This kind of post annoys me. It's driven by the fact that the author has some theories about UI design, and wants to share them with us. There's nothing wrong with that. But this post pretends to be like a real usability audit, which it is not.
> When I tap it, it turns red — but wait — it doesn’t give me the visual feedback. Did I break it?
> The alarm is shown as a red filled square, so when I tap it, it should perform a negative action, right?
These comments are disingenous. You didn't get confused by these things.
You, as a person who's analysing a UI, have an almost totally different mindset to someone who is just using the thing for real. You know this, so here, you're just play-acting. You're thinking, what might I get confused about if I was a normal user? That's a bad way to look for what's really wrong in a UI design.
Yes, when you present points like these, they sound reasonable, but that doesn't mean they're right. Perhaps the alternative (e.g. banning the use of red anywhere in the OS other than for a negative action) might be over-restrictive as a requirement, which could cause excessive complexity elsewhere in the UI and lead to a worse overall result. Or perhaps you're right, the colour–meaning thing should be 100% consistent above all other considerations. Either way, you don't know, and speculation about what might confuse a real user should not be presented as fact.
>This kind of post annoys me. It's driven by the fact that the author has some theories about UI design, and wants to share them with us. There's nothing wrong with that. But this post pretends to be like a real usability audit, which it is not.
Wrong on all counts. What the author complaints about are examples of broken standard usability guidelines that all experts agree upon.
Like consistency, affordances, the principle of least surprise, color coding actions, etc.
The excerpt you provide is characteristic: "When I tap it, it turns red — but wait — it doesn’t give me the visual feedback. Did I break it?"
The similar looking button in the Timer screen DID give visual feedback when pressed. In a consistent UI, either this button would do too, or neither would.
>These comments are disingenous. You didn't get confused by these things. You, as a person who's analysing a UI, have an almost totally different mindset to someone who is just using the thing for real.
Wrong again. Even a UI expert, or someone like me, who's been using DOS, Windows, SunOS, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X UIs for 20+ years (and has designed some apps' UIs) can be confused by a UI, even in the most common app and in the most basic actions.
> The similar looking button in the Timer screen DID give visual feedback when pressed. In a consistent UI, either this button would do too, or neither would.
Visual feedback needs to serve a purpose. This is a stop watch we're talking about - one that shows time in tens of milliseconds, which is less than one frame interval at 60fps. Any animation done would hinder the function of the stop watch and raise ambiguity about when the stop watch actually started and stopped. So not using an animation is the right thing to do here. If they'd gone for consistency in this case, it would've been "foolish consistency" [1].
[1] "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I did not comment on the implementation. I said, in effect, that an animation would affect the perception of the start/stop times and using one would therefore be a bad idea in this case.
Yes the stopwatch's buttons are different, but there is a reason for this. Imagine you are using a stopwatch. When the gun fires, you press the button with your finger. When the runner passes the finish line, you push the button with your finger. You will probably expect it to stop and start timing at these times, with no regard for how long your finger spends sitting on the screen, right? Now look at the buttons in other apps: they trigger when you release your finger, not when your finger touches the screen. This makes sense because you may be tentative about submitting a form, and it'd be scary if it just submitted the moment your finger grazed the screen, right?
>These comments are disingenous[sic]. You didn't get confused by these things.
What right do you claim in calling the OP a liar? Do you not think that he is capable of observing his own emotional reaction to UI independent of his intellectual understanding of it? Are you really claiming that he disliked the iOS UI because his theory told him to?
That is utter hogwash. No sane person goes out of their way to assign an explanation of dislike when there wasn't dislike to begin with. It's entirely reasonable to dislike something, and it is also very reasonable to then check with theory as to why that might be the case. Moreover, if someone takes the trouble to a) make screenshots, b) write it up in a blog, and c) share it with the world then I think they deserver far better than to be called a liar.
> What right do you claim in calling the OP a liar?
I didn't, I said his comments were disingenuous (what was your "[sic]" for btw?). I meant exactly what I said. I wouldn't call it lying, I'd call it disingenuous (i.e. put-on naivety).
> Are you really claiming that he disliked the iOS UI because his theory told him to?
No. I'm saying his theories about what's confusing, while sometimes interesting, are not necessarily representative of what regular users will actually find confusing, and you'd need to do testing to find out. The problem is he presents them as if they're definitely true, with absolutely no evidence.
He put the [sic] there because you spelled "disingenuous" as "disingenous", lacking the penultimate "u." Clearly just a typo, as you have now spelled it correctly several times.
You are missing the point here. The app in question performs a very simple task. Of course most of the users will be able to figure out little issues without getting stuck. But, if we consider the default apps as examples of what we will get with the new UI design, the article points out to how things could get out of hand when the interaction gets more complicated or the user isn't sure of what the app does. This is something people complain about, because iOS is the exemplary product that comes without a manual, and everybody just figure out how to use it.
No you missed my point, completely. I didn't say anything about the changes in iOS7. I don't know whether they are good or bad for general users, and neither does the OP. Both of us can have our own feelings about it, and both can come up with theories that back our feelings up. But theories are a dangerous thing in UI design. They can be incredibly convincing and yet still be proven wrong in testing. As a UI designer you have to constantly doubt your own theories about what is good and bad, and trust scientific observations (of real-life usage and stats) over your instincts sometimes.
No matter how the OP came to his conclusions do we not agree that if you look at it, it could be better and not everything shares usability practices between apps. For a fresh look (2 month tested) release iOS 7 has too many bugs.
>It's driven by the fact that the author has some theories about UI design, and wants to share them with us.
This was exactly my reaction. The author points out things which are "confusing" within the context of some logical UI design theory. But nothing in the article is practically confusing. From the article:
The Plus could mean “Add Something”, but why does it have no outline? And why is it red? Does it perform a negative action? Confusing.
