Comment by grishka
7 days ago
They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.
one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
Oh wow. Took me several minutes of aimlessly poking around.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
> Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
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Different people may approach the same UI differently. A good practice in UX design is to put things where people expect to find them — and duplicate them if different people go looking in different places. So a working search function doesn't absolve you of having to make the structure of your screens/menus/whatever make sense.
Life is not smoking guns, objective truths, or us and thems.
I do find it amusing how disorganized the app has become, and that has become my favorite example.
I find it even more amusing that you think citing search as a primary UI path is your “smoking gun” of good information hierarchy and interface design.
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Search is... bad, generally.
How is that setting spelled? What synonym did they use? Are there multi-work linking hyphens? Will it work with or without them? Is the search fuzzy?
And then localization comes in. Take any translated UI and the search often falls short. Did they translate the setting name? Did they translate it right, or did a google-translate of their localization plist? Will it find the setting if I spell it without accents? Which dialect does it use? Wait I don't know how to say this specific technical work in my native language because nobody actually uses it?
So yeah, please keep categories that make sense.
I couldn't search System Settings when I setup my laptop for over an hour because it was indexing files I migrated from my old Mac. It made for a frustrating user experience trying to set this thing up.
Search only works if you know what you're looking for and what it's called. Horrible for discoverability.
I mean, by your logic the whole settings app should just be a search box when you open it. Clearly there’s a use case for browsability in a settings app, so that you can discover what settings exist. Given that, it’s probably important for the location of each setting to be intuitive.