to almost any user of computer type equipment for the last however many decades. But Apple decided that that model was too risky and sandboxed the data - breaking the basic principles of usability.
"why is it, a 3 year old can pick up a ipad etc and just run with it, if its so hard to use?"
A 3 year old can fire a gun - but they can't shoot straight, reload or defend their playpen with it.
Also, a 3 year old mind is a lot more plastic than a 73, 53 or even a 33 year old mind.
Besides which, the typical use-case of a 3 yo with an ipad is probably a lot less complex than a Tomy toy for the same age range. For example:
Smear jam across the screen (Slide to unlock).
Jammy fingerprint upper left screen (Click Youtube)
Spittle / Jammy fingerprint right hand side (PewDiePew / Cbeebies / Whatever channel)
Bang screen repeatedly with ball of fist (Play video)
If you want to change settings, do anything substantial, it's a lot less easy.
Watching a toddler picking up the TV remote, talking to it, then throwing it across the room because it didn't talk back is funny. (To a toddler a remote is very similar to a phone). But the same toddler knew that if you pushed the blackbox (ie. video cassette) into the slot under the TV, Maisy Mouse would automatically appear on the screen rather than the rubbish the parents were watching...
Watching my children grow has taught me much about human-technology interaction and interface design... and we have definitely taken many backward steps in recent years...
Because the 3 year old I know has observed the adults using their ipad.
Me, I'm in a different city with no one that uses Apple products, so using my new iPad has been a nightmare. One night I accidentally double clicked the home button and discovered a new mode. Trying to get a PDF off my Linux box into iBooks for something to read at lunch is like dragging my sac through broken glass. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and I don't do anything different so I have no idea what the problem is. No error messages. Nothing. It's just not there.
I'll certainly never buy another Apple product.
"Trying to get a PDF off my Linux box into iBooks for something to read at lunch is like dragging my sac through broken glass."
Look, if you you're too fucking stupid to search with Google, then maybe you balls deserve that kind of treatment.
Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive is what you are looking for. You can easily transfer from Dropbox to iBooks, or Adobe Reader, or just read it in Dropbox!
'mazing.
If you "need to search for documentation", then you might as well be using VMS.
The WHOLE POINT of modern UI design is supposed to be that you don't have to do that. That was kind of a key thesis of the article we're discussing right now.
No, it really wasn't. At least not for anyone with any actual understanding of user interaction design.
While Norman definitely advocates, as a rule of thumb, that a well-designed product is one where recourse to documentation should rarely be required, he most certainly isn't opposed to documentation. Let's see. How about this quote:
The technical writing profession is an essential component of any design, just as important as designers, interaction and usability specialists, and engineers.
Indeed, a lack of good documentation is a huge UI / UIX / UIM error. Particularly with complex software, many user goals cannot be satisfied by discoverable controls - there are too many permutations of plausible user requirements, so the control scheme would fail due to combinatorial explosion, if for no other reason.
"Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive is what you are looking for. You can easily transfer from Dropbox to iBooks, or Adobe Reader, or just read it in Dropbox!"
So you are suggesting that the best way to get data from a computer on the desk to the iPad in your hand is to send it half way around the world via a 3rd party because Apple don't do the decades old already solved problem? Yeah, highly intuitive.
> ... the best way to get data from a computer on the desk to the iPad in your hand is to send it half way around the world via a 3rd party because Apple don't do the decades old already solved problem?
It's even worse than that. In OS X 10.9 they removed a feature that allowed exactly that "computer on desk direct to phone in hand" transfer - even for their own products. Yup, people upgrading to 10.9 suddenly found that they couldn't plug their iPhone in with the USB cable and have it sync. Why ? Because to Apple this is too old fashioned and the only way a user should be allowed to do it is via Apple's cloud service.
The outcry was loud enough that even Apple couldn't ignore it - and they re-instated Sync Services, but only enough to support Apple devices.
As an Android phone user, the fact that they destroyed the ability to sync music, photos, calendar, contacts, notes, call logs, and a few others (Missing Sync was an awesome tool) is probably just the icing on the cake for Apple.
I can't help thinking that if 70s/80s Steve Jobs had seen what 00s Steve Jobs did to Apple and "the user experience" he'd have been horrified. His early work was all about making computers for people to use as they wanted, his later work was all about making computers for people to use as Apple want - and these days what Apple seem to want is a 30% cut of everything.
"So you are suggesting that the best way to get data from a computer on the desk to the iPad in your hand is to send it half way around the world via a 3rd party"
It seems you're beginning to understood what "cloud" is all about, just change "half way around the world" to "several times around the world using protocols not optimised for bulk data transfer" and I think you've got it.
"Look, if you you're too fucking stupid to search with Google, then maybe you balls deserve that kind of treatment.
Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive is what you are looking for." - Anon
https://xkcd.com/949/
Sure that wouldn't make it more difficult than it needs to be. I mean the Internet makes everything easier. Even transferring files between local devices. Twenty years on and I still email myself files.
Trying to get a PDF off my Linux box into iBooks for something to read at lunch is like dragging my sac through broken glass.
Way back about the only reliable way to get stuff between Unix boxes was via uucp. I suppose that experience has stayed with me, so at the basic level to get a (PDF) file between your Linux box and your (vanilla) iPad the simplest approach would be to send yourself an email with an attachment...
The other approach you can explore is to upload files to your iCloud Drive via a Linux web browser.
"why is it, a 3 year old can pick up a ipad etc and just run with it, if its so hard to use?"
Partly because 3 year olds are fantastically competent at figuring out experimentally how things work, and...
"why is it there are more seniors and non computer users that ever in history using these devices?"
Because an iPad, as purchased, is a very limited system with relatively few functions - all of which can eventually be found by pressing one of a limited number of buttons on the screen. In any case, I've seen many non-computer users try an iPad for the first time and they generally don't find it easy at all to begin with. They are also less daunted by the form factor of the machine, compared to sitting down at a proper keyboard and screen alongside a possibly noisy and "dangerous" looking high-tech box with lights on it.
> "why is it, a 3 year old can pick up a ipad etc and just run with it, if its so hard to use?"
> Partly because 3 year olds are fantastically competent at figuring out experimentally how things work, and...
and they have all the time in world to spend on it, plus it is all play and any response is a good one.
"why is it, a 3 year old can pick up a ipad etc and just run with it, if its so hard to use?"
Not that I can verify this, but based on my long experience with technology, I suspect that 3 year old would be able to "run" with an Android device just as easily. This is primarily because children of that age have no expectations about how something should work. It simply works the way it does.
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