This post requires that users ignore the most prominent and longstanding discoverability feature of the Mac: the omnipresent top menubar.
1. Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. This bit of bad UI was imported from iOS. Unlike iOS, it can still be turned off: Click the Apple menu -> System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars.
2. File menu -> Quick Look.
3. Every action in that context menu is available in the File menu.
3a. Holding the Option key works in the File menu as well, but this change can also be made from File menu -> Get Info -> Open with.
4. This actually bad UI was, again, taken from iOS.
5. Go menu -> Enclosing Folder.
Nearly every example is solvable with single clicks in the always-visible, literally spelled-out menubar, as they have been for 30+ years. They are therefore eminently discoverable, contingent on a user giving a thought to trying in the first place to discover them. The one or two examples where this is not true are direct iOS tack-ons that do not respect the platform.
What this post is doing is mendaciously pretending that power-user shortcuts, some more or less discoverable than others, are the only way to perform these operations which can actually be accomplished by reading and clicking. The attempt to equate the Mac's discoverability with iOS fails once that is pointed out, since in the latter those mystery-meat gestures truly are the only way to execute them.
The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. This was not obvious to me until I saw people getting used to iOS programs where menus don't exist. The menubar is good at showing you a soup of options but is really bad at contextualizing it. The problem shows up in MacOS programs where they stuff all the contents of every context menu into the menubar just so they can say that it's usable with one mouse button. Well if you do that, the context behind all these actions and the locality of information goes away!
Even in simple programs like the finder there is global application state that can cause some menu items to arbitrarily become inactive. The action itself might be discoverable, but the state that it relies on isn't discoverable at all. Take a more complex application with massive 50-item-long menus and it gets ridiculous. The menu doesn't communicate at all what an action means or when it should be used. In that situation the only thing the menus realistically exist for anymore is a learning tool to help memorize keyboard shortcuts.
Side note: I didn't think I would be approving of Microsoft designers on something like this, but I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus.
“Mendaciously pretending,” is over the top. Even if you don’t agree with the author’s point, even if you think the tested users are idiots or unrepresentative, there’s simply no justification for calling the author a liar or suggesting he’s anything less than earnest.
It’s entirely possible that none of these users thought to use the menu bar for these tasks. I, for one, have never thought to use the “Go” menu to get to the enclosing folder. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m dumb. I guess it didn’t occur to me that such a frequently needed action would be provided and yet not given dedicated UI in the window frame.
Similarly, I “know” how to set the default program to open a file from the info pane, but I always end up re-discovering it because I do it so infrequently, and it’s not intuitive to me to find it under “Get Info.” I always doubt it until I find it there.
Nor does it matter where macOS inherited usability issues from: they still exist in macOS, they still affect macOS users.
I also think you’ve taken the wrong point. I don’t read the post as arguing that macOS has just as many discoverability issues as iOS or that it’s not in better in some ways. Instead, it seems to me the author is clearly arguing that macOS also has discoverability issues even for daily and power users, and thus we should re-evaluate both how good macOS’s discoverability is and how bad iOS’s is.
Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused.
No doubt there's a setting for this somewhere in OSX, but that isn't happening for me in Chrome, and it doesn't happen in the notifications panel where the Do Not Disturb toggle is either. What's worse, I set scrollbars to "Always show" in preferences it still doesn't show me that there are hidden options at the top of the notifications panel. There is nothing in the UI to indicate that those are there.
The difference between macOS and iOS isn't about discoverability (although, in one important area macOS far more discoverable that iOS: multi-tasking). The problem with iPadOS is that since all the expert controls are hidden, and there's no such thing as shortcuts or right-clicking on iPadOS, it means doing anything useful with iPadOS requires using many slow gestures in succession.
macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple's provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn't bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much effort, it's exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user.
I'll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate.
I'll add the best thing Apple could do to fix iPadOS is make the developers working on it bootstrap[0] it. E.g., by running some version of Xcode on it (or CLI tools until they have Xcode working). Those developer would then fix it right up.
I contend that iPadOS is so sluggish to use because it's a compile target from a real machine that developers respect and work on, not a machine that those developers take seriously itself. That Apple is pushing a platform so hard that their own developers would never use for their work is everything you need to know about using an iPad for productivity. Sure, there are other tasks you can use a computer for besides programming, but sorry, programming is the task for computers, everything else stems from it.
