Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.
Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.
Yeah, same here.
In light of a grandchild comment to this one about notification center on iPhone, I'll offer that on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center. It doesn't have search, but they are grouped in stacks chronologically. There is no default hotkey, but you can set one in system settings.
Or click the clock.
> I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.
There used to be an actual icon for it to the right of the clock. Why would someone think to click on the clock to access their notifications? This apparently also led to the clock becoming mandatory instead of being able to hide it if you wanted to use different options.
Yes, been about six months.
It’s the sort of software apple makes when they’re at their best. Much better than the built in podcast app.
Play #27 of Show, then #26, and after playing #26, it will automatically choose to go on with #27 again.
One annoying bug: if you switch to a different podcast sometimes, even when the new podcast starts playing, it continues to show the cover art of the previous podcast for a while. Super annoying.
What’s even more frustrating is how buggy streaming music to a HomePod mini is.
Even though I’m the only person in my household using it, I frequently get errors that I can’t play something because someone else is playing something, which turns out to be something I played a while ago.
Things seemed better before the latest HomePod software upgrade…
They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.
I’ve always assumed patents are to blame - I mean, surely no one at Apple uses their iOS notifications and thinks “yes, that system is perfect in every way”? There must be other factors at work?
1) Android's system relied on icons appearing on the bar at the top of the screen (e.g. a mail icon for mail, or a message icon for a text, etc.) - which was both unintrusive, and very quick and practical to check. To check a message, you'd just pull down the menu from that bar, and you'd see your different notifications in more detail, most recent first, and a tap would take you to the app. It was a lovely holistic concept. In contrast, iOS has some aspects of this, but it's not holistic:
* Red dots on icons indicate waiting content, but don't reflect when the content is from (unless you're obsessed with clearing all of your red dots - which would be a problem in itself)
* The notification center offers a list of notifications, but it's not linked to a visual reminder - you have to remember to check it.
* The notification center is shown on the lock screen, but IME it's buggy, not always responsive, and sometimes disappears confusingly.
* There are also banners which pop up (and there used to be alerts?) but these aren't connected with the other approaches.
TL;DR: Android had a single holistic approach; iOS has a variety of apparently unrelated approaches.
2) When you're using your phone or computer (it happens on MacOS too) many of Apple's notifications distract you and demand your attention or action. This would include banners which hang around obstructing part of your screen and need a swipe to remove them, or alerts which must be interacted with before you can do anything else. I find this a fundamentally user-unfriendly paradigm.
The only thing I’ve learned about dealing with these new notification types is that you can hover over them and swipe left to right to dismiss them. Unfortunately the notification will reappear sometimes. It seems like this happens for calendar notifications but not Messages notifications.
Anyone else have tips for how to deal with this? In ready to turn off notifications completely, which is unfortunate because I like to have calendar notifications (but only once).
* Select a desktop (even this is questionable as an action) * Re-arrange a desktop * Add a desktop * Remove a desktop
----
Nearly all of the time, I want to remove a desktop because I have too many of them.
I would expect a sane UI where the X button is always shown _and_ deleting a desktop results in a new X in the exact same spot (so I can quickly close multiple desktops).
Instead, I have to hover to reveal the x, click it. Everything then shifts to a magic new location where I have to repeat hover, find X, click it.
Drives me up the wall.
Before they were an annoyance; but now they’re just utterly baffling to me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to click half the time and they seem to come back randomly for me too.
Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away.
Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.
My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.
On the other hand, developers (and specifically, ones with engagement KPIs) want as disposable notifications as possible.
At 80% iOS notifies that it is charged enough, so you can unplug if you want to avoid supercharging it.
They're incredibly annoying and prevent me from charging my phone when I sleep.
If you’re manually dismissing every notification, consider going to your System Preferences and changing the notification type for those apps.
> all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.
Last I checked notifications over a week old are auto-cleared, so ignore the cleanup and only open Notification Centre when you need to check on a previous notification.
I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“
But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people.
Apple has lost what they had.
I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem.
The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on.
I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason).
We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.
Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion.
If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone soon and it will be the next persons problem.
Also, if getting a promotion was just as easy as a pay bump for transferring jobs, maybe engineers would stay longer. These are all ultimately management problems.
Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do.
It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.
I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.
Is Apple Music any better?
YouTube has the same problem. It seems to insist on recommending the same 3 rabbit holes every time I visit the site. I know there’s more stuff out there I’d love that I’m not seeing, that I don’t think to search for. But I have no idea how to get YouTube to show me any of it.
Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's just broken.
I wish I could universally blacklist a song (at least for a couple of months), but that only works for entire artists. I've seen the exact same complaint for the exact same song on reddit, which makes me wonder if it has something to do with their program that lets artists jump ahead in the algorithm (https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...).
Surely if some company focussed on making software that puts the user at the centre they'd be able to carve out a pretty decent niche for them.
Sadly if they we're a public company their investors would probably be unhappy because they'd be sacrificing the all important "growth", but a private company might be able to get away with it.
Not everyone uses feature X? It gets cut.
It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".
And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.
When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.
I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test
I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.
So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it.
I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.
The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.
Twitter is great when it serves its purpose of being a 140 char log of people that matter.
This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc.
...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.
So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this sentence
How am I supposed to learn "tricks" like this? They seem to be basic stuff.
Walter Bright, is it possible you run an older version of iOS or that you use a different app than Mail? I completely believe what you’re experiencing; just trying to think why it’s happening to you…
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/12/02/two-finger-tap-ipho...
The whole screen just scrolls.
I love working on broken things just as much as working on new things. Sometimes the reason something is broken is because it was a difficult problem. I love those difficult problems.
When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.
There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.