An absolute must-read from Don Norman and Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, two absolute heavyweights in the field of usability. On top of that, Tognazzini was heavily involved in the development of the early interface guidelines at Apple, which gives him a unique perspective on the matter.
The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage.
Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer’s sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.
The problem Apple is facing – as has been explained to me by people who are in the know about these matters – is that the people originally responsible for usability at Apple, including those responsible for the first multitouch interface of the first iPhone, are no longer at Apple. The company currently doesn’t have an overarching philosophy when it comes to user interface design, leading to the problems described in detail in this article. The software side of Apple lacks its own Ive, if you will.
And boy, does it show. I bought an iPhone 6S (the pink one, 64GB) a couple of weeks ago, and while I don’t want to reveal too much from my review, I’m appalled at just how unfocused, chaotic, messy, inconsistent, and hard to use iOS has become. This article articulates really well where the main problems lie.
It’s easy to look at Apple’s massive profits and the quality of its hardware and miss the abysmal state of Apple’s software. They’ve got a lot of work to do – and they really need the right people to get there.
But are they for or against skeuomorphism?
Well, I think Tim Cook’s Apple is more focused in being the next Louis Vuitton than being the next Braun.
BTW I found iOS and OSX miles ahead of the competency in usability regards… not because iOS or OSX are good… the others are terribly bad.
Same situation here – I keep with OS X and iOS not because they’re awesome but because the alternatives are so much worse. I keep wanting Microsoft to provide a better, more coherent product but every release of an update or upgrade I’m left bitterly disappointed about the situation.
I think that is why anyone uses a particular OS. Too me Linux (with KDE) is the least worse, but that is because of personal preferences.
Try a nexus phone for 1 month. Android phones in general are a mess but pure Android is quite coherent and have excellent usability, much more so than iOS.
HTC does an OK job as well but unfortunately the pro-Samsung circle-jerk that seems to exist within the Android community blind so many to the alternatives that do exist out there. The Nexus 6P is a great phone and if I do return to the Windows platform then it’s the most logical phone to choose at this point given how horrible iTunes is on Windows and how underwhelming Windows 10 Mobile has turned out to be based on what I’ve read.
Who else loves the fact that in an article that spends some of its time complaining about font, the article contains two other font choices apart from the main text that are much harder to read?
Not to mention shoving a full-screen ad in peoples’ faces. It leads me to believe these guys don’t know shit about pleasant user experiences.
I think the new iOS is certainly less cohesive, design wise, then the previous generation. It’s also more confusing, at least initially. ( Then again I really liked skeudomorphism so what do I know. )
That said user satisfaction is still extremely high ( declining only a few % from iOS 6 to iOS 9 ) and the Apple Watch satisfaction is a ridiculous 97%. This article suggests that the ‘new Apple’ is no longer about making computing accessible to those unfamiliar with UI’s but anecdotally there is hardly any complaints about iOS being confusing or difficult to use ( and it’s not like no one ever complains – look at Apple Music and Apple Maps fiascos ).
There is also the fact that Apple’s sales ( and especially iOS device sales ) continue to grow at a ridiculous pace which – with full respect to the ‘old Apple’ design team – suggests that the majority of users don’t find iOS ‘difficult and confusing’ by any means.
Argument is invalid, and has always been invalid. Apple fans were telling us that Windows’ popularity did not mean Windows was better than OS X, but now that iOS is popular, that same argument suddenly holds water.
Nonsense, of course.
Your arguing with me over a position I didn’t make. I didn’t say iOS is better/worse then X.
I simply said that (a) that vast majority of users have no complaints about iOS and (b) iOS users continue to grow without new user complaints increasing or satisfaction proportionally decreasing.
PS. I don’t know why you are always so defensive ( and in turn are impolite when your position is challenged; being rude reduces rather then increases the perceived validity of the position you are espousing ).
You don’t know the iPhone users I know. They don’t understand any gestures at all, except pinch to zoom. There are many many times they’ve asked me, their tech friend, when the iPhone will allow them to do x. And well, its been able to for many, many years. It was just un discoverable. I, a non iPhone user, only know about it because I read iPhone/ios reviews.