This feels like forced criticism. Immediately, they guess the correct function of the UI element (to add new alarms). Why should the plus sign have an outline? Why is it confusing that the plus sign is red, when the app has red as a primary component of the color scheme?
The author's points are interesting from a certain perspective, but it just doesn't matter in practice. I mean, is the biggest critique of iOS7 that a rectangle is clickable in one place and not in another?
If you want to see broken UI set a recurring alarm for workdays at 7:45 and 8:00 and then try to select each alarm in the week view. This must be the worst interface I have ever seen in an iOS app, the people that did it don't deserve to be called designers.
I wouldn't necessarily elevate an expectation of visual and behaviorial consistency to "theory". I have learned that a chair can hold my body weight. When I rest my body on an object that resembles a chair and that I've never encountered, I expect to be able to rest my body on it. This is the foundation of design, industrial or interactive.
We're not debating the outer contours and nuances of this idea. The article presents a cut-and-dry analysis of basic application of it.
You put far too much stock in your own experience and comfort exploring a tablet UI, and yet you seem to hold yourself as more representative as a "real user" than the author. I disagree. I've witnessed people in my personal and professional life get basic things wrong. What you perceive as a button, a data grid, a message window, they often perceive as an indiscriminate arrangement of text, lines, and color. Which is why I think the author's analysis, in those terms, is worthwhile.
> "You put far too much stock in your own experience and comfort exploring a tablet UI, and yet you seem to hold yourself as more representative as a "real user" than the author"
Nope. We're both totally unrepresentative, the moment we start analysing.
My complaint is: I don't believe that all the points the author made came from him genuinely finding things confusing and then working out which design inconsistencies caused his confusion. I think his ability to make those judgements are clouded by his endeavouring to analyse and critique a design (as would be mine). That's why we have user testing.
I didnt like the article either. I had different experiences than the ones he described and I also doubt he even had those experiences himself.
Also, while some of the experiences are not consistent within the time apps, they are artifacts that users already recognize- did he really get confused by the "cross?" Its a plus and its in the upper right hand corner of an app where you can add alarms...
This kinds of reminds me of an anthropologist trying to get a paper published in an journal for psychologists. Where is the rigorous application of science? Where are the statistics?
The general point of consistency is valid though. On the add alarm screen, I personally couldn't tell at first how you would add an alarm because the + was small and had no outline -- i.e. inconsistent with buttons elsewhere in the app.
Icons being thin-lined isn't bad per se, I'd rather say them being tiny and not obvious and inconsistent with buttons in other applications, especially for buttons that you'll use so often, is the problem. It's like the HN 'reply' link would be flat 5pt text right aligned at the same height as the comment header.
I'm actually surprised that there's so little visual consistency there... this stuff usually would be handled by reusable widgets - which, of course, gives you consistency for free.
Still, people bag on Apple's design problems because Apple's stuff often feels almost perfect. I tried out a BB Q10 the other day and I couldn't even figure out how the heck you get to the home screen. I got stuck in the voice-search app and couldn't figure out how to back out. That's one of those "I'd give it a detailed critique but where the heck do I even begin" moments.
My wife just got an iPhone 5C a few days ago, for all the hype that they are so easy to use, she had a hard time figuring things out. For example, how do you download a photo on facebook or other social networks? It's different for every app. On Android, you open the photo, then press the 'menu' button, and 'save photo'. It's the same in all apps. Apple seems to be missing on the developer documentation concerning common UI patterns. In one app, you have to press a small icon which looks like a box with an arrow pointing right (as if that's supposed to symbolize something like downloading?) and in another app, you have to hold down your finger on the photo for a second, and then use the menu to download. There's no consistency at all on this device. She chose 'Russian' as her language, and half the built-in apps are still in English.
To speak to your point about the Q10, the lack of affordances for moving between apps was a deliberate design choice. It creates a small learning curve when you first get the device, which is supposed to be ramped up through a short tutorial after unboxing (I'll admit the effectiveness of this is problematic and there needs to be more effort spent here). The gesture for moving between apps is consistent everywhere so user interface and hardware design can be drastically simplified. It allows for a focus on content and not 'administrative' UI or hardware buttons, and speeds things up drastically.
I think that kind of UX contributes to the divisive nature of BlackBerries; people either love them or hate them. The ones who love them are all well past the initial speed bump of learning the gestures and the ones who hate them pick it up in the store, get in to an app, get stuck and throw it down in frustration; the same people who stumble on to Vim would (and no doubt do every day).
The difference between iOS7 and BB10 is that the lack of consistency and affordances in iOS7 seems to result from inconsistent design choices, while in the Q10 it's a deliberate design choice designed to speed users up.
This is exactly backwards - all of the iOS 7 complaints I've heard so far have been about the UI polish and not the underlying functionality. Polishing a turd would be a beautiful UI in front of a buggy, slow system. Apple didn't ship a polished turd, they shipped a rough, unhewn diamond.
But each major iOS version is slower than the one before, it's just that we got used to it (and loud people on the internet always use recent devices anyway). I think this blog post is a good example of something that is definitely a polished turd. A clean, beautiful UI for a resource hog:
And something else that we have accepted is that Apple's services are what they are. For example, iOS 7 has polished the Photos and Camera apps. But in the big picture, Apple's ecosystem for photos is still a complete mess. There is Photos.app with its own Camera Roll, iPhoto for iOS, Photostreams, Journals, Moments, iPhoto '09 with its own Events, and no sane way to keep everything in sync.
If the stopwatch timer didn't record time properly, I'd see where you're coming from. UI polish isn't going to make fix an error in the timer. But here, all the core functionality works, the clocks show the right time, the stopwatch starts and stops. The main complaint here is about the colour of the buttons, which I agree could do with some polish.
