I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) has a similar, related explanation: computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/...). There are thousands, maybe millions, of developers who have little knowledge of the history of our field. I’ve found this true even of graduates from highly-ranked computer science bachelor’s programs. Think of all of the current-day LLM researchers and engineers who have never heard of Minsky, McCarthy, Lisp machines, and other aspects of the history of AI before we learned that attention was all we needed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
It’s when people confuse User Experience Design, which is a systemic and architectural discipline, with UI Art, which is an aesthetic discipline. If you have someone who is professionally the latter doing the former job, you get things people think look good but don’t work well.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
I concur, though I fear that as a discipline we haven't done ourselves any favours here in how we pass knowledge between generations.
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
"Computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past" this literally just clicked so many pieces in my brain all at once I had to close my eyes and sit with it.
Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.
All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.
I had some hilarious experiences by telling people that they did well, now make the same thing again but make it better. I was quite surprised they put up with it many itterations and even more surprised that each round (with few exceptons) was actually better.
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I love this quote! When I taught programming language paradigms at San Jose State as an adjunct, I introduced this quote as a motivating factor for learning different ways of programming, particularly introducing functional programming, logic programming, Smalltalk, and the Common Lisp Object System to senior-year students who coded mostly in Java, Python, and C (though this was during the COVID pandemic, right before the advent of vibe coding).
I think new UI designers might mistakenly think that they are in the fashion industry, when actually they are in the ergonomics engineering industry, or should be.
The amount of times I absolutely cringe from super lux UI which clearly a lot of time and energy went into prettifying at the absolute expense of usability and affordances. I love Apple TV but flip to any screen with multiple buttons and not being able to tell which button is selected. Or the Russian Roulette of Youtube trying to select any of the overlayed buttons on the actual video frame. I would 1000% trade shiny for more usablility in 99% of apps.
The Apple TV one drives me insane. The selected button is so subtly raised that it takes a lot to see. Usually I need to move it back and forth and look for the motion.
I don't like it either, but they are in the fashion industry.
Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.
I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.
Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.
At least on the brick and mortar side of things it’s not so bad since the refresh also allows a maintenance cycle while the store is temporarily closed. And I can think of many examples (KMart especially) where the lack of store refreshes/deferred maintenance torpedoed the entire chain (Walmart and Target were not afraid to teardown or abandon outmoded locations).
Well stated, but I will say, it is not impossible to do both.
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
Most UX designers seem to come from a graphic design direction, and they generally do a better job than developers - but not as good as the old school people who did research and wrote detailed guides and such.
The research and guides went out of fashion because actually methodically studying users costs money. I worked at a place that allegedly prioritized design and was really trying to launch more redesigns but also somehow kept losing positions for designers.
I was so frustrated 1995-2005 that the designers I worked with had a print mindset. Now I'm frustrated that designers are no good at all.
It's no help at all that people expect Apple to be fashionable, like if you read a review of an "operating system" in Arstechnica you'd think it's all about little details on the scrollbar, not about filesystems and microkernels and namespaces and stuff.
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
It's incredible. And the labels are all turned into pills or chips. Then they don't allow pivoted views of their lists, or if they do allowed pivots it's a visual nightmare.
This is exhausting with web stuff. Every designer wants flat everything, not even so much as underlining links, let alone enough design to actually make it obvious what's a clickable button.
I think it's this cargo cult attempt to tap into what Apple had pre-2010 on the iPod and first iPhone. They're missing that the design leadership and attention to detail was unparalleled at Apple in that era, so they just flatten everything for a streamlined look and miss every signifier Apple put in its UIs in those days
> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not just limited to UI decisions; many tech decisions were made the same way. I've said more than once, WRT to npm, that there were no adults in the room when they "designed" it, and npm is not the only tech stack that I look at and have the same thought.
In Chesterton's fence analogy, the person who wants to tear a fence down is at least aware there is a fence there. I think a lot of modern UI is being done by people who aren't even aware that there was logic being used to make decisions and are just steamrolling over the fences without even being aware they existed.
In their defense, it's not like good UI has ever dominated very many spaces. It is very hard to come up with a concept of good UI concepts from a natural meandering through the shattered landscape of UI paradigms anyone computer literate ends up subjected to. And then it's even harder to convince a manager that it's worth so much as a moment's thought about such things. Not impossible. But not easy.
>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
Or if you have any sort of non-correctable visual impairment. I'm sighted but recently I had actually been thinking of learning better how to use a screen reader because I genuinely struggle to visually parse a lot of modern UI design. The big move toward flat designs, but with everyone choosing their own idiosyncratic special snowflake way of doing it, leaves very little visual redundancy for people to use as a fallback. Sad to hear that it might not be the solution either.
Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.