My iPad is probably my most-used device, but it is also the device that I most often feel like throwing at a wall. Wading through quicksand is exactly how it feels like to do anything "advanced".
Not to mention the madness that is the Files interface. Far too often I find myself selecting a file, wanting to do something simple with it (like move it to a a location managed by another app) and just being stuck. Again, the quicksand feeling. I just want to get to that place right over there a few steps away, but there is no obvious way of getting there.
Almost nobody takes proficient users seriously, because there aren't enough of us. Only one demographic gets design priority nowadays, it seems, and it's definitely not power users.
(This message brought to you by UX designers declining your feature request because, "you think you want it, but our testing shows that you really don't")
> The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it.
It depends on who the target users are and what the platform's trying to do. An OS like iOS which is designed for complete novices should be judged on how easy it is for them to use (and it does this reasonably well, or at least it did until they started getting silly with the undiscoverable multitouch stuff.)
If there’s one area where macOS has lagged behind Windows for decades, it’s in making all menu items accessible using the keyboard by default (not forcing the user to go to Settings and setup a shortcut, which is very nice). In Windows, pressing Alt and then the underlined character in a menu name and then a submenu name would be the easiest way to get to things without even knowing any other shortcuts. On the Mac, many menu items don’t have shortcuts attached to them. To get to the menu bar using the keyboard, you have to hit Cmd+F2 and then use arrow keys to navigate — it’s useful when you can’t use the mouse or trackpad, but it’s highly inefficient.
I’ll list just one example of not having default keys for menu options. In Preview, you can adjust the size of an image from a menu option. But that specific menu option, among others, does not have any shortcut. If you need to access it via the keyboard, your choices are to use Cmd+F2 and then crawl around or go to Settings and setup a shortcut for it (playing around to avoid conflicts with any system wide shortcuts).
Decades long user of Apple devices, and a long time developer, and I learned a few things from that article. Have designers lost sight of the fact that 99% of people use their eyes when working with an interface? You cannot simply hide the simplest visual cues and expect people to find out about them accidentally, or via a video or article like this.
My biggest gripe at the moment is the photo sharing option in the latest iOS. The 'Copy' or 'Send To' options used to be immediately in front of you as buttons. Now, they are hidden below a 'swipe up' menu that resides off screen. There is not even the simplest hint that you can swipe up, and it took me literally weeks of using the new iOS update to discover that purely by accident.
Why not have the visual clue by having the top bit of the first menu option just showing at the bottom of the screen? That at least gives me as the user looking at the screen the idea that "Hey, there's something that goes off screen here - maybe I can swipe up a little to see it better...Ooooh - there is a whole menu hidden down there!".
UI/UX Designers - STOP designing screens that look cool on your Dribbble, UpLabs and Behance portfolios and start designing screens that give people hints as to how the interface is to be used. Please.
I'm with you, as far as wanting visual affordances for functionality, but I think it's a generational thing. Teenagers have no problem navigating Snapchat, and it allows for gross gestures like a swipe, which can be faster to apply than looking and aiming for an icon.
Good post - these features are quite undiscoverable, and I only figured them out because I did them accidentally one day or someone showed me.
Someone at Apple made the determination that "looking simpler" was more important that UX discoverability, and so hid some features under Ctrl/Command clicks.
A worse offender is "Command+Shift+." for showing hidden files - they don't even have a menu item anywhere for it, it's either you know that hidden files is a thing or you don't, and there's no way to discover it by clicking around and paying attention.
While I still prefer macOS to Windows, I agree that Apple could do a bit more to make these hidden features more exposable. E.g. why not let a click on the folder name show you the folder path, why require a "Command"?
That's one thing that baffles me about MacOS. There is a lot of powerful stuff hidden behind keyboard shortcuts but there is almost no way to find them. It seems a colossal waste of energy to first implement them but then making it very hard to find them.
On iPadOS it's very similar. Sometimes I get two apps on the screen by accident but I have no idea how I did it and there is no way to find out how to do it if you don't do an online search. Good old drop down menus were actually good for something.
