The other day I opened a Vue project from 2-3 years ago and after installing deps with NPM it reported something like 50 critical vulnerabilities. Fine, I'll update dependencies. After doing that nothing worked anymore. The Webpack config didn't work, the Webpack loaders for Vue didn't work, etc. I had configured this project with an "old" version of Vue CLI and now everyone had moved on from that and changed their APIs.
I had a similar problem with an in-house Electron app from 3-4 years ago. A user reported a problem running the app on high Sierra. So I updated Electron to the latest version and compiled but then I got some new errors because Electron changed something and it broke Gulp. So I updated Gulp and turns out they changed their API too and I had to change the logic... I lost a day with this.
You can open an old jQuery project from 10 years ago change some stuff and everything just works, even after updating jQuery to the latest version.
Combined with the current culture of "evergreen" software that is always connecting to online sources (even if it's installed locally), applies automatic updates, and doesn't support old versions in parallel with newer ones for extended periods, it's like we've regressed at least a decade in the quality of the software we use. Although next week it could be 13 years. And if you refuse to play, you don't get security or compatibility updates either.
The likes of Google, Apple and Mozilla bear great responsibility for actively promoting the evergreen and ratchet models: browsers, mobile operating systems and web and mobile apps have probably been the main drivers, and Apple has gone even further by weaponising its control of the app ecosystem via its App Store monopoly. However, it's not just web and mobile that are broken; more recently, it's been creeping into desktop applications and even desktop operating systems (Windows 10) as well.
Just as it's been the case with user-facing software, so it has also been the case with development tools. We seem to have trained an entire generation of young developers now who have no concept of maintaining stable APIs, using open standards for data formats and communications protocols, designing for compatibility and portability, and so on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is also much worse in the worlds of web and mobile development.
It's a plague, and we need to kill it with fire.
Would a team choose the same tools if they were starting those apps with a blank canvas today? Probably not. Is anyone going to throw away a decade of working code to rewrite the apps that already exist? Also probably not.
It should come as no surprise that if you ruin your UI, "engagement" goes up, because people are dicking around trying to figure out how the hell it works now. Unfortunately, statistics are hard, and nobody really knows what they're doing, so I don't think the organization is always aware of this kind of stuff.
A manager who loses all his staff isn't a manager.
Apple was one of the pioneers of it with it's always changing skeuomorphisms followed by its plane design trend. Their marketing has been mocking the stability of their competitors since forever, and only stopped when that stability went away.
That said, I'm peaceful with he fact that I can't access most of the features of my phones (I use Android, that while not being a pioneer has followed quite passionately). That also helps restricting my dependency on it so I have the option of not being spied on and avoid problems once the functionality goes away.
Android designers aren't doing much better though.
I frequently support my mother for all digital things, and everytime I need to fix something on her iPad (or formerly her iMac, since then I put her on Windows), I too often spend several frustrating hours with a 50/50 chance of success. Android for my SO is the same, my god, it's a misery of UX, the absence of thought into human cognitive flow reminds me of old Windows sometimes.
To be fair I think we're seeing one downside of an agile ecosystem where things are much less holistic, much more disjointed than with previous waterfall, major version box paradigm. It'll take time before we collectively learn how to address these issues under the (relatively) new DevOps model. Things are moving fast, faster than ever; UX requires time. There's a fundamental tension here, it's not an easy problem.
Sometimes look back at MacOS 9, even with its numerous issues and marvel at how good a lot of the UI/UX was.
Ah, this would explain that. I seem to remember that he did not want to deal with software design, but pretty much had to to fill the gap after Jobs passed away. something along those lines. I'll cut him some slack for the monumental achievements in his career, but Apple as a company should re-think their UX strategy for the 2020's imho.
And thank you for a nice trip via MacOS 9 memory lane!
Remove that someone who didn't just look at software as an accoutrement to hardware -- but as a necessary, functional part of that hardware (skeuomorphism was the natural outcome of this worldview), then replace them with someone who reveres form over function and we end up where we are.
Still missing Scott Forstall.
But apparently he's taking a (probably much-deserved) time off from tech, so more power to him.
Apple targets computer shoppers, not computer users.