Yeah, same. It seems like the only times I actually feel disabled are when I’m using a web browser, and when I have to work in a project where somebody set the autoformatter’s line length up to 120 characters.
Rightfully so. Your entire premise is that design should be made with accessibility in mind whereas in reality, accessibility tools should be built to handle those concerns and design should be free to do what it needs to do full stop. If that's being accessible that's fine, but trying to enforce accessibility standards is like saying that Levis needs to make pants for people without legs.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We came from CLI with white text on black. Now dark mode is all the rage for the last couple of years.
I know OLED and all but interfaces feel just like fashion now, to hell with affordances and improving how things actually work let's just make things pretty for that micro dopamine drip and change it up just for the sake of it because jazz hands looks new makes $$
We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.
I know this will never happen but it would be wonderful if designers were personally liable for all lost productivity of their changes. Designers move things around in some app or OS and millions of people have to stop their day-to-day work and figure out the new UI. Maybe you can attribute it to how many forests were burnt from the downstream effects of the changes.
Further, it's arguably become worse with touch screens in cars where, while you're driving, you get to discover a designer has moved a widget somewhere else and now your distracted. Self driving cars might solve that but even just walking around using your phone, every UI change is another distraction that might have consequences.
To be fair, the “younger replacements” have typically grown up surrounded with many more user interfaces than their predecessors, and the same is true for much of the audience they’re designing interfaces for.
Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.
We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.
The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.
> We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.
Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.
> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.
The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.
Perhaps instead of Agile I should have said "What Agile became in the 21st century." I know how Scrum is supposed to work. I just haven't seen anyone actually do it that way since about 2013.
I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later. Iterative development goes back to at least the 80s and doesn't require "scrum masters", "sprints", or "t-shirt sizes".
I do think that they were right, though, to point out that the practices already existed and that they aren’t inherently at odds with, and ideally support, good UI design. And the linked article makes a good case that Win95’s UI design was done in an agile way.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
> I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.
I think the trick here is to not co-mingle the development of UI toolkits and the software built with them. Agile works fine if the UI framework itself is its own project with its own lifecycle, suitably long sprints, etc.
This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.
I've worked at companies where to save a few thousands € to not buy a Qt license, they'd basically pay 50x more to have a bad copy of it that was also much slower due to using electron.
Back in the 2000s I would team up with people to put social applications in front of people and the one way you go could go big back then was carefully tune up every aspect of the funnel and get the viral branching ratio > 1 preferably >> 1 so you greased the skis and looked for every possible reason why people might not complete the process. It was life or death.
Around the time Facebook figured out what it's business model was platforms suppressed virality and people got used to the idea that you have to pay for traffic. You'd think that people would think "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't. Like zero interest rates and some people are just made of money and some people in business are lazy and, if their business is profitable, won't pursue cost reductions unless competition makes it life or death. Or something.
So I am appalled at so much bad software marketing that makes me think "is there anyone left who's had to tune up a marketing funnel?"
Like you see 200+ bug reports on Adobe's tracker about how Acrobat displays a total of 8 distracting UI elements to promote AI summaries the instant you open a document. And you can't clear them. And that's enough to make people see red.
But if you actually click on one of these stupid links you see a series of ads for things that are not AI features and that they don't make a serious effort to explain or sell. Then finally there's an ad for Acrobat Pro which maybe has the AI Summary but do I want to find out? I heard somebody somewhere did manage to try the AI Summary and of course it didn't work.
Like I could be annoyed by rapacious behavior but at least understand that people are motivated to make money for their shareholders. But to annoy everybody when they have Adobe CC subscriptions to lose and no clear path to convert? Where's the profit in that?
And that's totally ordinary. Like Meta solved so many tough problems to create the Meta Quest 3 and supposedly they are leaders in social software but they get the easy things wrong: they keep changing the interface that I'd use to "friend" people in games and make the process so terrible (at least the spammers who try to follow me on Instagram stole pictures of blonde women but nobody has a profile pic or the slightest bit of information to help decide "why would you follow me?") Supposedly Zuck wants to succeed at VR so bad... or is it just "we're #1 why try harder?"
What about AI? Do you think that had no impact here? Certainly I've noticed all knowledge professions gain a sense of urgency, survival like psychosis-style thinking, and deterioration of quality and human thinking.
> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
I've followed and agreed with this OP's critique for awhile.. it's also a justifiable and entertaining take. As a UI designer for 30 years, I have a sympathetic but slightly different view.
I grew up in the 80s with DOS software, when dropdown menus were new and our IBM PC didn't even have a mouse. Since the design idea emerged of using an icon in a menu, which I'd probably locate to the Apple menu on the 128k Mac, my whole life I've seen this push/pull between phases of design and various fads that have emphasized either information density or some kind of simplified graphic/hieroglyphic gloss of the language and intent.