Hidden files are hidden on purpose, because most users have no reason to see them. Arguably, it’s not a good idea to make them more discoverable. Power users will learn about them the first time they try to do a task that requires working with hidden files.
I thought for sure that holding some combination of option, shift, and control would reveal the command to show all hidden files, and...nope. It’s truly only available as a key command. Wow.
A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions. You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons, much less remember what they mean.
So you have to pick which actions are most important, and make those easy to discover. QuickLook is a wholly essential feature. So is navigating up a level—it's very useful in some instances, but the back button does the same thing 90% of the time.
For the rest, what matters most is that the actions are never activated accidentally†. This last point is, IMO, where iPadOS fails the most.
*
However: it is worth noting how far the Mac has fallen in the past decade. Snow Leopard had persistent scrollbars, that were big and blue so you couldn't miss them. Finder's toolbar had a button for activating QuickLook. And of course, the notification center didn't exist yet.
There's a pattern behind all these changes. Scrollbars were modified to match iOS. The QuickLook icon was removed to make room for a share button that mimics iOS. The design of notification center was basically ripped from iOS wholesale.
So yes, I agree that iOS has UI problems.
——————————
† Unless the user can instantly parse how they accidentally triggered the action. If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic.
‡ It's still there, but disabled by default. So in terms of discoverability, it might as well not exist.
> A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions.
Edit: FTR, this comment is kind of hyperbolic. I do not think I can outsmart all UX designers alone or that all UX designers are dumb or that those who designed Ribbon are dumb. I'm just pointing out that 1. I think there was a golden age of discoverability in UX where everything could be discovered and 2. It is over now.
Unless I misunderstand something here this should be plain demonstrably wrong (and note for context that I'm not exactly a Windows and Office enthusiast, quite the contrary):
In Microsoft Office (and a good number of other application) everything was available through the menus.
Toolbar buttons were just shortcuts fot the more important ones.
Then "UX" happened on Windows and today we've suffered through
- Office automatically hiding half the menus (late pre-Ribbon)
- early (but released, not Beta) Ribbon versions where File and Save was hidden behind a round flag that turned out to be a button.
- now: Ribbon is actually usable. Nice looking, still less predictable and more visual noise in addition to the leftmost menu (File...?) behaving in a (weirdly IMO) different way.
- now: menus are gone in many applications. I belive Chrome is the culprit here. Designers like Chrome it seems and for a number of UX-designers the idea seems to be that whatever Chrome and Mac OS does has to be copied across OS and domain boundaries.
If it wasn't clear:
UX on Windows used to be great. The OS was closed, slow, annoyingly limited etc, the UI was kind of ugly and business-focused but the UX was discoverable and usable.
What should have been done? I don't know but here are a couple of ideas:
- search in menus (as implemented in IDE settings, Visual Studio palette etc)?
- add fallback with synonyms and slight fuzzing to the search index so you get can the correct tool even if you misspelled it or if you are stuck on a Norwegian or French version.
- make enthusiastic videos about how it is best (I'm only half joking here, it seems to have worked for the vim crowd, - a number of people spend weeks learning a decades old editor whos discoverability is so bad no one knows how to even exit it the first time they open it.)
> You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons, much less remember what they mean.
That's where old-fashioned hierarchial menus are good. They're categorized lists of actions, where most of the actions are hidden most of the time, but can be read (and ideally have descriptive names). Typically there are also toolbars with buttons for the most commonly used actions.
These days it's become popular to hide all the menus behind a "hamburger" icon, which does satisfy the design types without harming usability all that much.
The other option is to have a gigantic button for everything, with tabs of buttons, and call it a "ribbon". The more cryptic the icons the better, you've made the decision to go to a ribbon so you wouldn't want to make things easy.
Practically speaking, Notification Center already existed, it was just called Growl. Everyone I knew with a Mac had it loaded, and Apple adopted the API whole-cloth for Notification Center, for compatibility reasons.
> None of this is meant to say macOS is garbage or anything like that.
I think an OS as prolific as macOS having such shit UX kind of implies it is garbage though.
The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder.
Basic native UI interfaces still completely lack keyboard controls.
Window snapping is still non-existent.
