You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.

It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability.

When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple would get rid of the Human Interface Group. (Steve was rather hostile to Larry.)

Later, when it was up to Steve, he did exactly what he said: he got rid of HIG.

I think it’s easier to sell visual design than it is to sell usability because people see visual design immediately, but it takes time and experience to see and understand usability (and some users never seem to consciously notice it at all).

I had no idea Steve Jobs felt that way about Larry Tesler. There were so many great UI experts at Apple, like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. While I love Mac OS X for its stability and its Unix support, I prefer the interface of the classic Mac OS, and it seemed to me that many third-party applications of the era were even more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines compared to later eras.

A dream desktop OS for me would be something with a classic Mac interface and with conformity to the Apple human interface guidelines of the 1990s, but with Lisp- or Smalltalk-like underpinnings to support component-based software. It would be the ultimate alternate universe Mac OS, the marriage of Smalltalk (with Lisp machine influence) with Macintosh innovations. Of course, there were many projects at Apple during the 80s and 90s that could’ve led to such a system.

Now that I’m a community college professor, I have more free time in the summer months for side projects...

> You must be too young to remember

Hopefully. I wouldn't mind being young. I am also not a designer, so UI/UX history may be lost on me.

I can only say that the only Apple product I genuinely enjoyed from a design perspective was the iPod Nano I bought sometime in early 2000s.

I feel the same way about Google's design and development principles. What the fuck happened?

You mean how they heavily researched their latest redesign of Android? https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...

> M3 Expressive designs were overwhelmingly rated higher for attributes such as “energetic,” “emotive,” “positive vibe,” “creative,” “playful,” and “friendly.”

Heavy research indeed

I can't tell if you're joking. M3 Expressive is godawful and throws away so many hard-won lessons in UX R&D.

I spent some time navigating through the linked page.

I don't doubt designers spent a lot of time researching it. It still reads like an incredible amount of carefully crafted bullshit.

The more the design of things "evolve", the more I appreciate designs that simply don't.

Well to be fair their research confirmed that half of 55+ year-olds didn't like the new design

Funny, someone else mentioned in another reply that I may be too young to remember something from like 25 years ago.

I'm a Schrodinger's old man.

> It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

Same. For just one example, consider how submenus work. You don't notice when they're done right, but when they're done poorly, they will disappear when you try to choose a submenu item, or stick around when you expect them to go away. Getting them right is subtle; Apple got them right, and plenty of web pages still get them wrong.

That's interface design. Flashy translucency effects are something else.

Isn't macOS the one, though, which immediately closes menus if you accidentally click or release over a divider? That always bugs me.