Why don’t they switch to Android? Well Apples are popular here so its easy to ask a friend how something works without too much trouble. And their afraid Android will be just as difficult, requiring then to learn everything over again.
And IMHO they are right, Android has too many features and every vendor has a different version of it. Android is a complex beast.
I did a “test” with my mom… I gave her a Moto G last year with stock Android… she kept it for months but never understood it, she barely managed to open whatsapp and was always ranting about the “phone” (she don’t even know what an OS is, to her, the problem was “the phone”… but it was Android and its usability complexities, the phone was fine).
Some months later I upgraded to an iPhone 6 Plus and gave my old iPhone 5 with iOS8 to mom (initially just for some days because I wanted to sell it)… well, now It’s her favorite phone ever, she didn’t allow me to sell it!!
I don’t know WHY, but iPhone creates a “rapport” with common non-tech people that other devices don’t.
I know I cannot extrapolate a personal experience to everybody in the world… but I told this experience because It surprised me and I think It refutes some theories that I had myself (i.e.: “people like the iPhone because is sexy/trendy/expensive/whatever”… well my mom doesn’t know what “Apple” is, not joking).
Take into account that, here in Buenos Aires, Android phones are _extremely_ popular and 100x more common than iPhones. That’s why I think there’s something more to iOS usability goodness than just “popularity” or “people around help you to use it” theories.
Interesting perspective. Moto G Android is pretty good, ux wise.
But in terms of a friend based support, does your mom know anyone else who has a Moto g, or iPhone?
As already established Android on moto is not the same as Android on Samsung.
No, she doesn’t, all people around use Android and I don’t have patience to explain how to use the phone… in fact I wanted to sell it so I just gave it to her.
I cannot say she uses all iPhone features (more like 30%)… but she doesn’t complain about the phone, takes a lot photos and send them to all the family… she even responds emails from the phone.
iPhone is the first technological device she really loves (doesn’t use computers at all!!). It was a big surprise to me.
ok, makes sense. Thanks for sharing your mom’s experience. Hearing stories like this really help to broaden my horizons.
Well yes. In your case it’s quite simple. You’re her beloved son and an Apple Fan. No problem with that… It’s your best right. But when a mom hears her son bashing day after day “somthing” explaining her it’s complicated and that it’s the cause of all her problems… She belives it.
People find easy to use what they have learned to use. It’s as simple as that.
I’m from Switzerland (Apple’s paradise) and I’ve seen countless people switch from iOS to Androïd during the last 5 years.
Guess what… They switched because:
– They like it
– They find it easy to use
– They don’t see why they should pay the Apple tax when something else does what they need for a fraction of the price.
– They get pissed off by Apple’s lock in (What I didn’t expect to be honest). They don’t really understand it for what it is but they see the problems they have each time they want to transfer or re-use “whatever” they’ve allready paid for.
As for personal experience. I would become crazy without dual-sim. I use this for more than 3 years now and it’s such a blessing not to have to carry 2 phones (work + personal) day after day.
Believe me my mom doesn’t know what Apple or Android is… she just liked one phone over the other.
Take into account that I gifted her the Moto G (it’s a nice phone!!)… yes, I’m a Mac fanboy since I was a kid but I don’t care too much about phones and even less about my mom’s phone!!
My theory is: I think she re-used the knowledge obtained from one year struggling with the Moto G… and exploited that knowledge better with the iPhone thanks to its simplicity (instant satisfaction).
BTW I think there’s something about iPhone+iOS that just turns people on. It doesn’t happen with the Mac, It doesn’t happen with the iPad… but the iPhone’s got something that common people love.
I suspect its something related to usability or simplicity because in every other aspects iPhones are crushed even by the cheapest Androids.
And actually your argument is also false. The fact that Android is more popular that iOS and Windows more popular than Mac OS X explicitly makes Android and Windows ‘better’ by definition ( which is to say more users find it a better choice for them ).
In this case better may mean ‘more user friendly’, or ‘more design unified’ or ‘supporting more games’ or it may mean ‘cheaper’, ‘more configurable’ or ‘more open’ or whatever but it is ‘better’ in aggregate because the market ( and by extension the buyers who comprise it ) have clearly spoken.