I understand Apple strive to be different, but lacking these basic features (among many others) makes macOS have an arguably inferior workflow to Windows or Linux/BSD DEs.
Excluding these things are not unique and quirky subjective design choices Apple can continue get away with. They are baseline expectations for a workstation computing environment to meet, which macOS does not. The way I see it, macOS is increasingly falling behind in UX. Not only have Apple failed to make their own improvements and innovations; they've failed to keep pace with Microsoft and the Open Source community.
IMO Apple has really lost its way in terms of genuinely good UX. The UI might be “pretty” but in terms of actual usability it’s gotten just frustrating at this point. The amount of complexity they require from their users now, memorizing swipe gestures, complex keyboard shortcuts, and strange incarnations is just sad. Good design is simple!
These things have been in Apple ever since the original Macintosh. In that case it was 'one mouse button, so simple'. Except to make the system usable as other systems with multiple button mice, they added a whole load of keyboard shortcuts mimiced how the multibutton mice worked, which ended up being far more complicated than just adding another button to the mouse.
None of that is required! In fact this article begins with people who are happily using MacOS despite not knowing all the features.
Truly simple design would not have these features at all; that’s where Mac started. The mouse had one button, period. There was no contextual click option at all. And MacOS can still be used productively that way today. Adding power features without disturbing the original usability is strictly positive IMO.
It’s incredibly easy to pick a power feature and demonstrate that some users don’t know it. The more capable a system is, the more likely this becomes. Might as well write an article demonstrating that some users don’t know how to use Terminal, so obviously Mac must have slipped in usability since the original Mac did not have a CLI.
The author is conflating discoverability of features, with discoverability of different ways to activate certain features.
So, for example, everyone knew how to view a PDF. It's just that the author disallowed the most discoverable method.
They all knew how to right click, in the most discoverable way (trackpad), it's just that the author insisted they use the magic mouse instead, or know about ctrl+click which no one ever uses. That the magic mouse is a usability disaster is a whole other issue, but that's unrelated to OS X.
I havent used OSX in a bit, but the default app thing should be something that you can do through settings (at least Windows 10 makes it very easily discoverable that way). Apple, however, has always done a terrible job with default apps (for example, requiring users to change their default Browser, Mail app, etc through Safari, Mail.app and so on).
The Do Not disturb thing is ironically an iOS UI pattern that Apple has completely unnecessarily brought to the mac.
So are the invisible scroll bars. Mac OS X's scroll bars used to be easily visible (and more functional, because it immediately gave you an idea of the size of the view as well as allowed you to click anywhere on the bar and jump there directly).
Fundamentally, OS X has well described, discoverable and recommended UI patterns that cover all these cases. iOS and iPad OS don't. It's unfortunate that Apple has decided the HIG isn't needed anymore, but that's more of an Apple thing, than an OS X capability thing.
I have been observing something similar recently, but related to other technologies. People claiming they are good at Excel, but can't do a vlookup or a pivot table. People using 5% of the power of an IDE. People not realizing that if they are able to use a web-based tool at work, they could (probably) also access it remotely.
And these are just the things I have noticed in the past week.
We utilize just a tiny percentage of options that are available to us, barely enough to get the basics of out tasks done. But we are completely oblivious that there are probably better/hidden/power tools available in the software we are already using that could help us achieve our tasks much more efficiently.
Interestingly, most people probably don't care about it, or are so oblivious of their lack of knowledge that they don't even search for better ways to do things.
It's hard to blame thought. Improving this state requires a mentality of continuous active learning, where you don't just wait for someone to show you how to do your task better, but to constantly expand your knowledge into areas you don't even think you need to improve. However, most of us usually have "better things to do" than reading software manuals.
I think part of this was that in the past, computers and software were new and novel. People had no comparative experience, so training had to be provided to fully explain what you could do & how you could do it.
Compare to today where most people "learn" by immersion - you have to use Google Docs or Excel for your school work, so you adsorb just enough to get your work done without really understanding the fundamentals or the more complex or non-obvious features, since you weren't taught systematically or comprehensively.
Then you "know" Excel, or Word well enough to get by - but don't know that you are barely scratching the surface of it's capabilities, or don't realize that being more competent with the tool will make you more capable and productive. And thus the motivation/opportunity isn't there to invest that time and effort.