I've just installed the update, and the inconsistency between the countdown timer start button and the stopwatch start button are probably deliberate. I didn't think about it at the time, but starting and stopping a stopwatch should have as precise a timing as possible, adding a fuzz of a "pressed" state for buttons which can respond instantly will reduce accuracy of the stopwatch. But for the countdown timer, accuracy doesn't matter so much, and these buttons work like normal ones, with a pressed state.
So, rather than evidence of bad design, this could be evidence of good design.
I wasn't making a judgement, I was responding to the above comment about the BlackBerry 10. iOS7 is great, and I think this article describes polishing a diamond.
> I'm actually surprised that there's so little visual consistency there...
The Stopwatch and Timer start buttons behave differently.
The timer provides some visual feedback because it starts the timer when you take your finger off the screen, you can touch and hold the button all you want but nothing happens until you release it.
The stopwatch on the other hand starts as soon as you touch the screen. I can see how that would be useful if you're timing a race or something that takes less than a second.
Incidentally, my double click/touch interval seems to be averaging around 0.12 seconds :)
Most actions in iOS are consistently handled on touch up and the timer is correctly consistent with this.
The stopwatch is for accurate timing and choosing to break the iOS convention for this specific use case does not seem surprising or arbitrary to me but a conscious design choice to improve the function of the feature. Guidelines are of course made to be broken (occasionally).
It actually is pretty much all reusable widgets. Buttons in the corner of the screen? We can call them "navigation widgets". Buttons in the middle of the screen? We can call them "action button widgets". Buttons on menu items (like Delete)? We can call them "menu button widgets". They can be reused across your entire OS.
The issue is trying to pare your widgets down to their bare minimum. The minimum you can get away with depends very much on the context of the widget.
In iOS 6 they used the same design for navigation widgets as action button widgets. This made them consistent between the different widgets, but left the navigation widgets slightly heavier than strictly necessary.
In iOS 7 they pared each widget down to the minimum they could in the particular context the widget is used in.
The result is screens that individually look like they're made up of inconsistent widgets, but OS-wide the use of the widgets is consistent. Whether that's enough I guess we'll see as more of the general public use iOS 7.
That reminds me of the first time I picked up an iPhone. I opened the Maps app and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to close it. 30-45 seconds of just staring at the thing. Then I saw the home button.
Yes, that happens a lot for new users. Thing is, once you DO know how to do something, it makes complete sense, and is very memorable - you won't forget it.
Sometimes the issue isn't so much making the interface usable, but instead teaching the user how to use it and in a way they won't forget.
By that logic, vt100 apps used by banks in those green terminals have fabulous UI. Users familiar with the UI are blazing fast on terminal apps. The discoverability is near zero, though.
I was referring to what takes but a second to learn and makes perfect natural sense thereafter (not to be confused with learning painful rote/ugly process). Interface should be obvious in context - but that doesn't mean the user has ever encountered that context before, and initially doesn't understand it enough to know what constitutes "obvious". If you've never encountered gravity before, walking (i.e.: stand, then fall forward, then stop yourself with a foot, repeat) is not something you'd think of doing, but is obvious once you see it done.
> I have no idea why the calendar is in German although the rest is in English
I had the same issue (with a different language). I really hope it's a bug because it makes no sense. Here goes:
In General > International, you can set "language" to english. So far so good. Then you can set "region format" for things like date and time formatting to use a sensible local format instead of e.g. the crazy US date format.
But when you go into Region Format, it turns out to be some sort of weird mix of countries and languages.
If you select a country — e.g. Germany, Finland, Croatia — , you'll get the english dates in the region's format but if you select a language (and possibly a territory for the language) — Chinese > Singapore, Cherokee (United States) or Lingala > Congo Brazzaville, you'll get the date formatted in that language instead, with your specified system-wide language ignored.
By default, you probably have a language selected — I had anyway. I think it's the same setting as in iOS6 but the semantics have changed.
edit: after checking, it worked the exact same way in iOS6 and a colleague (who also updated to iOS7) had the right setting without changing anything, so I guess both TFAA and I had the "wrong" setting in iOS6 and it got ported over to iOS7. Yet as TFAA I was kind-of shocked to see dates in a language different than the rest of the OS in iOS7 even though I apparently did not notice it in 6.
> German region format obviously also emtails German day and month names. That's really quite obvious.
No it's not obvious at all and it's shouldn't be that way. If I set my language somewhere it should be applied everywhere. I want Monday as first day of the week, not Montag.
Other companies that seem incapable of getting language right: Microsoft and Google.
Uhm, why exactly should that be the case? I think you should think over your assumptions. Date format and date names are intertwined, you cannot separate the two.
No they are not? How are they intertwined? One is language, one is style.
That is not even mentioning that "ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times" puts Monday as day one.
Plus all the clients that aren't broken and can separate language from style.
> German region format obviously also emtails German day and month names. That's really quite obvious.
It's not. In fact, it's nonsensical. If I have a language setting, I want things in that language, not in an other one.
The format spells out where items are relative to one another, what the various separators and interspersed characters are and if applicable what size the various elements are (e.g. months could be spelled out in full, only the initial or in abbreviated form).
And this is supported since There are a "Germany" or a "France" format which do not override the language setting.
The confusion appears to be that there's an English - Germany setting and a German - Germany setting, as you point out in this comment. You have to distinguish between countries and languages when requesting a date format. It's unfortunately just that complicated. Why? Because some people never learn another date style even if they prefer a different language. This isn't as much of a problem when dates are represented in a straightforward way, but some regions are really different and if travelling in a different country, you may want to borrow that country's date formats without changing the rest of your system language. It's equally possible that some date representations don't "translate" and so to properly support all date formats, languages may need to be overridden. I'm not saying it's obvious -- but then country restrictions were always man-made and rarely make sense in the first place. Personally, I blame languages named after countries. ;-)
The lack of affordance in iOS7 is a real usability killer. People argue that the lack of button borders and inconsistency invites exploration. That's the kind of BS argument bad designers make when their designs test poorly. iOS7 is great in many ways, but is harder to use than ever before. Ugg.