Now we might argue about UI’s or kernels or API’s or development toolchains or App Stores or whatever the heck you want to argue about because your into operating system and you are totally entitled to your opinion, but your not entitled to your own facts.
PS. Being rude is still not cool though.
Edited 2015-11-14 16:37 UTC
You talk about this as if the consumers always actually have a choice. Hahahaha!
Well with phones in the USA in 2015, they do. Now mobile carriers, that’s a different kettle of fish.
I don’t agree. There are more Chevy cars on the road than Porsche, Audi, BMW or Mercedes. Does that mean Chevy is the best car? It means that more people can afford a Chevy.
Windows based PCs are usually cheaper than Macs. Android phones are cheaper than IPhones usually. They are the chevy’s of the computing world.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with Windows, Android or Chevy cars but they’re not flashy, they’re not sexy and they’re not what people that care want.
Sometimes you can get a little high end in your cheap thing. A windows machine can run iTunes. A 2016 chevy camero has Apple CarPlay. Android can play beats music.
YMMV, to stick to the car analogy!
I think a lot of users just follow the hurd. Microsoft built an empire with the hurd and Apple is doing just the same. And the fact that Apple makes excellent but expensive hardware, makes it for the average user difficult to admit that they have paid a lot of money for a great device with some shortcomings in SW. (Apple Music app, Numbers app, App Store app are all poorly written apps)
All Apple fans dismiss the usefulness of the back button, but in reality the back button is big miss on an iPhone. As an app developer for both iOS and Android, I don’t have any preference towards one of them, but in term of ease of use the back button makes a lot of standard apps (Facebook, Twiiter, Gmail, …) easier to use on Android.
…. because the formatting and typeface inconsistencies on that page make it practically unreadable. A TdF stage would’ve been less fatiguing.
I thought the first quote was intentionally using a bad font to demonstrate the problem. When they used the same bad font a second time about something else, it was a bit confusing.
I really didn’t notice much difference between IOS8 and 9. As for usability, I find it totally usable.
For me, IOS has always been simple and straightforward.
I could never get my thick head around those ‘charms’ on Windows (And many other things).
As an engineer, I appreciate good design. I am als oa student of the Mackintosh (Nothing to do with apple)
http://visit-glasgow.info/culture/top-ten-charles-rennie-mackintosh… and Art Deco styles in particular.
The craftsmanship he showed in his works is fantastic. Functional and looking good. I see many similarities of that ethos in Apple today.
Can anything be improved? Sure it can. But on the whole I don’t have any issues with the way my Apple kit works. What needs change? I really don’t know.
I guess I’m one of those who are happy with what they’ve got.
I worked in a UI lab for a while in the 1980’s and am amazed at how much everything has come on since those days.
Unless there is a completely new paradyme waiting to be discovered this sort of thing will be our lot until we get implanted computers that we can control by thought. That may well not happen until I am pushing up the daisies.
Being slightl cynical, saying everything is fine and dandy does not get the same level of page hits as saying it is a POS.
Edited 2015-11-14 17:08 UTC
I will examine this clickbait article in more detail later, but for now I’ll leave it at this:
“APPLE, YOU USED TO BE THE LEADER. WHY ARE YOU NOW SO SELF-ABSORBED? WORSE, WHY DOES GOOGLE FOLLOW ALL YOUR WORST EXAMPLES”
Never mind the irony of the guy writing in all caps shouting about bad design. The real point is when you find yourself trying to claim that not only is Apple totally wrong, but the market leader Google is so unbelievably dumb that they would willfully copy what you claim is terrible design, that should really make you step back and question your basic assumptions.
So the only options are that this guy is either stupid, or the article is clickbait. Given I have faith in humanity, I’ll go with clickbait.
Edited 2015-11-14 17:32 UTC
To all you angry Apple fans: Don Norman is a hugely important ux person. This simply can’t be denied. He’s a genuine expert in the field.
Look past the presentation of article and engage with the substance.
Now, if you want a consistent experience try the Linux DE GNOME.
Hmm. Argument by authority. Not very convincing. Let’s take a look at the claims in the article.
Hmm let’s see. On their iPad it would be go to Photos, press “select”, highlight the photos, click Share and Email. When they send the email it asks if they want to send them Small, Medium, Large, or Original size.