The gloss that works, imho, isn't precisely what has iconic meaning, as the OP postulates. It's what the user becomes familiar with. There's a subtle difference there. An arbitrary icon can be made to mean something over time. But that has to be an intentional process, and it should be tied to a larger theory of the branding and iconography of the company. Otherwise, it's probably worse than useless, even if it does literally signify the action.
Lately, in the last 10 years, I've found myself doing hybrids. I treat icons in selection modes as something like an emoji. If an icon is so universally understandable that no text is necessary, I might prefer it. Otherwise, it would be included only if I need to draw a user's attention to something more than the other items. For example, an extra icon next to a pending issue waiting for approval.
When available too, I'd much rather show a keyboard shortcut than an icon. That's useful information for most users, instead of decoration.
People who don't design for a living often think decoration is design, or vice versa. Decoration is antithetical to good design. And good design is never decorative. If it's not either informational, or what I'd call "aspirationally informational", in that it's training the user to recognize a meaningful design artifact, then it should go. Decorations belong in illustration and background art, to tie the piece together. Not in UI.
I think the main thing is to consider these design choices. Does the icon help someone identify and navigate to something they need to do more quickly? No one is perfectly correct, making that call. We have a lot of tools at our disposal, and too much of anything is bad if it's not thought through for every mode the user could see.
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because their hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions
In this video Bill explains why he moved it. At 28 min he says: "…and if the window is near the bottom, how are you going to show all the choices? Well, I tried moving the menus to the top of the screen."
It's well worth watching that entire video, in which Bill Atkinson dropped many profound mind blowing ideas in his talk to Brad Myers' user interface students on February 4, 2019:
At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:
Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!"
Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:
Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that,
because it was a kind of odd thing at the time..."
[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]
Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?
[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]
Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.
And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.
Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.
Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.
How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.
But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?
Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.
i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.
This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.
Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.
Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
[Class laughs]
So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
----
That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:
At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:
As an homage to Bill's HyperCard story, at 37:11 I trolled Brad and his recently-shocked students by asking the class: "Have any of you ever used ...[pregnant pause]... HyperCard?", then I told my own story of how HyperCard blew my mind and changed my world.
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
> they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.
Decades before Liquid Glass. They had begun throwing it all away by the time they got rid of scrollbars (and the rest of the industry followed like gormless lemmings).
Ah yes, I experienced a designer who hid scrollbars, and also decided that the title was NOT part of the page so a scroll action there would not scroll anything.
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
> Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
All the things you mentioned are applicable to Adobe (!) as well. Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere.. and not to mention Flash, InDesign etc
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.
Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.
> And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them.
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
> John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call out Tahoe’s approach to menus as an example of what not to do on macOS.
Apple knew this was bad 20 years ago. They just don't bother to read their own documentation:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2008) [1] p. 170:
> If you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value; don’t include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read.
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Apple's own design guidelines originally said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again saying not to do).
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
> Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
No evidence this is true. It's basically PR / urban legend. It's not like the people at Apple are magic angels. They're the same people that worked at Meta or Google or MS last year or the year before that
Metro design being amazing, refreshing, beautiful and delightful is a hill I will die on.
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
> A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
Humans are very good at distinguishing shapes and colors. Visually distinct icons of various shapes help build muscle memory and quickly find the needed option.
One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.
For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.
On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
I've never thought SF Symbols were beautiful. They are boring, ugly little bugs, hieroglyph crap that fade to blobs unless you're looking at them at 64x64 and above. Bereft of color, care, or soul, just crappy little vector squiggles. I hate them, and I hate that everyone copied them.
A company 1/100th the size used to design beautiful icons that clearly represented what they meant, and that company was Apple. Now I get SVG slop. SF Symbols can bite me.
My inbox folders/labels used to be just text, and I'd have to read them to find the one I wanted to look at. I started adding emoji to the label names and suddenly I could scan the list far quicker to get to what I was looking for.
Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.
Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.
Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for information density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.
This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise
It doesn't matter that it's JS, they have their own, performant interpreter for it and it's a limited subset of JS. And that's just one layer, the rest is actual compiled code, increasingly Rust.
I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.
I can't stand that keyboard shortcuts for menu items are the same color as the disabled menu item color. It's mixing two meanings for the same color in the same UI element. Despite this being the style for years, I still have a split-second interpretation of non-interactivity every time I see it.
The only time I think you ever need an icon beside text is if the exact same feature is found elsewhere as an icon only. And even then ask yourself if it can be avoided.
What are the odds the next version of macOS reverts most of what happened in Tahoe? After having it forced on my work MacBook, I will not willingly install that trash UI on any device I own.