I actually do believe iOS7 a step back usability wise (at a component UX level, not in features). The reduction of visual affordances in controls makes it very hard to tell at a glance what is interactive, and often even where the touch areas of controls begin/end. This slows you down, and I find it takes me a few moments to orient myself on a new page.
Ok, maybe you can explain this to me then. Before iOS7 came out there were a bunch of people saying that Apple had to stop holding users hands as much.
Could you point to an example? 'Hand holding' could mean many different things. Hiding configuration settings? Verbose instructions? Big shiny pulsating continue buttons?
If you mean people were complaining that the controls were too visually complex and they attempted to differentiate themselves too much, I guess personally I'd have to disagree with those people.
Actually, it's a learnability problem: once you learn how to use its features, iOS 7 is a vast improvement over 6.
But that can be said about anything which involves "knowledge in the head" vs "knowledge in the world": Once you learn how to use it, it's superior to simpler systems restricted to only what can be operated by knowledge in the world alone.
And so far everyone has argued that iPhones are "better" by virtue of being "simpler" and "more intuitive" than Android because you don't need to figure out how things works, i.e. it only depends on knowledge in the world.
And now with iOS7 the tune is that you just need "knowledge in the head" and all is good. That's not a very consistent story.
What about when people back in the day argued that links on the web were difficult to use because they were just underlined text instead of buttons? Lots of link styles today have no text decoration but are rather just a different color, and are as easy as ever to use.
Web browsers let you hover over a link to query if it's clickable before clicking it.
Also in this case the problem is if a site has some text that's blue & clickable, and some text that's blue & not clickable. That's more or less what iOS 7 is doing. Colored text doesn't mean it performs an action. It might, it might not. Similarly, black text might be clickable, it might not. It might have a border, it might not. And these are all mixed together in the same app, or even a single screen such as the case of the alarm that the article is talking about.
Mousing over ever piece of text in a document to see if it's clickable isn't a great user experience. If you've ever tried using a site whose link style is 'non-underlined, blackish blue', you'll understand the problem, particularly if you suffer from colour blindness. The Guardian is a prime example of poor-usability when it comes to text links.
This doesn't seem like a very fair comparison. Most browsers account for this (by default) by using a different cursor symbol for linked text vs. non-linked text. Some also show the linked url in the browser UI also.
A web developer can override both those conventions and when they do, their links become less recognizable and their apps become less usable. Since there's no cursor on iOS touch screens, losing the visual cues is a similar problem.
[edit] You might argue that just tapping on something serves as the way to discover if a visual element is tappable on iOS. But it doesn't, as the original article states, it just makes the user wonder if something might be broken.
> Lots of link styles today have no text decoration but are rather just a different color, and are as easy as ever to use.
They're not, and their relative ease of use is only because users have learned over years that a few words looking markedly different (but not emphasized) might just be links.
Nice post. The one that REALLY annoys me is reminders. If I want to add a reminder, I would assume subconsciously I have to press the add symbol. But that adds a new list. To add a new item you have to tap an empty white box with no visual cue. Brilliant.
For me the big annoyance are the "shuffle" and "repeat" buttons in the music app. Identical buttons right next to each other in the interface and they behave differently. I can't even tell if the shuffle is active or not as the labels toggle between "shuffle" and "shuffle all". Which one is "off" ?
I take it you haven't tried to rate a song yet? I spent 5 minutes mashing the screen before I noticed the 'Rating' text. Then spent another 5 minutes tapping, swiping up down left right on that text before I gave up. I finally figured out that you have to tap the track (silly me, thought that would play it over again) to rate it. I still don't actually know if that 'Rating' text does anything
iTunes Radio has a similar issue with "Never Play this Song" which is found in a dialogue after clicking a star icon, which I assumed means "Play More Like This." On more than one occasion I've found my finger hovering over some element in iOS 7 guessing at what will happen.
Appleism. They use the words "Get Info" where Windows says "properties" in OS X too, including cases where the properties/info are editable. One of those cases where Apple is stuck with a bad decision they made a long time ago.
The reminders app is an abomination and has been since iOS 6. I only use it through Siri ("Remind me to ..."). How did they ever let this app see the light of day?
Yep. Discovered this one today. Completely ridiculous.
If anyone wants evidence that iOS 7 was rushed, all they need to do is see things like that (and the parent post). All this is fixable though, rather than something endemic in the design of iOS 7, so I'm hopeful it'll get fixed soon enough.
We know it was rushed, and we know why. Scott Forstall (the architect of iOS 1-6) was fired, and Jonathan Ive promoted to VP of Design, on 29th October 2012, 11 months ago. 11 months -- really 7 months, as it had to be mostly done in time for the WWDC demo -- is an astonishingly short length of time to do a ground-up UX redesign of an OS. The only way it's possible is to parallelise the design process to some extent, which makes consistency issues inevitable.
Finally a post that doesn't just say "iOS7 BAD". Pretty well motivated, and I can agree with it in part. The inconsistencies it shows with the red button are confusing indeed (I just tried it on my iPad, the button in the stopwatch will change state when you begin touching, the one in the timer changes state when you lift your button, which is confusing because it doesn't work as expected).
The one thing I don't agree with is how the writer argues that, because the UI elements like the "+" button are red, it means they might be misinterpreted as performing a negative action. I think it's not a good point because it's easy to tell that red is the accent color of the application (for example the active navbar button is red), and thus it doesn't really play a role in telling the user whether the action is a positive or a negative one. The fact that the big round buttons start as green, and only become red once tapped (along with a change in their label), should make it easy to tell that they're not red because it's the accent color of the app, instead they're red because they perform a destructive action (in this case, resetting the timer). Their label further confirms their purpose.