In Windows they still can’t send photos no matter how often I’ve shown them.
In closing, criticizing design is easy. Any grad student that’s taken a human interface class could write this article (and many do) illustrating how a certain design violates the criteria they just learned. But all of that is useless without an alternative. So I’ll take these guys seriously when they propose a touch interface designed for phones which has all the properties they espouse and retains all the utility of a modern smartphone. Sure it would be great if every single feature was immediately visually discoverable. But how do you do that when you have so little screen space? Do you sacrifice content for UI? Let’s see their great alternative. Without that it’s just blowing hot air.
Edited 2015-11-14 21:13 UTC
Few more things..
Real design is about compromise. They go into great detail about Ram’s design principles, and the design principles are all valid. But the reality is Ram was talking about some pretty simple devices. An electric shaver has a cutter, a grate, a single button, and a way to hold it. It’s not wildly difficult to design that well when it has a single function. A modern smartphone has thousands or tens of thousands of functions. Fundamentally it will not be as discoverable as a device of the same size with only one.
I wonder how people managed for 100 years with physical keyboards and typewriters, which – prepare yourself – have ALL CAPS letters on the keys despite the fact they normally type lowercase! It’s a wonder anyone ever figured out how to type anything.
Also funny anecdote about the switch to upper/lower case in the recent iOS update. My brother and sister in law found it really visually jarring that the whole keyboard changed by pressing shift. They immediately switched back to the old all caps mode.
I prefer the upper/lower case mode, but never had a problem with the old way. I suspect it was a holdover from the skeumorphic days when they wanted things to look more like their physical counterpart. In the case of the keyboard that was making the on-screen keyboard like a physical one.
Edited 2015-11-14 21:32 UTC
A smartphone interface only has a handful of different interactions (forward, backward, zoom, save etc). The “thousands” (more like dozens) of functions are nothing more than combination of 2-4 simple interactions eg open camera app, select focus, press shutter button.
Edited 2015-11-15 08:37 UTC
I remember laughing at Windows between XP and Vista/7 with the “Aero” eye-candy. The Mac used the animations, transparency, and the rest to indicate something useful. Windows just had useless bling, e.g. a window would animate to where it would be in the dock – showing the position.
Skeuomorphism is a way of doing thing – when it works and is indicating and allowing adjustment using the familiar graphics, not just eye-candy – which Apple fell into.
I think it was a Steve Jobs patent with all the unknowable gestures.
The one button mouse was stupid – because they never told you it was option-click, shift-click, clover/control-click, hold the following dozen keys down while clicking…
The error was repeated and made worse with the iPhone. Only one “home” button. They should use a ruby slippers clicking “there’s no place like home”, even if I don’t want to go there.
Remember there wasn’t any cut-paste at all for a while. Or ways of sending info across application boundaries. The walls aren’t just around the perimeter, but it isn’t a prison farm, just a walled garden, although most are confined to “solitary”.
That said, my largest annoyance is when you have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse. If I’m typing, or entering data into a spreadsheet, I don’t want to have to shift/change species.
The hard part is to understand users differ. I really would like to pick my own fonts, but still see italics, bold, and larger/smaller sizes as needed. But everything now may as well be pre-rendered jpegs.
Another stupidity is to hide the filesystem, or other “details”. They can’t be harder to understand or less convenient than having to copy something to dropbox just so a different app can do something with it.
Or… there’s a gazillions competition out there that do provide what’s you’re looking for. Select, pick, switch.
most of what you ask for would add complexity and instability to the system.
i like those power features.
but i like something that never crashes, or at least never loses data with an app crash even better.
iOS has a few issues when you start to live with it as your main computer. i have clients that deploy to asia with just an iPad, or at least they leave the laptop in the hotel room.
i’d say file handling is the biggest issue they face, but they know to use email, airdrop, and dropbox to get around it. maybe having some sort error or audit log would be nice.
but the always on, always ready, always stable , nearly ubiquitous iOS is pretty handy for lots of modern mobile workers. it hasn’t completely replaced the laptop, but most of my clients walk room to room or building to building on a site and the tablet goes where no laptop ever did.
> It’s easy to look at Apple’s massive profits and the quality of its hardware and miss the abysmal state of Apple’s software.
