Comment by mrweasel
7 days ago
> 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?
I understand the concept that objects like letters are no longer used very much. My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon, and what tangible benefit does it bring, given that people are already used to letter icons, and aren't going to be used to your new icon. Tangible benefit meaning "users will be able to use this interface more easily".
Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.
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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.
IMHO this is precisely why clinging to old metaphors might not be optimal.
While the Shift key keeps some resemblance of the original object behavior, a shortcut like Cmd + Shift V makes no sense in the metaphor.
Same way holding Shift while selecting objects in the finder, or arrowing around breaks the mental image. In many ways, the Command key's higher abstraction makes it easier for newcomers to grasp that it just does magical things.
Cmd + S saving the document needs no additional lore or image of a past clunky machine would had somehow reacted in a Rube Goldberg way.
Interfaces should be simple to use for simple tasks anyway, getting rid of semantic noise is IMHO a better way.
And the "upper case" vs. "lower case" distinction, even though we no longer use a printing press in which each letter is sorted into a different box, or "case", depending on if it's a capital or not.
And we kept the letter "c", even though in English this is always* either pronounced like "k" or like "s", or the "ch" digraph. But sutsh ðings go in sykles, and one day ðe English language will be simplified.
* Saying "always" is a risk on a forum like this, no doubt there's an example I've not thought of.
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The benefit of skeuomorphism was that it was universal.
Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"
Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.
That universality across apps for basic functionality was the biggest feature: it didn't matter if I knew what a disk was or not, because I knew the disk-shaped thing meant save in every app.
The original modern sin of UX was having the hubris to ditch universality because they believed whatever batshit they dreamed up was better enough to justify doing so.
It wasn't. Arguably, it couldn't ever be.
You could come up with a unique wiz-bang UX for something that's objectively 25% better than skeuomorphism, and it still wouldn't be a net improvement. Because no user cares about one specific app enough to train on it.
But building a hammer that looks like every other hammer doesn't get you on the cover of design/UX magazines...
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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.
And while we're making the button say Save, perhaps we could put other buttons around it that just say what they do. We could even group those buttons into common types of activities, and then hide them in some sort of flyout dialog until you want to actually use them. We could group all File activities, all activities relating to the View, all activities relating to getting Help. This idea might revolutionize computing!
Especially not in non-English countries.
Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.
The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.
So I don't know what the point of this is.
Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.
I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.
This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.
"Save" is 4 characters in English, but it's over twice as long in German (9 Characters), and even longer in French (11). The variable length means the UX for word-based buttons would need to be designed for the longest case, which is why we mainly see them in title bars for navigation, or in very sparse UI.