Writing in Fastcodesign Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini said that although Apple products are more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price.
“Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realise exist,” they wrote.
They said that when they worked for the outfit, Apple had well-known, well-established principles of design. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations.
Jobs’ Mob has abandoned many of these principles.
“Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage,” they wrote.
Apple seems to believe that design is only about making things look pretty at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.
They also added that Google was making a big mistake in copying them.
Apparently the rot set in when Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles.
“Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. They began shipping systems that people have difficulty learning and using, getting away with it because people don’t recognise such problems until it is too late, and money has already changed hands. Even then, people tend to blame themselves for the shortcomings of their devices: "If I weren’t so stupid."
IPhones and iPads might have beautiful fonts and a clean appearance, uncluttered by extraneous words, symbols, or menus but people can't read the text. The have to use the “disabled features” so they can actually use the product.
Norman and Tognazzini wondered what design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product.
Text legibility is only one of Apple’s many design failures. There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen.
“Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? So often, the user has to try touching everything on the screen just to find out what are actually touchable objects.”
If something goes wrong there is no ability to recover after an undesired action. Apple used to do that with undo but Jobs’ Mob initially discarded this essential element of system design, perhaps because undo would require an object on the screen in order to invoke it.
This would detract from the clean elegance Apple now prefers over clear understanding and usability. When enough people complained, Apple bought it back so that to do to undo is to violently shake your phone or tablet.
Android phones have Back built into the phone as a universal control that is always available. Apple does not, they said.