It’s actually pretty easy to see when you try to use OS X 10.1x as a real unix-like OS, like they’ve been advertising for the last fifteen years. I wiped OS X off my Macbook’s SSD and replaced it with Fedora 23. I got better hiDPI support for Gtk and Qt applications, a modern set of shell tools, proper package management, roughly equivalent battery life, clearer fonts, a filesystem that doesn’t actively destroy my data, and far better performance.
The one thing that sucked was getting the Broadcom wifi adapter working, but that’s Broadcom’s fault for not open sourcing their driver and getting it upstreamed.
Edited 2015-11-16 02:35 UTC
Except of the red dot playing blurry porn in the middle (at least that’s what I saw) it wasn’t a great article, but as an Apple fan I agree with the broader point, and I submit into evidence iTunes 12. That’s really all they had to say.
I find this piece of text higly interesting because it is not valid:
“Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed. The only way of telling whether the keyboard will produce a capital or a lower case letter is to look at the keyboard’s up-pointing arrow, which is either black or white. Weird: First of all, this means that people have to recognize that the up-facing arrow is the control for upper/lowercase. Second, it means that they must know which color indicates which case. Quick—without looking at your Apple phone or iPad, which color do you think represents lowercase?”
First of all, on my iphone 4s running ios 9.x, the keyboard clearly toggles between capital and lower case when pressing the “key with the “up-facing arrow”. That invalidates most of their statement above.
Second, I would say almost everyone who has ever typed on a physical keyboard knows that you need to klick the shift button if you wish to type capital letters. The look of it is the same in IOS as on any keyword found around, so no difference there.
Third, the color is not the important part, it could be red, green, blue or whatever color, it is all about making it stand out from the rest when clicked/pressed, therefor the colour changes.
Now, if the rest of the keyboard would have been rain bow coloured with different colours for each button, then i could see the problem of identifying shift being clicked, but that is not the case here.
same can be said for Android and Microsoft.
…minus “style and appearance”
After spending 20+ years bashing Apple for giving a chit about design in the first place, telling us that no real computer user cares about superfluous things like this….
Now Apple is giving Design a bad name? Ok. Says who, all their competitors who continue to rip them off?
Tog is mad about icon placement and seems to have been complaining since 1996. Nothing new there.
iOS continues to be the easiest to use mainstream OS in existence. it has the highest customer satisfaction rate, it needs the least amount of tech support, rarely loses data, and is free and continually updated.
also it’s not a front for an advertising-led data collection service that profits hundreds of millions on customer personal data.
Not the most manly of colours
Since when is a colour manly or not?!
I’m not an Apple person, but I remember one of my first experiences with a modern Mac. I was at a school and had to copy some files from a USB stick to a Mac.
I insert it, copy the file. Now I have to remove the USB. So I’m looking for some kind of eject option.
Windows, while complex in many ways, I am generally able to discover this options. When I insert an USB device, it pops up in the tray in the bottom right. I right click that device and there is a menu with eject. Not quick or simple, but easily discover able once you learn the basic mechanics of windows.
Anyways, I googled and found you drag the drive into the trash icon.
I was like WTF. I get it. Probably quicker than Windows. But I mean dragging a drive to the trash. It could delete everything on it.
But even windows feel on this path towards visual simplicity, but less discoverability. In office (2010?) the menu is hidden in a circle on the top left. The first time I used it, I couldn’t find this menu and the corresponding ‘save as’ button.
In many ways, earlier versions of windows had much better discoverability. The start button was easily labelled start. It even had some sliding text telling you to click there.
Seems to me like an industry wide problems.
Visual simplicity has overtaken discoverability.
The problem can be seen industry-wide when it comes to IT. Years of usability studies and user interaction common sense has been thrown out the window — and the reason is clear.
Artists have taken over.
I’m going to use web development as an example as it’s supposed to be all about accessibility and usability. That’s why HTML was even created in the first blasted place.
When I think of the word “design” I think things like electrical design and mechanical design. These are fields where limitations of material strength, availability, usability on the end product come in front and center as without those they are of no use. HTML and websites in general also have limitations where there are a lot of things you CAN do that you probably shouldn’t.