As a last remark, I don't think that even the least savvy users are to be treated as "dumb". If they care enough, they will figure it out nonetheless. This isn't one of those issues that would make it impossible to use the app. You just need to put a small amount of thought in using it.
The + sign and nav buttons are "tinted" as red, as are the rest of the app's functions. When overlay UI appears, such color tints become grey. That's consistent throughout Apple's apps -- every app has a colour to tint with.
The green circles shown are the inconsistent buttons. They're trying to do too much, both compensating for the choice of red and encouraging you to click them. Their thick circle borders are redundant, and the lack of consistency on these custom buttons is indeed an issue.
The calendar is probably set to a different language/country's date formatting. That's a feature and is observable in other OSes. (English menu, arabic dates, for example)
The unique bit about alarms -- for iPad only -- is that table representation. They should have cut it out until the next iOS revision.
My biggest gripe with iOS 7 is how I can't predict that a UI element is tappable. With every new app (i.e. every app I already have that has been updated for iOS 7 and automatically upgraded by the iOS without me really knowing) I find myself having to tap various bits of UI stuff to figure things out. What's fascinating to me is seeing how my 2 year old does with it.
It's even funnier on old devices like the iPhone 4, where a tap might not have a response within a few seconds depending on what's the app's doing. These are genuinely awkward moments wondering if the phone is painfully slow or you just tapped a label.
It's even better when those taps lead to actions. I permanently deleted some messages because of a non-descript icon (on Android's confusing modern look).
The worst thing about all this icon frenzy to me is that they often even take up more space than text that could descripe their function.
* The worst thing about all this icon frenzy to me is that they often even take up more space than text that could descripe their function. *
That highly depends on the language that you're using... Having localized our app into 16 different languages I've found that there are many languages where the text simply does not fit into the allotted space. In those cases I think using icons are a lot more effective than a bunch of ellipsized text.
Sounds exactly like the problems for WP: can't figure out which is tappable just by looking at it. Maybe that's one of the inevitable pitfalls of flat design?
I must be the only one who loves it. It just feels so much nicer to use. There are the little annoyances, sure, but things like the Reminders app were in iOS 6 anyway.
Apple definitely removed as many affordances as possible with each screen, almost to the extreme. Now, have I figured out how each screen works? Yes. Do I think the UI would be improved with a few more visual hints (button backgrounds, consistent color choice for actions)? Yes.
iOS 7 is such a large reset from previous iOS versions, and I would expect to see this new design language evolve over future releases. The best comparison I read: think of the changes between OS9 and OSX.
The problem with pretending to be someone unfamiliar with touch UI (and computers in general) is that whatever you claim to be confusing is still just conjecture. You claim one thing, Apple claims another. If you'd highlighted the parts that are genuinely confusing to you (and I'm sure they exist) rather than talking about rectangles v.s. red things in corners, or written up a walk-through with someone who realistically might get that confused (not denying they exist), then it would be easier to take this post seriously.
I work with people who have TBI (Traumatic Brain Injuries) on a daily basis. Many have cognitive issues with short or long term memory.
We use iPads during "Tech days". On iPads that we have updated to iOS7, people that normally have no problem are having a heck of a time with the new UI, where things are, new actions with swiping, buttons, fonts, ect. It's not as, dare I day, intuitive. Even using more outlines on the new blue buttons (like in the App store) would make it better
Yes, most will relearn it, but it will take months for some. Great UI, Flat UI, doesn't have to mean less intuitive (borders around buttons, ect).
"Intuitive" is the great misused word of our industry.
The only intuitive things in human experience are fear of heights and the location of your mother's milk (I'm probably quoting but can't remember who). What people call intuitive is merely the familiar, all else is learnt.
With all of these iOS7 bashing articles I've read, I really expected to be perturbed by the upgrade. So far I've found very little to complain about. To me, the call to actions are now clearer than they've ever been because so much of the interface is simplified. I simply don't have these problems of being thrown off by an "incorrectly" used color. There's just not a lot of detail to mentally parse when looking at the interface.
I wonder how many people that aren't looking at this with a UX hat on are actually experiencing these problems.
Little to no problems. There are a couple of miss alignments here and there, but overall they did a great job on iOS 7 from an UX point of view. There's even a countdown timer on the lock screen when snoozing an alarm. There's more important information shown to the user thanks to this over simplified interface.
"Content first" was one of the main topics in the UX crowd lately, and frankly, iOS 7 is a good example of this concept.
I was reading a book on dashboard design by Stephen Phew. I don't have it in front of me so I can't remember the name exactly. One of the chapters was dedicated to Gestalt principles. Basically, it was about how your brain interprets data. An excellent read. The main feature iOS 7 does is it clears the visual clutter, making the content do the talking. That is a huge improvement. According to what I read in the book and from what I observed in iOS 7, it looks to me like they hit the nail on the head with cleaning up clutter. Having used iOS 7 for some time now, it's quite clearly less taxing on my eyes and brain to use.
Pointing out inconsistencies can be fun, but I believe that it distracts from the overall feel you get from using an improved OS.
The arguments of keeping a 90 year old grandmother up to date with the UI seems a bit ridiculous to me. They can always stay on old versions if they need to. You can keep their PCs on Windows XP as well. Progress should not wait for the lowest denominator of users.
I think one of the major points of iOS7 is that grandma is getting kicked to the curb. iOS devices are designed for people who already know how to use them, or for young people, who will figure them out.
Except this doesn't seem to be borne out in reality. I have installed it for people in their 60's, 70's and 80s who find a Mac barely usable, who have had no trouble at all with moving to iOS7 after using iOS6.