In asked myself that same question when Microsoft introduced Metro into Windows 8. Having been a Windows user at that point, it is the change that drove me to Mac OS X.
Fifteen years later, I am still waiting for them to undo the damage that was done.
They won't. They doubled down on Liquid Glass and its here to stay. Go take a look at their Apple Music rebrand. They honestly think it looks good! They really think they're cooking with their "we moved some acrylic blocks around our studio and thought real hard about it, aren't we great!" bullshit. It's so ugly.
Does anyone have a list of guidelines for good UI design that they would recommend?
As I have to design UI myself, I'd be quite interested. Personally, I do favor a mix in my UI: icons for obvious-or-frequently-used stuff (like Save, Undo, Help, Sort A-Z, etc, all of which usually have standard icons (except for Save now)) and plain text for things that can't be expressed by icon (like "Refactor XYZ").
and the high water mark of my graphical UI experience was when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable/note-taking/sketching device and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ as my desktop.
I don't quite understand. Icons by default obviously is stupid. But meaningful icons for actions such as copy and paste seems like a very good idea to me.
Personally I think there are not enough icons in MacOS right click menus for example. For me an icon makes it much easier to find the action I want to hse
Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.
One of my pet peeves is deleting an item is "Move to Trash". With no trash icon, I want labels to front-load the key word so the menu/list is scannable.
I think icon in every menu is fine. The problem is choosing the wrong icon. The icon could just be text, you know, Like [TU]:Tuesday.
English is not my native language, so i was having a very hard time to learn how to use computer, with icon, my 8 Years old brain can kind of infer what is its meaning.
When the Mac UI took over (some of) the world, many thought it was because of the icons, so they put icons all over their UIs.
That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.
I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) has a similar, related explanation: computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/...). There are thousands, maybe millions, of developers who have little knowledge of the history of our field. I’ve found this true even of graduates from highly-ranked computer science bachelor’s programs. Think of all of the current-day LLM researchers and engineers who have never heard of Minsky, McCarthy, Lisp machines, and other aspects of the history of AI before we learned that attention was all we needed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
It’s when people confuse User Experience Design, which is a systemic and architectural discipline, with UI Art, which is an aesthetic discipline. If you have someone who is professionally the latter doing the former job, you get things people think look good but don’t work well.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
Outside of big tech I’ve never met a UX designer who wasn’t just a graphic designer. Not a single one.
I have met exact one and the stuff he made was amazing
I concur, though I fear that as a discipline we haven't done ourselves any favours here in how we pass knowledge between generations.
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
"Computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past" this literally just clicked so many pieces in my brain all at once I had to close my eyes and sit with it.
> not being taught enough history of computing
Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.
All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.
I had some hilarious experiences by telling people that they did well, now make the same thing again but make it better. I was quite surprised they put up with it many itterations and even more surprised that each round (with few exceptons) was actually better.
> Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame)
Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I love this quote! When I taught programming language paradigms at San Jose State as an adjunct, I introduced this quote as a motivating factor for learning different ways of programming, particularly introducing functional programming, logic programming, Smalltalk, and the Common Lisp Object System to senior-year students who coded mostly in Java, Python, and C (though this was during the COVID pandemic, right before the advent of vibe coding).
I think new UI designers might mistakenly think that they are in the fashion industry, when actually they are in the ergonomics engineering industry, or should be.
The amount of times I absolutely cringe from super lux UI which clearly a lot of time and energy went into prettifying at the absolute expense of usability and affordances. I love Apple TV but flip to any screen with multiple buttons and not being able to tell which button is selected. Or the Russian Roulette of Youtube trying to select any of the overlayed buttons on the actual video frame. I would 1000% trade shiny for more usablility in 99% of apps.
The Apple TV one drives me insane. The selected button is so subtly raised that it takes a lot to see. Usually I need to move it back and forth and look for the motion.
I don't like it either, but they are in the fashion industry.
Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.
I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.
Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.
At least on the brick and mortar side of things it’s not so bad since the refresh also allows a maintenance cycle while the store is temporarily closed. And I can think of many examples (KMart especially) where the lack of store refreshes/deferred maintenance torpedoed the entire chain (Walmart and Target were not afraid to teardown or abandon outmoded locations).
Well stated, but I will say, it is not impossible to do both.
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
You are right but man the new Fig Newton packaging looks just like the store brand fruit cookies what were they thinking?
There is both ux and and graphic design and they both have their place. Saddly far too often one wins out over another instead of finding balance.
Most UX designers seem to come from a graphic design direction, and they generally do a better job than developers - but not as good as the old school people who did research and wrote detailed guides and such.
this is an understatement.
i remember the studies used to design windows 95
nothing modern ux amateurs do can compare to the oldschool HCI professionals
The research and guides went out of fashion because actually methodically studying users costs money. I worked at a place that allegedly prioritized design and was really trying to launch more redesigns but also somehow kept losing positions for designers.
