Comment by smcleod
2 days ago
This has been a serious problem since macOS Tahoe. Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles - it's incredibly hostile to users. Not only does it make it impossible to distinguish between overlapping windows as this tool seeks to mitigate, there's many confusing UI elements and lack of contrast not to mention why it has so much padding on everything - you're left with far less usable space.
> Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles
Their background is in marketing/packaging/retail design, and they were at Kate Spade before Apple.
https://a-g-i.org/user/alaindye/
It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine why someone from that world would prioritize things looking good in promotional photos/videos, and not care too much about human factors and fundamentals of interaction design.
Blaming any one person doesn't seem very useful without extraordinary insight into the development process. It could be this approach was dictated, and it's not like the rest of the product team didn't have say, and it allows scapegoating them even if both the above are true.
Being on the E team is literally about being the one person to blame when things aren’t right.
When you’re an exec in charge of a whole area, the buck stops with you and, to quote Steve Jobs - the reasons stop mattering.
As a user I don’t care about having “extraordinary insight into the development process”. All I know is you’re vice president of interface design and the interfaces are getting worse over time.
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Even when everyone is to blame, one person is to blame. That's why prime ministers resign when they can't hold together a government. That's why leaders step down.
There are tens of thousands of interface designers who would be able to make a better interface than what is Tahoe and iOS 26. One of them should have the job.
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Notably, their name is Alan (or sometimes Alain), which might be where this app gets its name?
Similarly, when you switch to another app via command+tab, the keyboard events are being sent to the previous app for a couple of hundred milliseconds.
I cannot remember the number of times I quit the wrong app because of this or pasted something to the wrong window. I genuinely have to wait a second on every app switch.
It seems mindbending that this would pass any stage of testing. As a non macOS user, this feels like a complete dealbreaker for ever considering a switch. But macOS is demonstrably popular, and I haven't heard this complaint before. Is it less of an issue in reality than I imagine it would be?
I have an electric moped that delays the throttle 500ms after the brakes have been pressed and released. Terrifying in corners now and again
Windows also has problems with mouse clicks and window stacking. And an ugly bug, when closing a window with the mouse on "x" button, will also close the window below.
This also happens on switching virtual desktops, even with reduce animations there is a 100ms+ delay before any input on the new desktop will be sent to the correct app.
Apple has favoured looks over function for quite a while now.
Indeed. Here’s an article from Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and former Apple employee, that talks about Apple’s decline in usability back in 2015:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-apples-products-so-confus...
Apple had usability experts like Bill Atkinson (RIP), Larry Tesler (RIP), Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. At one point, what differentiated Apple products from competitors was Apple’s focus on usability and consistency. However, it seems that sometime during Apple’s revival under Steve Jobs, there became a big focus on appealing design. Beige desktops and black laptops gave way to colorful desktops and metallic laptops, and the Platinum interface was replaced with Aqua. Nothing was wrong with this; in fact, this was peak Apple, IMO, with usability and visual appeal. But somewhere along the line, Apple lost the plot. Apple became less about usability and more about visual appeal, but with usability taking a hit.
To be fair, Apple makes world-class hardware, and I still prefer macOS to its competitors. The problem is that I prefer 2000s Mac OS X and even the 1990s classic Mac OS (from a UI perspective, not necessarily a UX perspective due to stability issues) to modern macOS.
Seems everyone has. Which is weird, given how bad everything looks despite this focus.
I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?
By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.
And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.
That'd be true but it doesn't even look good!
They stopped favoring looks recently.
Software isn't written for users anymore, unfortunately. Users are merely an annoying side effect that attempts to impede the line going up.
I must be out of the loop - i’m using Tahoe since few months now and I haven’t noticed any difference in what you are saying.
i cannot wait for OpenAIPhone and then OpenAIMac to come out and make Apple wake the fuck up
Ah yes, because Jony Ive definitely made iOS better when he was in charge of its look & feel and usability. :-|
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ios-7-interface-design-...
If openai can pay their bills