Apple used to be much, much more than marketing; in fact the very smugness of their image and marketing comes from their unprecedented domination over computer-user satisfaction, superior design language that contributed as much to art as it did to tech, and so on and so forth. Even typography, one of Job's first huge intuitions and success, is a true user's benefit well beyond the looks.
I'm particularly harsh with Apple these days when I criticize their choices (UX, UI, manufacturing quality, product design, pricing, whatever), but that's because I hold one of the world's biggest company to much higher standards than what they're currently outputting; and I did not set those standards — they did for themselves over their own history. That has been their true gift to the world.
How to delete an app? Right click on the icon, delete. Kind of the same action on iOS as on Windows 95.
1. Hold down (long press? 3D Touch? I’ve never quite understood the difference) on the icon until a context menu appears. This is analogous to right-click.
2. Select “Rearrange Apps” from the menu - you need to know/guess that deleting is a sub-action of rearranging.
3. Click the familiar close icon that now appears.
Step 2. is the new one, and it introduces quite a lot of friction.
On the other side of the analogy, I think there was an easier (more discoverable) alternative to the right-click in win95 - certainly OSX - which was to drag the application to the recycle bin / trashcan.
"Options/other"-icon before: 3 dots ( https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/android-user-interfac... )
"Options/other"-icon now: 3 horizontal lines ( https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/android-user-interfac... )
I liked the 3 dots because it was natural for me to associate it with "etc...". I don't know what the 3 horizontal lines are meant to represent, but I know that it's really difficult to explain to my parents and that they keep forgetting its meaning because they cannot associate the symbol with anything :(
Similar thing with the "back button"-icon ( https://icon-library.net/images/android-back-icon/android-ba... ): it's an equilateral triangle, maybe pointing to the left, or maybe to the top/bottom right corners, or maybe just a "triangle" (associate "triangle" with "back"?) depending on how you think. I'd prefer a less stylish but classical arrow ("<") than that.
Etc... .
The only thing that I've noticed is that when I use Sonos, it hijacks the volume button (so that the volume on my phone controls the volume of the Sonos speaker), but when I stop using Sonos (like leaving the network or doing something else that uses sound), the Sonos setting is sticky. I usually have my volume muted, but after selecting a song on Sonos my local device volume is adjusted to match whatever the Sonos volume was.
It is very unlikely that people are changing things just for fun.
Why is that very unlikely? Many of these changes are not objectively better: they're just different and sometimes arguably worse. If you and your team decide you don't have anything to do for the next release, guess what happens next.
Scenario 1 is that Apple has enough money, time, and manpower that they are constantly doing user studies, in-person and via survey, to see how people currently use and learn to adopt the product.
They find out that moving the cursor is something that people want to do often, but that the current method has some problems. It is hard for new users to discover, and the tap and hold takes a long time if you're doing it frequently, like in a text revising workflow. The magnifier was useful for the old low-res screens, but less helpful now that everything is retina.
They implement a few different approaches, and measure them against the old method. In their previous tests, they've seen that one thing new users try is dragging the cursor directly, so they try making that work, which is more discoverable. It's faster because you don't have to wait for the long press. They add some feedbacks so you can see both where it's tracking your finger, and where the cursor will drop in the text. And if those feedbacks aren't precise enough, you can use the spacebar trackpad method. In their benchmarks, the combination of the methods is easier to discover, and a big speed improvement.
They know that some users will hate being forced to change, because nobody likes being forced to change, but they honestly think it's worth the improvements. They take their findings to management, who personally try out the new methods and approve the change.
Scenario 2 is that Apple is such a large company that nobody really knows what other people or teams are doing, even management. There's nothing pressing for the UX teams to work on - I mean, aside from the AR HMD and the car. So, they decide to change up one of the core interactions of the company's most important product. They don't need to justify the change to upper management (all of whom use the product heavily), so it just sort of slips under the radar.
If you've got a more plausible scenario 2 I'd be interested to hear it, but yes, I think scenario 1 is more likely.
To my mind this is becoming a BIG problem in tech and I'm really saddened to see Apple falling for it. I guess too many people in a position to change things that feel like they need to justify their positions. Either way, it needs to stop. Sometimes good enough is good enough.