>> because actually methodically studying users costs money.
you mean "actually methodically studying users is boring and requires competence"
these people only care about making pretty pictures, they dont care about the actual effort to deliver a good product.
I was so frustrated 1995-2005 that the designers I worked with had a print mindset. Now I'm frustrated that designers are no good at all.
It's no help at all that people expect Apple to be fashionable, like if you read a review of an "operating system" in Arstechnica you'd think it's all about little details on the scrollbar, not about filesystems and microkernels and namespaces and stuff.
To that point:
Bad Dye Job:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191194
The two things that pain me the most are:
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
> No more clean, compact directory trees
Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
It's incredible. And the labels are all turned into pills or chips. Then they don't allow pivoted views of their lists, or if they do allowed pivots it's a visual nightmare.
Your average UX person has no idea what a pivoted table is
Hell your average developer probably doesn't either anymore
This is exhausting with web stuff. Every designer wants flat everything, not even so much as underlining links, let alone enough design to actually make it obvious what's a clickable button.
I think it's this cargo cult attempt to tap into what Apple had pre-2010 on the iPod and first iPhone. They're missing that the design leadership and attention to detail was unparalleled at Apple in that era, so they just flatten everything for a streamlined look and miss every signifier Apple put in its UIs in those days
How about on windows, no visible borders just overlapping off-white
Drives me nuts. It makes everything feel like working on a poorly organized desk.
> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not just limited to UI decisions; many tech decisions were made the same way. I've said more than once, WRT to npm, that there were no adults in the room when they "designed" it, and npm is not the only tech stack that I look at and have the same thought.
In Chesterton's fence analogy, the person who wants to tear a fence down is at least aware there is a fence there. I think a lot of modern UI is being done by people who aren't even aware that there was logic being used to make decisions and are just steamrolling over the fences without even being aware they existed.
In their defense, it's not like good UI has ever dominated very many spaces. It is very hard to come up with a concept of good UI concepts from a natural meandering through the shattered landscape of UI paradigms anyone computer literate ends up subjected to. And then it's even harder to convince a manager that it's worth so much as a moment's thought about such things. Not impossible. But not easy.
>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
Or if you have any sort of non-correctable visual impairment. I'm sighted but recently I had actually been thinking of learning better how to use a screen reader because I genuinely struggle to visually parse a lot of modern UI design. The big move toward flat designs, but with everyone choosing their own idiosyncratic special snowflake way of doing it, leaves very little visual redundancy for people to use as a fallback. Sad to hear that it might not be the solution either.
Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.
I'm in a similar position. I can see a hell of a lot. But I have some problems, and I get lost in shitty, 'modern" UIs.
Yeah, same. It seems like the only times I actually feel disabled are when I’m using a web browser, and when I have to work in a project where somebody set the autoformatter’s line length up to 120 characters.
Rightfully so. Your entire premise is that design should be made with accessibility in mind whereas in reality, accessibility tools should be built to handle those concerns and design should be free to do what it needs to do full stop. If that's being accessible that's fine, but trying to enforce accessibility standards is like saying that Levis needs to make pants for people without legs.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We came from CLI with white text on black. Now dark mode is all the rage for the last couple of years.
I know OLED and all but interfaces feel just like fashion now, to hell with affordances and improving how things actually work let's just make things pretty for that micro dopamine drip and change it up just for the sake of it because jazz hands looks new makes $$
We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.
The hamburger's just where you put bad ideas you can't say no to :)
I know this will never happen but it would be wonderful if designers were personally liable for all lost productivity of their changes. Designers move things around in some app or OS and millions of people have to stop their day-to-day work and figure out the new UI. Maybe you can attribute it to how many forests were burnt from the downstream effects of the changes.
Further, it's arguably become worse with touch screens in cars where, while you're driving, you get to discover a designer has moved a widget somewhere else and now your distracted. Self driving cars might solve that but even just walking around using your phone, every UI change is another distraction that might have consequences.
To be fair, the “younger replacements” have typically grown up surrounded with many more user interfaces than their predecessors, and the same is true for much of the audience they’re designing interfaces for.
Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.
We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.
The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.
> We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.
Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.
Its U/I design since Windows 3.11 came about because of agile, not in spite of it. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.
The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.
Perhaps instead of Agile I should have said "What Agile became in the 21st century." I know how Scrum is supposed to work. I just haven't seen anyone actually do it that way since about 2013.
I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later. Iterative development goes back to at least the 80s and doesn't require "scrum masters", "sprints", or "t-shirt sizes".
I do think that they were right, though, to point out that the practices already existed and that they aren’t inherently at odds with, and ideally support, good UI design. And the linked article makes a good case that Win95’s UI design was done in an agile way.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
> I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.
