Please note what Apple is now calling the tint color, used to signify a tappable button, much like blue text on the web means it's a link. You think the web is "simply insane" now that most have abandoned underlines?
Hyperlink vs an actual button is not a good comparison. You don't have a mouse on iOS to hover over things to see if they're 'touchable' or not. Bad design is still bad design even if the cool kids are doing it.
There's no mouse to use to hover on mobile or tablet devices on the web, either. I haven't seen any push for change in how hyperlinks work on the web now that mobile/tablet is a common client.
Stretching the concept a little here, but design that hinges on being able to hover the mouse to detect possible interaction reminds me of those dreadful 90's web menus where you had to hover to see the title.
In your linked example, there are as many or more hyperlinks that don't appear as buttons. The button styling in those examples indicates "primary call to action" more than anything. A page that uses button styling for every single hyperlink would be a mess. The iOS 7 styling for "primary call to action" is to make the tinted text bold, rather than giving it a background color, though that's used in some different areas too under different context.
PS, a side note that these are 3rd party examples of iOS 7 UI. Certain things are going to be misused or overused etc.
When you have an app as well as a website, users generally prefer the app because it has a better experience. Even if your website is mobile optimized, users prefer native apps, at least on iOS. I suspect part of the reason is that iOS widgets (at least until iOS 6.x) are more intuitive than HTML. iOS 7 seems to eliminate this advantage, and Apple has given up much of the differentiation. iOS 7 looks closer to Windows Phone and Android, and even web, so it is unclear whether going forward, users will continue to prefer apps over websites by the same margin.
I'm with you on users generally preferring app versions. It's IMO a huge jump to say that it's because iOS 6 UI is intuitive. Users go through a lot of training, more than they may realize: friends showing their iPhones, ads on TV showing the iPhone being used, some UI concepts borrowed from the desktop paradigm people are already used to, and just that once a UI has been in the mainstream's attention for six years, people are going to have had a lot of exposure to it. After all that it's easy to say it feels intuitive. There are intuitive elements but don't overlook the amount of "training" that happens.
Responsiveness is another reason native apps tend to win out. iOS adds delays when tapping links in Mobile Safari, etc. Users also have expectations of consistent behavior for native apps, unlike the web which is its own diverse platform - iOS 7 resembles web UI in some ways, but don't forget the hundreds of pages of human interface guidelines it comes with.
I'm not a fan of this style as implemented in Apple's own UI, but some of these aren't bad. I still think the translucency is a net loss in legibility and usability though. There's a reason this was tried and rejected in other operating systems.
Agreed that it's a net loss in legibility, but it does improve spatial reasoning. In a single window environment like iOS, there's a definite hierarchy: the home screen lies below apps which in turn lie below the control panel/notification window. Being able to see the blurred contents of the view below e.g. the control panel really helps reinforce that and stops the user getting lost in the OS, though admittedly at the cost of legibility. It's a fine line to be sure...
Most of these, especially without colorful, professional photography adorning them (which is unlikely to be the case in real use), just look like wireframes to me.
Most of these are probably. There's another blog out there covering iOS7 redesigns, but most of them aren't actually from the companies/apps in question, but rather spec redesigns by third parties.
In any case, Kicksend is the only app there that strikes me as having problems with stock photography. The other apps that features photography: TeeVee and that blog reader app, strike me as non-problems, since they are in every position to use curated, professional photography everywhere.
But yeah, I really hate it when social networking/sharing apps use stock photography in their designs - these screenshots look nothing like what their typical user will see. Build your design around shitty phone photographs (or help your users take less shit photos).
Also, in my admittedly not-very-important opinion, both AboutMe and TigerLily Lane's designs are terrible and violate a truckload of very core iOS7 (or really just modern mobile design) philosophies.
AroundMe uses the dreaded "internal homescreen", which was a fad that came and went during Facebook's v1 application back in 2008. Tile-homescreens within apps are confusing and do not read naturally, they also are indicative of extreme kitchen-sink design that hasn't been fully thought through. It's a crappy response to having an app that does too much stuff in completely unrelated ways. The linear list they have in their iPad design is much better.
TigerLily Lane gets much worse though. Lots of drop shadows where iOS7 deliberately avoids them. Lots of boxed components instead of iOS7's standard of full-bleed to the edges. Lots of completely ignoring stock components/design in exchange for their own invention of the same thing - e.g. the size selector, where the user has to learn a completely new segmented control instead of using something that is (or looks/feels like) the stock segmented control.
Lots of violation of new iOS7 button conventions. Icon buttons are conventionally surrounded by a circle to indicate tappability, they are never filled with a color except in their "down" state. All of their icon buttons violate this.
And their home screen has nothing that implies tappability on the username/password fields. The least they could've done was separate those two visually so it looks like each is tappable.
I love the PerfectWeather design though - IMO it's got the right mix of iOS7-convention-following without going straight off the flatten-everything deep end.
Overall if this is indicative of iOS7 design in general, we've got a long way to go.