The obvious observation about Excel: spreadsheets are a highly specialized expert tool for highly specialized expert users (accountants).
Most Excel users aren’t; and most don’t even use it for its designed purpose, i.e. user-programmable parallel calculations, but rather for ad-hoc ersatz databases.
Of course, said users are rarely any better at designing and using databases than they are at bookkeeping.
It's a shame there's no standard contextual key one can hold that overlays all the keyboard shortcuts, swipes, clicks, scrolls, etc that are available in the currently displayed UI. Ideally, every window that has hidden UI stuff would have a little indicator in the corner that means "hey, there's something weird you can do here, hold down the 'explain-o-tron 3000 key' to get a hint".
While one can argue that UIs should be immediately understandable, it doesn't seem possible to pull off such a feat in many cases. Keyboard shortcuts are particularly problematic, as an always-visible list would take up too much space in most cases.
I don't get why there's not continuous validation from apple for UX. Can't they just pay random users to do some tasks and continuously monitor whether they are able to do it?
Something like: how satisfied are you with x,y,z and then let them try to do task 1, task 2, task 3.
Just track these metrics and try to improve the UI according to this. It seems like the designers just live in a bubble without feedback from the users, this seems especially crucial during and after a redesign.
Maybe a small popup in apples own apps, like music. Something like: Want to use apple music for free for one month? Just answer these short questions and complete a few tasks! These things don't need to take longer than 10 minutes.
Even a small sample size could provide meaningful and statistically significant results.
The hidden scrollbar trend is maddening to me, why hide such an important element? I just tried one of the latest Ubuntu Unity/Gnome/whatever it is versions (I normally use XUbuntu) and saw that the scrollbars are hidden there too, which is crazy. How is the user supposed to know whether they can scroll?
I love using MacOS now that I'm used to it, but it really is a disaster from a basic UX point of view. Even just installing applications on MacOS is wacky, and it makes me wonder how Macs got their reputation of being easier to use than Windows computers.
The party line at Apple is that right click (and everything in there) is for power users only, and that you should be able to do everything a user reasonably needs with only one button. I think this is a reasonable approach, but it seems that it's breaking peoples' ability to transition from user to power user.
The other Finder issues, however... well, it's become clear that Finder has become simpler and simpler in an attempt to make the computers more accessible.
Did you know: you can turn scrolbars on by default? A lot of common macos/finder complaints can be addressed by toggling settings, but it'd be nice if there was a single "pro mode" button, or something.
I've been using macOS for about 10 years after 20 on the nameless platform.
1. Get KeyCue or something like it that tells you (almost) every keyboard shortcut within any application by using the accessibility API.
2. Turn on that accessibility mode option where it makes it possible to cursor through multiple-choice modal dialogs.
3. What I find maddening is AppleScript. It's incredibly powerful except for three deficiencies a) an inability to introspect applications to find their nouns and verbs b) the lack of complete AppleScript documentation c) they fired the AppleScript guy. You could do a lot in it if you only knew the syntax and how to call things. AppleScript needs a minor UI overall to show what possible keywords, operators, nouns or verbs could be used during contextual code-completion.
4. macOS (and iOS/iPadOS) support most *NIX Ctrl- shortcuts within text fields. Ctrl-k to kill to EOL, Ctrl-a go to beginning, Ctrl-e go to EOL, etc.
5. Assign keyboard shortcuts to speed-up common actions (both system-wide and within particular apps) that don't have hotkeys by default, like Command-Shift-, to open Settings.
6. Get BlueToggle & AirToggle to bounce BT and WiFi.
Bonus for iPad/iOS: use the triple-click accessibility feature set to only the Magnifier (with no zooming) with the darkening filter to get a darker display at night.
I've been using Mac OS, Windows and Linux (multiple distros) for over 20 years.
To me Mac OS always had the worst UI experience. I can understand why people like it: it is clean and looks good. But clean and good looks doesn't make it good.
Windows has been good on average.
On Linux it depends on the distro and the version of the distro a lot.
Overall I think Ubuntu has the best UI experience at the moment.