When the end of a sprint is a hard cutoff point for tasks, agile is done wrong. Just carry unfinished work over - it won't go away, anyway.
I think the trick here is to not co-mingle the development of UI toolkits and the software built with them. Agile works fine if the UI framework itself is its own project with its own lifecycle, suitably long sprints, etc.
This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.
I've worked at companies where to save a few thousands € to not buy a Qt license, they'd basically pay 50x more to have a bad copy of it that was also much slower due to using electron.
Back in the 2000s I would team up with people to put social applications in front of people and the one way you go could go big back then was carefully tune up every aspect of the funnel and get the viral branching ratio > 1 preferably >> 1 so you greased the skis and looked for every possible reason why people might not complete the process. It was life or death.
Around the time Facebook figured out what it's business model was platforms suppressed virality and people got used to the idea that you have to pay for traffic. You'd think that people would think "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't. Like zero interest rates and some people are just made of money and some people in business are lazy and, if their business is profitable, won't pursue cost reductions unless competition makes it life or death. Or something.
So I am appalled at so much bad software marketing that makes me think "is there anyone left who's had to tune up a marketing funnel?"
Like you see 200+ bug reports on Adobe's tracker about how Acrobat displays a total of 8 distracting UI elements to promote AI summaries the instant you open a document. And you can't clear them. And that's enough to make people see red.
But if you actually click on one of these stupid links you see a series of ads for things that are not AI features and that they don't make a serious effort to explain or sell. Then finally there's an ad for Acrobat Pro which maybe has the AI Summary but do I want to find out? I heard somebody somewhere did manage to try the AI Summary and of course it didn't work.
Like I could be annoyed by rapacious behavior but at least understand that people are motivated to make money for their shareholders. But to annoy everybody when they have Adobe CC subscriptions to lose and no clear path to convert? Where's the profit in that?
And that's totally ordinary. Like Meta solved so many tough problems to create the Meta Quest 3 and supposedly they are leaders in social software but they get the easy things wrong: they keep changing the interface that I'd use to "friend" people in games and make the process so terrible (at least the spammers who try to follow me on Instagram stole pictures of blonde women but nobody has a profile pic or the slightest bit of information to help decide "why would you follow me?") Supposedly Zuck wants to succeed at VR so bad... or is it just "we're #1 why try harder?"
FYI it’s Chesterton’s Fence, named after writer G. K. Chesterton.
Fixed, thanks!
What about AI? Do you think that had no impact here? Certainly I've noticed all knowledge professions gain a sense of urgency, survival like psychosis-style thinking, and deterioration of quality and human thinking.
> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
Dye comes from fashion and packaging not UI design. In that sense, he is a younger generation of UI designers.
I've followed and agreed with this OP's critique for awhile.. it's also a justifiable and entertaining take. As a UI designer for 30 years, I have a sympathetic but slightly different view.
I grew up in the 80s with DOS software, when dropdown menus were new and our IBM PC didn't even have a mouse. Since the design idea emerged of using an icon in a menu, which I'd probably locate to the Apple menu on the 128k Mac, my whole life I've seen this push/pull between phases of design and various fads that have emphasized either information density or some kind of simplified graphic/hieroglyphic gloss of the language and intent.
The gloss that works, imho, isn't precisely what has iconic meaning, as the OP postulates. It's what the user becomes familiar with. There's a subtle difference there. An arbitrary icon can be made to mean something over time. But that has to be an intentional process, and it should be tied to a larger theory of the branding and iconography of the company. Otherwise, it's probably worse than useless, even if it does literally signify the action.
Lately, in the last 10 years, I've found myself doing hybrids. I treat icons in selection modes as something like an emoji. If an icon is so universally understandable that no text is necessary, I might prefer it. Otherwise, it would be included only if I need to draw a user's attention to something more than the other items. For example, an extra icon next to a pending issue waiting for approval.
When available too, I'd much rather show a keyboard shortcut than an icon. That's useful information for most users, instead of decoration.
People who don't design for a living often think decoration is design, or vice versa. Decoration is antithetical to good design. And good design is never decorative. If it's not either informational, or what I'd call "aspirationally informational", in that it's training the user to recognize a meaningful design artifact, then it should go. Decorations belong in illustration and background art, to tie the piece together. Not in UI.
I think the main thing is to consider these design choices. Does the icon help someone identify and navigate to something they need to do more quickly? No one is perfectly correct, making that call. We have a lot of tools at our disposal, and too much of anything is bad if it's not thought through for every mode the user could see.
This Apple devotion is really something else..
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.
But that was in a different millennium.
> But that was in a different millennium.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
For people with a normal screen size, having the click targets be of infinite size is still very useful.