I was speaking figuratively, of course there isn't anything inherent about being a grandma that prevents you from using iOS7. The point is the people who have never used a smartphone before will probably not pick up iOS7 as fast as they did iOS6 due to affordances the UI had for folks like them, which were discarded since most people on Earth have now had some experiences with smartphones.
Any change can be construed as kicking a percentage of users to the curb. I just don't think it's reasonable to hold back design for them. If they learn, great. If not, maybe it's a sign that you should be spending more time teaching your grandma.
PS. Your grandma says you never call. She knows you're busy but still, a phone call once a week never killed anyone.
That's really not true or fair. I'm in the process of giving my ~70 year old mother my old iPhone so I can send her photo messages and such.
The teaching experience I've had running through how to use applications is almost exactly the same as here. (Though I must say that this is on IO6). Simple things like the way you 'Add' or 'Edit' something being inconsistent really do throw her off. I'm sure anyone who has guided very none-technical people through using technology can relate. It's nothing to do with being 'an idiot'.
There are plenty of older people who take a lot longer to pick up technology like this, and it's also worth noting that as a demographic they are often wealthier than their younger counterparts, and a valuable customer segment.
Nobody is saying users are idiots or that there is no learning curve for some older people using iOS (I have introduced it to people in their 70s and 80s too).
The assertion is that the author is pretending to be an idiot in the way he is claiming the iOS7 is somehow worse than iOS6.
There are faults in iO7, but there is no evidence that it is harder for people to learn, and plenty of evidence that it is basically more usable.
Actually, that's backwards... You know that something is well designed precisely by pretending to be an idiot, and asking yourself if you still know what to do...
That's a very rudimentary view of UX. If I'm writing an app that helps radiological engineers calculate radiation dose, should I pretend to be an idiot? Likewise, in a world where kids have grown up with these devices, should we still think that way about UX? I think we can give users some benefit of the doubt. Each app should have a design that reflects the purpose of the app. Consistency is not always the top priority in UX.
I'm not saying that's the only step in design...
In my attempt at brevity, I lost the nuance.
The point I was trying to make is that if you're taking the view that your users need to have a significantly higher than average the level of knowledge in a domain area (i.e. equivalent to the knowledge of the domain area that the product designer has), you're going to end up with an un-usable product for the left end of the bell curve of your user population.
That left end of the bell curve is relative (as you point out) to your user population, but exists nonetheless - an "idiot" radiological engineer is not an idiot in relation to the general population, but is one in relation to the 99th percentile best radiological engineer (and, hopefully, in relation to the radiological engineer building your product).
What I was trying to say is that a well-designed UX requires that the 1% "idiot" of your target user population still knows what to do...
Gotcha, I'd agree with that. I have some bitterness extending from sham "UX Hackers" selling e-books that basically boil down to pretending to be an idiot, and thinks that is enough. :)
Many of the complaints around these iOS 7 screenshots revolve around HOW WILL I EVER KNOW "< BACK" IS A BUTTON!?!?!?!
There are many valid complaints that may annoy designers and may initially confuse people, but in reality in really shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes to get oriented with even the most confusing UI changes.
Exactly right. I've never seen so many articles that completely miss the point of the experience. Instead of "where do I tap?", the point is that everything should be a valid tap target - that's the beauty of a touch-first environment. Everything is tappable. If my 3 year old had no issues when we moved from iOS 6 to 7, then adults have no excuse. These are (so far) all straw-man arguments.
While on a personal level I agree with you, having interacted directly with my users for many of them it's not pretending (idiot is the wrong term) I don't think it's a good idea to measure users based on our own yardstick.
Now the article did seem to be coming from a place of "I have never seen a computer, phone or tablet before in my life how does this work?"
iOS7 apps are littered with this kind of stuff. In truth, I doubt iOS7 is any more confusing to a newbie than the original iOS was, and since there's so very little to do in most places, it doesn't take much experimenting to learn. The most grating thing to me at an intellectual level is the lack of consistency, but part of the smartphone experience is using apps which often have their own styles anyway (especially games).
I just tell myself it's all a giant A/B test and iOS8 will consolidate one specific set of styles.
"In truth" implies you have a fact to share, when in fact, it's just your opinion. Better to use "In all honesty" since you were being a bit dishonest in saying that "IOS7 apps are littered with this kind of stuff".
The next Apple statement placating congress about jobs created can probably also include
"
With iOS 7, we have also created the largest number of design critics, UI designers and UX experts in history - Everybody is now an expert and we believe the world will
be a better place for it.
"
Hopefully those said experts will also out their money where their mouths are and get busy making a competitive alternative that addresses the issues identified.
As bad as the critics make it out I wonder if they have seen it used in the wild by someone non-technical. My mother in law asked me about upgrading her iPad on Sunday. She did so and I expected a bunch of confusion and questions re: photo's and email; the two apps she uses most (besides mindless games that aren't affected by any OS changes whatsoever).
Her comment last nigh? "It's really different I really like how they organized my photos for me."
So that's an n of one. But it's closer to observing it in the wild vs. a small circle of tech savvy perfectionists.
If the critics want me to take them seriously they should not focus on themselves so much but the average person and their experience immediately after upgrading, a day later, a week later and a month later. Otherwise, IMO it's just a whiney tech pundit fishing with link bait.
Everybody is an expert in deciding what they don't like. It doesn't matter how much designer-speak bullshit you can spew, if the person using it doesn't like it or finds it too confusing, it failed.
Someone saying a design doesn’t work for them does not necessarily mean that the design failed – it could just mean that that person isn’t in the target audience. “That person” includes their state of mind, too; maybe whatever they are complaining about isn’t supposed to be used when sleepy, or when driving, for example.