As a user mostly use windows. I always find the ui discoverable of mac problematic. I really have no idea why do they like to hide most used things like move file, show hidden under keyboard shortcuts and don't have a option to force them permanently show up. As in windows, they are either already show up or exist in some obvious item like `setting` and you can toggle things here. You rarely need google to find out what's going on. But has in mac you need to press random keys here and there is no obvious visual indications that you can do so. I really curious about how mac user before google exists find them out. Or they simply not?
Here's the thing: you can't have 1000 "discoverable" actions, there's no place for it.
Correction: you do have 1000 discoverable actions, but you discover them in the menu bar.
What you found out with this article is that users are bad at knowing things, because there are too many things to know. I know all of those actions and their keyboard shortcuts, but I still have to occasionally "google it."
Either you have iOS 1.0 where everything is clear and easy to do — because there's very little to do — or macOS, where each app has dozens of features but can only surface some of them.
[+] [-] bangonkeyboard|6 years ago|reply
1. Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. This bit of bad UI was imported from iOS. Unlike iOS, it can still be turned off: Click the Apple menu -> System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars.
2. File menu -> Quick Look.
3. Every action in that context menu is available in the File menu.
3a. Holding the Option key works in the File menu as well, but this change can also be made from File menu -> Get Info -> Open with.
4. This actually bad UI was, again, taken from iOS.
5. Go menu -> Enclosing Folder.
Nearly every example is solvable with single clicks in the always-visible, literally spelled-out menubar, as they have been for 30+ years. They are therefore eminently discoverable, contingent on a user giving a thought to trying in the first place to discover them. The one or two examples where this is not true are direct iOS tack-ons that do not respect the platform.
What this post is doing is mendaciously pretending that power-user shortcuts, some more or less discoverable than others, are the only way to perform these operations which can actually be accomplished by reading and clicking. The attempt to equate the Mac's discoverability with iOS fails once that is pointed out, since in the latter those mystery-meat gestures truly are the only way to execute them.
[+] [-] cycloptic|6 years ago|reply
Even in simple programs like the finder there is global application state that can cause some menu items to arbitrarily become inactive. The action itself might be discoverable, but the state that it relies on isn't discoverable at all. Take a more complex application with massive 50-item-long menus and it gets ridiculous. The menu doesn't communicate at all what an action means or when it should be used. In that situation the only thing the menus realistically exist for anymore is a learning tool to help memorize keyboard shortcuts.
Side note: I didn't think I would be approving of Microsoft designers on something like this, but I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus.
[+] [-] spoondan|6 years ago|reply
It’s entirely possible that none of these users thought to use the menu bar for these tasks. I, for one, have never thought to use the “Go” menu to get to the enclosing folder. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m dumb. I guess it didn’t occur to me that such a frequently needed action would be provided and yet not given dedicated UI in the window frame.
Similarly, I “know” how to set the default program to open a file from the info pane, but I always end up re-discovering it because I do it so infrequently, and it’s not intuitive to me to find it under “Get Info.” I always doubt it until I find it there.
Nor does it matter where macOS inherited usability issues from: they still exist in macOS, they still affect macOS users.
I also think you’ve taken the wrong point. I don’t read the post as arguing that macOS has just as many discoverability issues as iOS or that it’s not in better in some ways. Instead, it seems to me the author is clearly arguing that macOS also has discoverability issues even for daily and power users, and thus we should re-evaluate both how good macOS’s discoverability is and how bad iOS’s is.
[+] [-] onion2k|6 years ago|reply
No doubt there's a setting for this somewhere in OSX, but that isn't happening for me in Chrome, and it doesn't happen in the notifications panel where the Do Not Disturb toggle is either. What's worse, I set scrollbars to "Always show" in preferences it still doesn't show me that there are hidden options at the top of the notifications panel. There is nothing in the UI to indicate that those are there.
[+] [-] em-bee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangerface|6 years ago|reply
I hate that people keep pretending its good UI design simply because it was a thing before we knew what good UI design was.
[+] [-] staplers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robenkleene|6 years ago|reply
macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple's provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn't bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much effort, it's exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user.
I'll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate.