I think the median screen size today is closer to 30" than 9".
Have you tried ⌘-Shift-? and typing the menu option you want to select?
IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because their hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions
It was tried out per window, but changed:
https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...
In this video Bill explains why he moved it. At 28 min he says: "…and if the window is near the bottom, how are you going to show all the choices? Well, I tried moving the menus to the top of the screen."
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
It's well worth watching that entire video, in which Bill Atkinson dropped many profound mind blowing ideas in his talk to Brad Myers' user interface students on February 4, 2019:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:
Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!"
Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:
Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that, because it was a kind of odd thing at the time..."
[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]
Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?
[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]
Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.
And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.
Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.
Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.
How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.
But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?
Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.
i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.
This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.
Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.
Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
[Class laughs]
So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
----
That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Don-Hopk...
At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/symelec/
As an homage to Bill's HyperCard story, at 37:11 I trolled Brad and his recently-shocked students by asking the class: "Have any of you ever used ...[pregnant pause]... HyperCard?", then I told my own story of how HyperCard blew my mind and changed my world.
More on the "Mile High Menu Bar":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125835
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210672
[...]
Now, it feels like they prioritize branding over functionality. Like "Hey let's use a notch as branding element in iPhone and Mac"
> they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
Full clip slightly longer, worth watching.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.
Decades before Liquid Glass. They had begun throwing it all away by the time they got rid of scrollbars (and the rest of the industry followed like gormless lemmings).
Ah yes, I experienced a designer who hid scrollbars, and also decided that the title was NOT part of the page so a scroll action there would not scroll anything.
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
The serious downgrade of how dismissing popups worked is what drive me back to Linux (GNOME).
It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world.
This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
> Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
All the things you mentioned are applicable to Adobe (!) as well. Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere.. and not to mention Flash, InDesign etc
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
> This Apple devotion
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
By recent, you mean since just after the iPhone 3s?
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise.
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
*3GS
It's almost as if challenging assumptions, trying new/old/different things, course correcting after you learn is completely normal thing to do.
Your assumptions only work until they don't. It's not like we live in a static situation. What didn't work yesterday might work today
It's the Reality Distortion Field.
Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.
Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.
It’s the goomba fallacy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
In other circumstances, I'd be the first to agree, but you'll find people arguing for both sides in the same comment in this very comment section.
You know, it’s really not what happened. All these people, Gruber, Siracusa, and the usual suspects, were unanimous in their displeasure.
You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.
> And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them.
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
> John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call out Tahoe’s approach to menus as an example of what not to do on macOS.
Apple knew this was bad 20 years ago. They just don't bother to read their own documentation:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2008) [1] p. 170:
> If you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value; don’t include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read.
[1] https://acko.net/files/zoomer/apple-hig-2008.pdf
The conclusion is too forgiving...
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Apple's own design guidelines originally said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again saying not to do).
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
Why do you assume they didn't talk to those people?
Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.
> Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
No evidence this is true. It's basically PR / urban legend. It's not like the people at Apple are magic angels. They're the same people that worked at Meta or Google or MS last year or the year before that
Microsoft has (and had) some amazing designers. They came up with Metro, which was the forerunner of the flat design that everyone loves/hates now.
Isn't that like saying "Georgia is full of amazing people. For example, Stalin and Beria."
Or is that how you meant it?
Metro design being amazing, refreshing, beautiful and delightful is a hill I will die on.
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.
I really liked Windows Phone, too.
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
When you say carefully considered, you're going with the the Aristotelian process that led him to argue that feathers fall slower than rock.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
> A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
Your “today” does a lot of work. Many frustrated people are comparing 2020s Apple with 2010 Apple, thus the complaints.
Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.
Humans are very good at distinguishing shapes and colors. Visually distinct icons of various shapes help build muscle memory and quickly find the needed option.
One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.
For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.
On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
I've never thought SF Symbols were beautiful. They are boring, ugly little bugs, hieroglyph crap that fade to blobs unless you're looking at them at 64x64 and above. Bereft of color, care, or soul, just crappy little vector squiggles. I hate them, and I hate that everyone copied them.
A company 1/100th the size used to design beautiful icons that clearly represented what they meant, and that company was Apple. Now I get SVG slop. SF Symbols can bite me.
And also to constantly redesign the icons. I am effectively icon blind at this point due to the constant churn
I once thought it was a nice refresh every 5+ years. Now it feels excessive changing every single year.
1. Read the post
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
The author isn't against icons in menus, they are against icons in every menu by default.
Icons can genuinely help convey meaning/understanding. They can also be clutter. It comes down to how you use them.
My inbox folders/labels used to be just text, and I'd have to read them to find the one I wanted to look at. I started adding emoji to the label names and suddenly I could scan the list far quicker to get to what I was looking for.
Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.
Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.
Honest mistake.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
There's a sort of unthinking maximalism in corporate culture. I'm sure Tahoe's menus are the product of a conversation that looks roughly like:
"Hey our metrics show that menu items with icons are interacted with more often."
"Oh we should put icons on every menu item and get our usage numbers up."
"I agree, bigger numbers are more impressive and will get us promotions or bonuses."
KPI-driven development. I hope whoever got that bonus sent their kids to a good college on it.
I love KDE but they could take some notes from this!
Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for information density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
I use KDE and you made me right click everywhere and I can't find a menu without icons lol
Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.
This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise
where do you disable them?
System Settings > Application Style > Configure Icons and Toolbars
Yeah I'd love to prefer KDE, but GNOME is closer to what I'm used to (Mac OS). Pity it's not that good and written in JS.
I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.
It doesn't matter that it's JS, they have their own, performant interpreter for it and it's a limited subset of JS. And that's just one layer, the rest is actual compiled code, increasingly Rust.
I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.
I can't stand that keyboard shortcuts for menu items are the same color as the disabled menu item color. It's mixing two meanings for the same color in the same UI element. Despite this being the style for years, I still have a split-second interpretation of non-interactivity every time I see it.
The only time I think you ever need an icon beside text is if the exact same feature is found elsewhere as an icon only. And even then ask yourself if it can be avoided.
What are the odds the next version of macOS reverts most of what happened in Tahoe? After having it forced on my work MacBook, I will not willingly install that trash UI on any device I own.
The latest version has already removed most of the worst of the changes, if you set your settings right.
In asked myself that same question when Microsoft introduced Metro into Windows 8. Having been a Windows user at that point, it is the change that drove me to Mac OS X.
Fifteen years later, I am still waiting for them to undo the damage that was done.
They won't. They doubled down on Liquid Glass and its here to stay. Go take a look at their Apple Music rebrand. They honestly think it looks good! They really think they're cooking with their "we moved some acrylic blocks around our studio and thought real hard about it, aren't we great!" bullshit. It's so ugly.
Does anyone have a list of guidelines for good UI design that they would recommend? As I have to design UI myself, I'd be quite interested. Personally, I do favor a mix in my UI: icons for obvious-or-frequently-used stuff (like Save, Undo, Help, Sort A-Z, etc, all of which usually have standard icons (except for Save now)) and plain text for things that can't be expressed by icon (like "Refactor XYZ").
My favourite book on this is _Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques_ by Kevin E. Mullet and Darrell Sano
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_...
and the high water mark of my graphical UI experience was when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable/note-taking/sketching device and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ as my desktop.
Whoever thought hieroglyphics were a good replacement for text should be drawn and quartered.
I don't quite understand. Icons by default obviously is stupid. But meaningful icons for actions such as copy and paste seems like a very good idea to me. Personally I think there are not enough icons in MacOS right click menus for example. For me an icon makes it much easier to find the action I want to hse
The previous post:
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/
A related post linked to by the previous post:
https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
Click the triple lines
The what
Next to the floppy
The what
The hamburger!!
Are you high?
I'm just an unwashed linux user but I kind of like the icons for the days of the week, they seem funny and appropriate for each day.
Suppose you've remotely accessed a Windows computer with no icons in the menu.
You've figured out how to access the Start menu, and figured out where the Power menu is through the icon, but now have a choice between 關機 and 重新開機.
Which one is shut down, which is reboot?
You have one chance, otherwise it requires an embarrassing trip to the server farm.
That specific case led me to make the following table of Windows strings in other languages:
https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/windowsStringsTable/index...
Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.
One of my pet peeves is deleting an item is "Move to Trash". With no trash icon, I want labels to front-load the key word so the menu/list is scannable.
> "putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate"
They needed to make room for Siri.
My favorite thing about this is a checkbox in Xcode's Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now) for menu items image — "Only for macOS 26".
The windows 11 right click menu should revert as well. It’s like a menu over a menu. You need 2 clicks to get to what you need.
IMO Windows 7 was peak user experience.
Particularly with the Windows Classic theme!
I think icon in every menu is fine. The problem is choosing the wrong icon. The icon could just be text, you know, Like [TU]:Tuesday.
English is not my native language, so i was having a very hard time to learn how to use computer, with icon, my 8 Years old brain can kind of infer what is its meaning.
When the Mac UI took over (some of) the world, many thought it was because of the icons, so they put icons all over their UIs.
That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.
Ironically, I kind of liked the icons in the menus.
But at the end of the day, it was like Liquid Glass itself - looks sick in presentations, but in real life, it looks pretty awful.
You first? Lol
Art vs. minimalism in design
Icons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?
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I like icons