Comment by kristopolous
1 day ago
I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
I suppose it’s exactly the programmer’s job to make sure cursor grabs the edge of the curved window border, not the arbitrary point outside.
And it's the UX designer's job to specify the click target area based on best practices and usability testing with real users.
If this is the click target area specified by the designer (or it was simply unspecified) then it's absolutely the designer's fault. I'm a UX designer and I've made mistakes like this before, though this one is pretty egregious because the issue is core to the interaction.
It's sometimes easy as a UX designer to forget to specify some of the smaller details (though this example isn't what I'd call a "small detail"), particularly because they're the kinds of things you don't notice when they work, and I don't have to implement it. The developer has to sit down and write code for what will or will not happen.
I've made mistakes in the past where in an mobile interface I neglected to specify the click target area for some controls. Typically the minimum clickable area we'd use was something like 44x44 but the visual was smaller than that, and I didn't specify it, so the developer made the visible element the one that would respond to the click events. It was too small and it caused issues. I owned up to that one, I didn't want to let the developer take the blame for that.
I've also been fortunate enough to work with developers who would notice these things and then ask me if it was intended and whether they should increase the clickable area. I was always so grateful to have colleagues like that, and I'd always offer to set some time aside to come take a look at things on their local environment before they moved things forward just to catch any issues where they could immediately fix it instead of having to push fixes later on.
I don't know where the failure happened at Apple, but based on what I've seen from "Liquid Glass" it's clear there's some real institutional failures involving either the design leadership, the development leadership, or somewhere in between both. It's really quite embarrassing the quality of GUI and UX that has come out of Apple recently.
This is the first time ever where the hurdle of rolling back my iPhone to an earlier version of iOS feels worth the effort. I disabled as much of the liquid glass effects as I could because I found it difficult to read and now it all looks like shit, whereas before I could read it and it looked nice.
In this specific case, yea, the programmers might be at fault, but most of my gripes with Liquid Glass are not like this. They are design issues. This seems like maybe more of a bug stemming from an underlying design issue (corner radius being ridiculously large).
Is that something the programmer decides or are they just implementing what the designer decided?
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Yeah I don’t like the glass effect and I realised it’s because it creates movement and drags your attention to things that should be background items. On the phone, video controls and app folders are particularly egregious.
The worst part here is that the style works decently on mobile but they shoehorned it onto a 25-year-old UI and shipped it.
I'm fond of saying that most problems in the software world are due to one thing trying to do two things, or two things trying to do the same thing. In this case, it feels like the former: getting the same implementation to cater to both desktop and mobile is obviously the most efficient solution from a development perspective, but not an end user (and ultimately business) perspective.
Because they absolutely can't have disparate visual styles in their product lines, practicality be damned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I hate it too, but to my surprise, all of my colleagues (with an iPhone) said they love because it looks great.
I’ll add a third perspective that’s probably often gone unsaid: I love it on Apple TV, and kinda like it on iPhone and Mac. It definitely needs to be improved though. There are definitely a whole bunch of usability issues, but they shouldn’t be too hard to fix. And Apple has shown willingness to iterate until they get it right. Unlike Microsoft which just moves onto the next thing (the system settings UI design in Windows 11 is fine.. but can they pleeeease just integrate all settings into that UI now.. how many generations of settings / control panes are there in Windows now?)
The huge corner radius is one thing I do wish they reverted in Mac OS.
I love it both on an iPhone and a Mac. It runs great and it looks great. It’s a mistake to look at what people say on the internet. They are usually hopelessly contrarian.
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I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described
I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
Apple designers used to build interactive demos in Macromedia Director, so I'm assuming they knew a bit about scripting. That probably helped them think in a way that really clicks with software development.
I've worked with some younger designers who couldn't even put together a consistent click-dummy once the client wanted to see flows outside the happy path. To be fair, all they really had to go on was their education and Figma's panels.
This is a pretty discriminatory comment that I’ve honestly seen zero hint of in reality. And this is coming from someone who didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I honestly rarely even find out what school my colleagues went to school. But the ones I know who did go to those prestigious schools are beyond humble.
