Comment by Someone1234
7 days ago
I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.
I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.
You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
IMHO skeuomorphic design had a few wins, but also plenty of losses. Sometimes the real world interface is just not as intuitive as it should have been.
But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.
This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
> This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.
I was actually complaining about this the other day: there is no manual (or even a searchable database) of recognized commands/features. I often discover that something was possible with Google Assistant when the announcement comes that it's being removed.
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I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism. I’m seeing “skeuomorphism” increasingly used for the former, where people mostly mean “not flat design”, whereas originally it meant only the latter.
Ideomorphic seems like it would work for that.
Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic
That seems to fit amazingly well here too.
> I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism.
Likely related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action..., but it's a jargon word most tech people and others don't know, and it creates debates about what it means among those that do know it.
I usually say something like it should be obvious it's clickable, or obvious what it does, when it comes up.
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This is exactly the problem with Siri - if it was nothing but a vocal command line that I had to memorize exactly how to talk to it, and I could find a list of commands to learn, it'd be 1000x better.
This is similar to WolframAlpha. Theoretically, it can do countless different things, but you wouldn't know about them just from looking at the empty text box. The difference to something like ChatGPT is that it can interpret arbitrary commands, even if it can't properly execute them.
I think one thing that is involved in this is conventions, and when you've learned one set of rules on how to communicate on one form of interface that it transfers to other applications on that interface. If there's certain ways to use graphical elements, gestures, console keywords/option flags, spoken keywords, while other applications have the freedom to do their own thing it should be seen as better not to diverge and reinvent the wheel (so each needs learning its own rules) too much without good reason.
> having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely
A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.
I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.
This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.
Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.
> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.
Yeah, about that.
When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.
Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.
I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
Having lived through the whole iPhone 4 thing, I'm extremely hesitant to upgrade my iPhone 13 Pro here.
To be clear, an irreversible update caused my iPhone 4 to become immediately unusable.
I have to admit that I don't feel that on my old SE 2, but I do see Apple not caring about the device type. Some of the UI elements overlap og doesn't line after the update to iOS 18.
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense
This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?
(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)
> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?
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The classic example is the save icon being a floppy disk. Older people understand the history, and young people figure it out, even if they don’t know the history.
Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.
I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.
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> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
Knobs work as a tactile interface that require two fingers minimum to rotate predictably. With digital screens we lost the tactile element, and mandated a new one finger (thumb) minimum. Interfaces had to adapt, which is why knobs were replaced with sliders. Changes like this happened all over the place; not because of "gen-Z", but because they were the most effective solution for the platform.
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists
Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.
I find it comical that macOS displays an HDD icon for internal storage. It's even using the "old", skeuomorphic art style, from before the flat design.
(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)
OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.
I've seen a few instances of an arrow pointing down into a box/tray. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems appropriate, but the only caveat is that a lot of applications already represent 'download' with a similar icon. I imagine some product designers would be unhappy with a download-looking icon representing saving to a location in "the cloud".
USB flash drives are still quite universally used and a direct replacement for the floppy's functionality. I've seen a USB stick shaped icon used as a metaphor for saving in some places. But I agree with the sibling post that the text "save" probably has more staying power.
Personally I'd just make it a button that says "Save", but I doubt that's going to be popular.
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This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita.
My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.
This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.
I was initially excited as on paper it sounds like a fantastic throwback to the Aqua design, which I still think was fantastic.
From the preview so far I'm not excited.
I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.
Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.
When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.
It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.
Someone installed beta and posted a screenshot down below somewhere; control center with these glass buttons over a colorful springboard icons grid turns interface into a visual mess.
I wonder if they manage to change anything or tweaks, polishing (sic!) will happen over next or two iOS releases.
like a lot of redesigns, its more about marketing and 'the new shiny' than anything else imo
Maybe it's because I'm living in a country where we had to catch up with marketing and advertising after communism fell and I have some kind of "immunity" and cynical approach to such forms of product presentations... But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.
And I honestly felt sorry for woman who tries to sell me amazing emoji combining "technology". Who actually uses this beside the obvious die-hard fans on dedicated sites and forums.
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> I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely.
As I child of the nineties I was surprised to eventually learn that a file in a folder was a real thing and not only a computer concept.
> it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design
I strongly disagree. I don't mind if people like skeuomorphic graphics. Want to make the "play" button look like a 1987 tape deck? Not my thing, but everyone has different preferences. That's fine.
But I loathe, detest, hate, despise, skeuomorphic user interfaces. Remember when Calendar.app would only let you turn one month page at a time because that's how desk calendars work? How Podcasts looked like a reel-to-reel recorder and waste tons of screen space? Contacts app imitating the limitations of a physical black book because that's how real books work?[0]
If you like brushed metal or whatever, right on. Again, not my thing, but you do you! But I cannot abide the fake limitations that skeuomorphic design pushed onto software in the name of making apps work just like their physical equivalents. The UI on the magic boxes we're typing this on are limited only by our creativity. Please, please don't infect them with the real world's restrictions when it's not necessary!
[0] https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/
Agreed. Use the medium’s capabilities! Don’t cripple it for the sake of familiarity.
I think you have a romanticized revisionary memory of back then.
I went to school in the 90s and learned computers in school.
All they taught us was the basics. How to use Windows explorer. What files are and how to rename and delete and undelete them.
And some hypercard clone. Which barely taught us anything about computers except "they can do stuff you tell them to," which I guess was a valuable lesson?
I've been hearing that kids do not understand files and hierarchal file systems due to cloud and iOS.
> Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)
The middle school here has a "computer applications" class that covers all that kind of thing. Definitely not iPads only.
> and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
This is my #1 take-away from this. At this point it seems pretty safe to assume that interfaces made by Apple will probably still be decent, in spite of this design philosophy.
The clones, however, are going going to take accessiblity to new lows.
I believe that new to computing populations in developing countries who were also new to literacy benefited a lot because of the shift away from skeuomorphic design paradigms because those real world object choices didn't always translate.
> (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)
I swear, some decisionmakers deserve a brutal punch in their face. I don't even care anymore about being civil in such matters.
Attack of the clones, yes.
Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.
Brrr.