Dwarf Fortress has never been and will probably never be for public mass consumption. Unless of course they code in a giant Fortress swallowing dragon named "The Public"
I have a very small tidbit to contribute to the list of inconsistencies. If you were at WWDC or watched the videos online, you will have noticed the same theme being hammered in again and again: "iOS7 puts the user's content first", "we have taken away all the chrome and UI distractions to allow the user to focus on the content" etc. If you have tried to adjust the volume while watching a video, however, you may have noticed that the volume popup has a very thick blur behind it, basically obscuring the content at the center of the video you are watching for 3 seconds or more, which in several occasions (e.g. news interviews where people's faces were completely blurred out) forced me to go back to the piece I missed.
What I find particularly unsettling about this is that the user doesn't even need any kind of visual feedback. The only feedback that truly matters is the one from his ears. Imagine if your TV obscured a big chunk right in the middle of the screen every time you adjusted the volume. I find this deeply distracting and in direct contrast with the iOS7 design philosophy portrayed by its designers.
that's it? that's so specific. For me this update brought the feeling that I can hardly see anymore. I'm always squinting now to try and distinguish things, whereas in iOS 6 and before I had no problem. What is it? The colors, the lack of depth, the low contrast, the super thin lines - all of it together and I struggle to make sense of it. That white on green is just blinding.
This is the problem - changing the l&f across the board is not a good MO in 2013. Yeah, I know, it's Apple and their fashion dictatorship. I've been through Mac UI changes since 1988. But I feel like I can barely use this tool now for what should be surfacey and easily hackable issues. I like the fundamentals, the animation is fine, the general UI tweaks are great.. it just hurts to use it now.
Apple needs to solve the one-size fits all UI problem. I don't care how they do it, I don't have a great suggestion ('theme support' is not one) -- but this state of affairs just sucks.
iOS7 is a beautiful new path in the history of these amazing devices. Are there a few warts here and there? Sure. That's part of the process of evolving anything. With user feedback and experience future evolutionary steps will improve upon this and nobody will remember the warts.
Usability? There are loads of examples of usability not being as much of a problem as many make it out to be. You can start with Windows as an example of something that billions of people use without problems while usability experts blog about how horrible it is --yet five year olds in schools all over the world seem to not have any issues. Another one is computer games. No two games seem to have the same interface (save such things as basic navigation commands) yet people adapt and become very adept at operating them. I always take usability reports with a grain of salt. Some are legitimate and honest, most are less than that.
Gone are the days when Apple used to make "perfect" user experiences. These days Apple seems care more about "modern aestethics" that look "beautiful" than actually good design, as it used to when Steve Jobs was alive.
I expect the Mac OS X interface to become worse with time, too.
I can't confirm it because I don't have iOS 6 to hand, but I'm pretty sure the difference in button highlights will be the same.
The buttons in Timer works based on the OS wide standard of activating on release.
For a stopwatch, however, you want it to be instant because it's time sensitive. It would kinda suck if you're timings were all out by a bit because you kept you're finger on there slightly too long.
This is actually an example of breaking a convention to improve usability [1]. It's also an example of how if you're looking hard enough you'll find inconsistencies and things that are theoretically horrific in stuff you've been using absolutely fine for years.
The real inconsistency on this screen is that the Reset button doesn't activate on release. If ever there was a time you want to be able to back out of an action by moving your finger away from the button before release I'd say this is it.
While the faux naivity is a bit irritating, it does make a valid point (if not entirely novel). The more you pare back your UI the more you lose distinction between interactive and non-interactive elements. If your buttons are simply color tinted text, it's difficult to unambiguously use color tinting to highlight text of note such as the current day.
What makes iOS 7 really interesting is how it tries to counter that. For example, color hinted text in the edges of the screen will always be actions, so color is enough; color hinted text in the middle of the screen could just be marking interesting things, so actions are usually accompanied by thin borders.
An proper dive into the design and the trade-offs rather than endless "look at this edge-case" would be really interesting.
[1] Caveat because I'm sure otherwise someone will try and pull me up on it. No, this isn't amazing revolutionary design by Apple or super-human attention to detail. I'm sure the Android and WP 7 equivalents work the same.
Man, nothing inflames the religious like a critique of their favorite baby. It's exhausting reading through these comments that, no, the OP is a stupid liar and wrong and an idiot for not recognizing that iOS7 is the new benchmark of perfection and should only be talked about in glowing terms.
This (among other examples) is why I'm sticking with iOS 6 for the foreseeable future. I haven't wanted any new substantive feature of iOS for several iterations - and while the design was tempting for me, if it comes with this much punishment I'm out.
The overall experience is considerably smoother and more cohesive with less cognitive clutter. There is a definite transition period; stick with it and you'll be happier on the other side.
That's not necessarily true. I used the beta for a few weeks (on my iPhone) and couldn't get over the new visual style and UI changes. I've been following its development and know they haven't done much besides fix bugs since the beta (as is usual). So I've reverted to iOS 6 and have no immediate plans to upgrade.
It took me more than "a few weeks" to get comfortable with it. In fact, I actively advised people to avoid it until the last beta and the GM.
As of the last beta and GM, either iOS suddenly changed drastically for the better, or my perception finally adapted.
Either way, now the old version is frustrating, lacking essential features to accomplish common intents. I believe it's my acceptance or comprehension of the new flow that shifted.
FWIW, I work with several major versions in the course of my day, from 4.x through 7.x.
From what I've poked at, I'm not sure I agree with you. Animations are slower and frequently un-interruptable, where 6 was generally faster and better about that kind of thing. The UI is definitely more cohesive on 6, and definitely has better and more consistent affordance. There are new-system bugs to get patched (system-level and apps updating to handle the new behavior).
For now at the very least, 6 is faster, more consistent, more stable, and better supported by both devices and apps. Maybe they'll fix most of that soon - with an initial showing this bad, I'm less hopeful than I normally would be. Bigger changes will be harder to swallow until iOS 8.