… and right now, most of the people calling themselves “web designers” are so woefully ignorant of these things, that they are NOT designers; they are graphic artists. The end result ends up akin to hiring a 5 year old with a box of crayons to design the space shuttle.
You can see this in the utterly and completely back-assward process people use of developing sites now, where these ALLEGED designers start out by dicking around in Photoshop worrying about fixed width screen appearances before they even have content of value or semantic markup. That’s putting the cart before the horse and completely missing that there is more to a website and more to ACTUAL design than “what it happens to look like on the screen the designer is seated in front of”.
To be brutally frank, 99% of the people out there calling themselves “web designers” do not know enough about HTML, CSS, Emissive colourspace or accessibility to be designing but two things: Jack and ****, and Jack left town.
You can tell this by asking the simplest of questions, like “How are you going to handle when the content is too big for that fixed height background?”, “How is this going to scale to dynamic fonts?”, “How is this going to be elastic and semi-fluid” — generally “designers” have no clue what that even MEANS.
… and if you ask about “responsive” they’ll typically say the actual coder (who should be doing the ACTUAL design work) will handle that with some bloated rubbish mouth-breathing asshat bull like bootcrap. At which point I tell the poor client being duped by these scam artists to go find a stick to scrape that off with before tracking it all over a websites carpets.
Really that’s just indicative of every industry right now, where form hasn’t just put functionality in the backseat, it tossed it in a sack and threw it out the window into the river like a unwanted litter of kittens.
It’s easy to see why though — suits with checkbooks who know nothing about usability are far easier to impress with “cool and flashy” than it is “subdued and functional”. It’s why goofy distracting animations, images too big to even go on a website in the first damned place, and endless pointless scripttardery and bloated frameworks are the order of the day.
On the hardware side you see much the same thing, where really, REALLY bad designs are getting greenlighted because they’re artsy, without asking if it’s actually USEFUL. Just look at the Micheal Bay movie reject mouse Razr put out recently that leaves one asking “Have these people ever even SEEN a hand?” — or disastrously bad “yeah, but where are you going to put it” Boxee box with it’s oddball shape that didn’t play well with normal furniture. Just look at the goofy artsy shape of the Alienware Area 51 or Apple’s own “trash can from outside the convenience store” Mac Pro. The latter undoing several decades of progress for them and reversing the joke about which platform has the bigger mess of tangled cables.
In many ways it’s the same as the asshattery you see in construction where you now have “Architectural Death Rays” like the Walkie Talkie in UK, Disney concert hall in Cali, or the Vdara hotel in Vegas. It’s why you see structurally unsound shapes like the Stata Center in Cambridge Mass, or again that Disney concert hall where after just a few years they’re bordering on needing to be condemned… and it’s why idiot money pits like the “Millenium Dome” and outright eyesores like the “Music Experience” even got built in the first place.
It’s what happens when you let artists think they know **** about **** without letting an ACTUAL architect or engineer supervise their hoodoo-voodoo “gee ain’t it neat” bull!
There are WAY too many artists not qualified to design a blasted thing, who openly attack concepts like usability, calling themselves designers these days.
You want proof of that? Track down one of the sleazeball scam artists who call themselves a designer crapping out templates at web design whorehouses like Themeforest or Templatemonster, and ask their opinion of NNGroup or the WCAG — half will never even have heard of them, the other half will rant and rave about how full of **** Neilsen-Norman is and how following things like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines “limits their creativity”.
Sorry to say, when it comes to usability and accessibility, there NEEDS to be limits on creativity!
Edited 2015-11-18 06:24 UTC
Android came out with a new sparse design language and everyone was all “Apple is doomed, it looks horrible, it doesn’t look “modern”, etc etc”. All the pundits ranted & raved that the look of iOS was stale and needed to look like Android, all blank, empty space, thin fonts you can barely read, buttons that don’t look like buttons, etc etc. Well, Apple did just that, did what the pundits wanted and now those pundits are back to bitch once again. Bitching about too much blank space, fonts that are too thin and unreadable, buttons that don’t look like buttons or something that does anything, etc etc. This was all totally predictable. Those pundits have to write something to generate page views, even if they are complaining about a company that did exactly what they wanted them to do.
Edited 2015-11-19 22:42 UTC