Comment by bze12
19 hours ago
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.