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:
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.
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.