[0]: https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/
[1]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
[+] [-] robenkleene|6 years ago|reply
I contend that iPadOS is so sluggish to use because it's a compile target from a real machine that developers respect and work on, not a machine that those developers take seriously itself. That Apple is pushing a platform so hard that their own developers would never use for their work is everything you need to know about using an iPad for productivity. Sure, there are other tasks you can use a computer for besides programming, but sorry, programming is the task for computers, everything else stems from it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
[+] [-] deepspace|6 years ago|reply
Not to mention the madness that is the Files interface. Far too often I find myself selecting a file, wanting to do something simple with it (like move it to a a location managed by another app) and just being stuck. Again, the quicksand feeling. I just want to get to that place right over there a few steps away, but there is no obvious way of getting there.
/rant
[+] [-] tomc1985|6 years ago|reply
(This message brought to you by UX designers declining your feature request because, "you think you want it, but our testing shows that you really don't")
[+] [-] taneq|6 years ago|reply
It depends on who the target users are and what the platform's trying to do. An OS like iOS which is designed for complete novices should be judged on how easy it is for them to use (and it does this reasonably well, or at least it did until they started getting silly with the undiscoverable multitouch stuff.)
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newscracker|6 years ago|reply
I’ll list just one example of not having default keys for menu options. In Preview, you can adjust the size of an image from a menu option. But that specific menu option, among others, does not have any shortcut. If you need to access it via the keyboard, your choices are to use Cmd+F2 and then crawl around or go to Settings and setup a shortcut for it (playing around to avoid conflicts with any system wide shortcuts).
[+] [-] wingerlang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|6 years ago|reply
If you don't take care of this, explicitly, there'll be no accelerators. There's plenty of programs that are like that.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberferret|6 years ago|reply
My biggest gripe at the moment is the photo sharing option in the latest iOS. The 'Copy' or 'Send To' options used to be immediately in front of you as buttons. Now, they are hidden below a 'swipe up' menu that resides off screen. There is not even the simplest hint that you can swipe up, and it took me literally weeks of using the new iOS update to discover that purely by accident.
Why not have the visual clue by having the top bit of the first menu option just showing at the bottom of the screen? That at least gives me as the user looking at the screen the idea that "Hey, there's something that goes off screen here - maybe I can swipe up a little to see it better...Ooooh - there is a whole menu hidden down there!".
UI/UX Designers - STOP designing screens that look cool on your Dribbble, UpLabs and Behance portfolios and start designing screens that give people hints as to how the interface is to be used. Please.
[+] [-] bobbylarrybobby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mceachen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] transreal|6 years ago|reply
Someone at Apple made the determination that "looking simpler" was more important that UX discoverability, and so hid some features under Ctrl/Command clicks.
A worse offender is "Command+Shift+." for showing hidden files - they don't even have a menu item anywhere for it, it's either you know that hidden files is a thing or you don't, and there's no way to discover it by clicking around and paying attention.
While I still prefer macOS to Windows, I agree that Apple could do a bit more to make these hidden features more exposable. E.g. why not let a click on the folder name show you the folder path, why require a "Command"?
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
On iPadOS it's very similar. Sometimes I get two apps on the screen by accident but I have no idea how I did it and there is no way to find out how to do it if you don't do an online search. Good old drop down menus were actually good for something.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
The menu functions descriptions will change.
For example, in Finder, open the File menu and you should see:
if you press down Option/alt, this will change to:[+] [-] tobr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|6 years ago|reply
Why wouldn't this just be be "Cmd-."? It doesn't seem to be doing anything, at least on the generation of Finder I just tried it on.
[+] [-] rewgs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
So you have to pick which actions are most important, and make those easy to discover. QuickLook is a wholly essential feature. So is navigating up a level—it's very useful in some instances, but the back button does the same thing 90% of the time.
For the rest, what matters most is that the actions are never activated accidentally†. This last point is, IMO, where iPadOS fails the most.
*
However: it is worth noting how far the Mac has fallen in the past decade. Snow Leopard had persistent scrollbars, that were big and blue so you couldn't miss them. Finder's toolbar had a button for activating QuickLook. And of course, the notification center didn't exist yet.
There's a pattern behind all these changes. Scrollbars were modified to match iOS. The QuickLook icon was removed to make room for a share button that mimics iOS. The design of notification center was basically ripped from iOS wholesale.