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I worked for a company with a large website. The designers were elite and worked in a darkroom on expensive Apple equipment. At some point, it turned out that users couldn't see a certain color on the website because it could be seen on an Apple monitor, but not on a mass-market laptop's TFT screen.
I have difficulty reading the light gray text on white/bright background that too many sites favor these days. I have a pretty good 4K 32 inch monitor. Even with a full Adobe color space capable and calibrated device in a darkroom I don't want to read that combination.
I don't get it, I have medically tested 120% color vision (it was a lengthy test), definitely nothing wrong on my side, so I don't understand at all what the designers and coders are seeing that they think that that is a great idea. The difference between the pixels is objectively bad, one can take a screenshot and look at the background versus text pixels.
I worked at a really large social media company, and there was a design which looked beautiful on all of the employee's high-res screens and monitors but used too much space and just didn't work for most of the users. It never got launched, which feels like what should have happened here.
To be fair to those designers, color reproduction is a really hard problem, and shitty monitors have terrible color reproduction.
You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons, but they should be testing their work on shitty monitors, too.
> You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons
I don't know, I conclude the opposite. If you need accurate color reproduction when you publish online, you are doing something wrong.
I used to co-own a small digital printing business, so I'm aware of what all of it means, and I had an appropriate monitor myself and a paid Adobe Design Suite subscription.
But for the web, when our setup is too good it's actually a detriment. It is predictable that you end up publishing things that require your quality setup. There is a good reason not to bother with a high quality monitor usable for serious publishing and photo/video editing when you only do web thing. Which is exactly why when I bought my last monitor, which is for business work and coding and web browsing and other mundane things, I deliberately ignored all the very high quality displays, even though the company would have paid whatever I chose. It is not an advantage for that use case.
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.
Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)
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True, if they'd kept the function keys and just added the touch bar above it it would have been great. Weird thing is there was more than enough space for both so I don't understand why they didn't do that.
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Curious why you liked it so much. Removing the fn keys was a big no-no, yes, but also it was just located in a place I'm never going to look at. So why do you think it would've been a hit feature?
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The fn keys you can almost circumvent, but the escape key? Common!
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Seems like you could make the corners round (not making a judgement on that in any way) and still give the resize handle a more sensible size/shape/location right? As in this isn't a visual design problem.
It's tricky because you're now cropping into rectangular apps which may actually use all the pixels they get and want hit testing in them.
When Windows went to a 1 pixel border and shadow effects, it still had hit testing in a region around the window to account for that. No idea what they're doing with rounded corners in Win11.
Your comment reminded of these fantastic sketch.
The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
I need evidence that sufficiently large organisations don't eventually devolve into… whatever that is. And then, names, so I can apply there, while there's still some work ethics left in me.
I want OS vendors to stop prioritizing "design" above performance. Opening a Finder window used to be instant, now it takes 0.3s-1s. Opening Safari used to be instant, now it takes seconds. Even menus in the menu bar take a few dozen milliseconds too long, which becomes obvious when you compare it to apps with custom truly-instant hamburger menus.
Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.
> fixing an obviously broken spec
Going off spec is not the correct way to deal with this, and I could see how that might get you in trouble. It's counter productive.
Better choice is to escalate, but at some point you have to simply disagree and commit.
>I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.
The point is that Apple's own design team was.
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In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
It's a throwback to BDUF.
that’s a lot of words to say “bad at their job”.
If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.
Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
That's a bit like software developers iterating until all unit tests pass, and then considering all user feedback dumb.
>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Of course it's not "a conspiracy", but it is a major, gigantic, huge, alarming failure by Apple. Resizing a window is just about the most basic and useful thing a window system can do after opening a window, and Apple totally messed it up. It's like they've never worked with a window before, but TBH though, their window system has always sucked.
I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.
That’s not a bad thing (user experience is important) but remember that Liquid Glass was designed by someone without a UI background. Alan Dye designed the boxes iPhones come in and was installed by Jony Ive, an industrial designer. Neither of them had training or experience in usability, and all of the UX people I know are basically complaining non-stop about how many basic UX principles the 26 releases violate.
Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there as the final quality filter.
Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.
I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it.
Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).
The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.
Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).
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