What I find worrisome is that these UI ideas are bleeding over into OSX. Take a look at the new Build Phases tab in Xcode. It used to be nice and clear, now it's just a see of white, and it's hard to visually see how different elements on that page relate to each other, especially on a large screen.
As I often say, life is about balance. Apple used to have way too much UI chrome. Now they have way too little. I hope they swing back a bit and find that balance soon. An I hope they stop sticking so many pure white backgrounds all over the place, it makes it hard on the eyes, at least for me.
Also: Good luck figuring out which part of the Xcode UI has the focus right now. Code editor? Assistant editor? Debugger console? File hierarchy? The clues are so subtle that they might as well not be there. Having to look for the blinking cursor on a big screen is annoying.
I also feel this complaint about iOS7, while relevant to the phone UI, is using the iPad UI to make a greater point: that iOS7 doesn't feel like it was designed for the iPad.
Skeuomorphic vs. Flat aside, the sparseness in how iOS7 looks on my iPad prompted me to revert the upgrade and go back to corinthian-leather-infested iOS6 for now.
The lack of visual cues in iOS7 is a bit off putting combined with the "designed primarily for iPhone" keep me from upgrading mine and my parents' iPads.
That said, I'm loving iOS7 on my iPhone5. It feels liberating.
In an English locale (as the rest of the UI suggests), "Montag" isn't a day at all, let alone the current day.
The incorrect text is a UI bug, certainly, but the underlying issue suggested in multiple places is, how can you distinguish between a negative action and an accent in apps where both of those are identified by the same colour?
The iOS 6 version of the alarms app for iPad had a similarly confusing interface. It's a complete disaster -- one that I was hoping they would remedy in iOS 7, but that doesn't seem to have happened. I've always been surprised that this app managed to get out of Apple's internal UI review -- now not once but twice.
Apple lost intuitive when it went to OSX. Things were just there, and worked, menus had understandable names dialogs were terse and to the point. Sometimes it was messy but you never felt lost.
Just to be clear: you are seriously suggesting the intuitive usability of went down in OS X? As opposed to the label-less icon buttons in the control strip that you had to click/drag to get it to show and hide?
The release of OS X, and the subsequent program rewrites to support it, put apple back on the tech map. I find it hard to believe this doubled as their usability death sentence.
Im not saying it was less "Usable" using BSD saved them from years of pain transitioning from MacOS to something that was more network/internet savvy.
But there was a price was a hit to the UX and UI. which were actually pretty sensible. All the fancy graphics and lack of helpful text labels and assistance has become more a pain for new users.
The under pinnings of iOS7 are great (from a developer standpoint), but this release honestly doesn't feel like an Apple product. I have the iPhone 4 and Instagram's filters are cut off on the bottom and the photo/video frame is also mis-aligned.
I feel like any other company could have come out with this release and it would have been met with far less analytical criticism. Why is there so much analysis on v.1 of a their new UI?
I think an argument can be made for the difference between the stop timer, and the stop stopwatch.
Red (in those two cases) means stop, so the button turns red. Stopping a stopwatch is an expected action to perform, so the button remains white (to be consistent with start). Stopping a timer is an unexpected action—you are cancelling the timer. To denote this, they use dark grey.
Its a massive step in the right direction. Its a giant overhaul that was accomplished in a crazy amount of time. Yes theres some obvious missteps, and having literally everything look different across the board is going to be confusing for many people, but either way the transition wasn't going to be fun.
That was one of the first things I noticed. You can disable it in general settings but unfortunately it is all or nothing. Now I can only pull it up from the lock screen.
I just opened up the clock app on my iPhone after reading this post and it's shocking how much cleaner/clearer the interface is on the iPhone than it is on the iPad.
People were mentally comparing it to how the calendar works ("drag and drop") as opposed to the home screen ("hold to enter edit mode so icons wiggle in fear, then drag and drop"). In part this is because we intuitively assume that the only thing we should be able to do with such icons is either click once to select, or hold to drag and drop. It doesn't occur to us that hold might do something else, as in the home screen's swipe, for instance. This makes even less sense when you realize a calendar has many reasons to enable dragging blank space to move around to new dates and times, while a schedule of alarms auto-repeats every 7 days and has no need for horizontal scrolling as a result. It was simply rushed for iPad. Neat idea, needs more work. :)
How do they show it? We don't know how many % of the iOS user base uses Twitter or any observable channel to praise iOS 7 or complain about it.
Plus it's impossible to downgrade, so any iOS 7 user in a statistic might be an unhappy one; or the other way around, maybe I would love iOS 7 on my iPad 3rd gen, but I won't irreversibly upgrade for now.
That's not a study of actual users, but the application of random metrics plus a bit of personal opinion (in the user friction section). It's as good or bad as the OP.
iOS7 default apps are quite confusing. The calendar is way worst than before. Now you tap on a event from the month view and you don't see it in the day view if your current time is not close to the event time.. It feel rushed. I hope they fix it but it might not happen before next year. That good for third party app though.
> When I tap it, it turns red — but wait — it doesn’t give me the visual feedback. Did I break it?
> The alarm is shown as a red filled square, so when I tap it, it should perform a negative action, right?
These comments are disingenous. You didn't get confused by these things.
You, as a person who's analysing a UI, have an almost totally different mindset to someone who is just using the thing for real. You know this, so here, you're just play-acting. You're thinking, what might I get confused about if I was a normal user? That's a bad way to look for what's really wrong in a UI design.
Yes, when you present points like these, they sound reasonable, but that doesn't mean they're right. Perhaps the alternative (e.g. banning the use of red anywhere in the OS other than for a negative action) might be over-restrictive as a requirement, which could cause excessive complexity elsewhere in the UI and lead to a worse overall result. Or perhaps you're right, the colour–meaning thing should be 100% consistent above all other considerations. Either way, you don't know, and speculation about what might confuse a real user should not be presented as fact.
Theories just guide us in what to test.