Good points, a lot to think about. And I do agree it seems like there is a long way to go before we are seeing many great apps in iOS 7 design language.
Original iOS may feel bland now, but I feel like the design language that it created bred extremely usable apps at a far higher rate than any other OS before it. I can't say that I see the same happening with iOS 7. The foundation just doesn't seem to inspire great design as easily. In the hands of great designers, we'll be fine. But let's be honest, the vast majority of all apps and even a large portion of those we use daily are not created by great designers (or are held down by corporate interests).
I'm curious about your objection to the internal homescreen approach. You're saying that showing disparate functions in a tiled layout is bad, but a linear list layout is good? I don't really follow why that's the case.
Has there been any discussion of downsides of the internal homescreen approach by professional designers that you know of?
I've chatted with some professional designers about exactly this and the opinions have been pretty consistent - they dislike/hate the internal homescreen.
There are a bunch of issues I've seen raised (and I agree with):
- It's hard to parse. We read left/right (or right/left as the language goes), or top/down. We don't read in zigzag easily. A tiled layout makes parsing a list of items difficult. This is, at the end of the day though, a fairly minor complaint compared to the rest.
- It gives unimportant features equal prominence to your primary features. This is, IMO, the biggest knock against using this UI. When Facebook used the internal homescreen (once upon a time) the "Notes" feature was given equal prominence to "News Feed", which seems pure silliness. When Yelp used it, the "My Account" feature was equal in prominence to "Search" and "Nearby". This happens because in almost all cases where internal homescreens are used it's because the devs can't find a better way to communicate the apps different features to the user, so the solution is to bundle it all up into a bunch of tiles and let the user deal with it.
- It encourages a high degree of modality. You launch into into this massive 9-way fork in the road, and this encourages deep UIs where it's difficult to move between the different branches without backing all the way back up to the root. The original Facebook app suffered terribly from this. The trend in recent years has been a move towards flatter, more laterally traversible UIs. See for example the Facebook Chat Heads - where messaging is embedded throughout the app without making it modal. The ubiquitous side-menu that's almost universal in iOS today is a slightly less elegant solution to the same - though in the slide-menu's defense, it's less disruptive than taking over your whole screen.
- It's user friction you didn't have to incur. If I launch into Facebook it's a pretty safe assumption I'm checking my news feed. You can also contextually very easily determine what I want to do - if I have outstanding unread messages received recently, take me to messaging. Don't make the user choose if you have a high degree of confidence about what the user is looking for. A good example of this done well is, IMO, Ness - instead of asking you for cuisines or price ranges to execute a search, it does a default search based on smart defaults (which takes into account your last search, as well as time of day and other factors), and gives you easily tools to tweak the results to what you really want. A homescreen says "I have no idea what you want, so here's everything". Imagine going to Google.com and getting dropped in a large list of everything Google does.
I know there are alot of images on this site, but I really think JPEG was a poor choice. The compression artifacts on UI elements look especially bad. I also agree with philwebster about it being really hard to see the full image.
Oh that's too bad; I didn't realize that. It looks like Apple's Enterprise Partner Relational Feed serves up JPEGs as well. I guess the last place to check would be by monitoring network traffic coming out of the iOS App Store app or iTunes Mac app, but that'd be a bit of a pain (not even sure those use PNG).
Prediction: I think developers will find a harder time to differentiate than previous iOS versions, and will feel a bit marginalized as apps evolve around a common style, palette and pattern. However, the user experience will be evolutionary.
Frankly, I feel that this design strategy has a split personality.
As I wrote in my past blog(http://mattzlw.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/ios-7-beta-ux-thinki...): "Making users think which part of the iOS application I am in less, instead, a more strong feeling in one single place Apple provides." Apple made their move. Whether the rebalance can be reasonably achieved or not, how and when remain uncertain. I do think, in terms of graphic design choices, it seems to have fewer variables. But, perhaps this is where a more dynamic 2D physics UI engine comes to help.
I think it'll take Apple a bit to figure out their exact niche. Remember the original release of OSX 10.0? It was a hodge-podge of pinstripes, liquicap buttons and realistic looking icons mixed with some old 4-16 color icons. It was a mess if you're judging by where they were by the time OSX Tiger (10.4) was released. I'm sure the same will happen for iOS.
Just going to point out here that iOS is already a 6+ year old operating system. Tiger came out 4 years after OSX's debut. iOS hasn't found it's niche yet?
Except the design of iOS7 borrows liberally from both. The flat design was introduced in WP7 then copied and popularised in Android 4.0. A lot of these design elements that iOS7 is being praised for have been recommended in Android for quite some time.
Kicksend in particular, and Reeder 2 to a lesser extent if you cropped out the iOS status bar looks far more like an Android app than iOS has been in the past.
Each to their own, but I wouldn't describe Android as "garbage" now - I actually quite like its current style. I'd also argue that most of these iOS7 apps look like they'd need only minor tweaks to fit in with Android's style, so your claim is at the least a bit unfair.
Flat designs represented by these screenshots are a depressing step back in usability.