So yes, I agree that iOS has UI problems.
——————————
† Unless the user can instantly parse how they accidentally triggered the action. If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic.
‡ It's still there, but disabled by default. So in terms of discoverability, it might as well not exist.
[+] [-] eitland|6 years ago|reply
Edit: FTR, this comment is kind of hyperbolic. I do not think I can outsmart all UX designers alone or that all UX designers are dumb or that those who designed Ribbon are dumb. I'm just pointing out that 1. I think there was a golden age of discoverability in UX where everything could be discovered and 2. It is over now.
Unless I misunderstand something here this should be plain demonstrably wrong (and note for context that I'm not exactly a Windows and Office enthusiast, quite the contrary):
In Microsoft Office (and a good number of other application) everything was available through the menus.
Toolbar buttons were just shortcuts fot the more important ones.
Then "UX" happened on Windows and today we've suffered through
- Office automatically hiding half the menus (late pre-Ribbon)
- early (but released, not Beta) Ribbon versions where File and Save was hidden behind a round flag that turned out to be a button.
- now: Ribbon is actually usable. Nice looking, still less predictable and more visual noise in addition to the leftmost menu (File...?) behaving in a (weirdly IMO) different way.
- now: menus are gone in many applications. I belive Chrome is the culprit here. Designers like Chrome it seems and for a number of UX-designers the idea seems to be that whatever Chrome and Mac OS does has to be copied across OS and domain boundaries.
If it wasn't clear:
UX on Windows used to be great. The OS was closed, slow, annoyingly limited etc, the UI was kind of ugly and business-focused but the UX was discoverable and usable.
What should have been done? I don't know but here are a couple of ideas:
- search in menus (as implemented in IDE settings, Visual Studio palette etc)?
- add fallback with synonyms and slight fuzzing to the search index so you get can the correct tool even if you misspelled it or if you are stuck on a Norwegian or French version.
- make enthusiastic videos about how it is best (I'm only half joking here, it seems to have worked for the vim crowd, - a number of people spend weeks learning a decades old editor whos discoverability is so bad no one knows how to even exit it the first time they open it.)
[+] [-] SAI_Peregrinus|6 years ago|reply
That's where old-fashioned hierarchial menus are good. They're categorized lists of actions, where most of the actions are hidden most of the time, but can be read (and ideally have descriptive names). Typically there are also toolbars with buttons for the most commonly used actions.
These days it's become popular to hide all the menus behind a "hamburger" icon, which does satisfy the design types without harming usability all that much.
The other option is to have a gigantic button for everything, with tabs of buttons, and call it a "ribbon". The more cryptic the icons the better, you've made the decision to go to a ribbon so you wouldn't want to make things easy.
[+] [-] samatman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
There's a reason people pay lots of money for Bloomberg terminals, with their zillion labeled physical keys.
> If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic.
On the other hand, if there's no other way for people to discover them than accident ..
[+] [-] wyqydsyq|6 years ago|reply
I think an OS as prolific as macOS having such shit UX kind of implies it is garbage though.
The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder.
Basic native UI interfaces still completely lack keyboard controls.
Window snapping is still non-existent.
I understand Apple strive to be different, but lacking these basic features (among many others) makes macOS have an arguably inferior workflow to Windows or Linux/BSD DEs.
Excluding these things are not unique and quirky subjective design choices Apple can continue get away with. They are baseline expectations for a workstation computing environment to meet, which macOS does not. The way I see it, macOS is increasingly falling behind in UX. Not only have Apple failed to make their own improvements and innovations; they've failed to keep pace with Microsoft and the Open Source community.
Posted from my 2019 MacBook Pro
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
⌥⌘P
> The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder.
System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Use keyboard navigation to move between controls
> Window snapping is still non-existent.
Not completely: you can do two windows side-by-side, and resizing windows now makes them snap to each other and edges.
[+] [-] erling|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tehdasi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|6 years ago|reply
Truly simple design would not have these features at all; that’s where Mac started. The mouse had one button, period. There was no contextual click option at all. And MacOS can still be used productively that way today. Adding power features without disturbing the original usability is strictly positive IMO.
It’s incredibly easy to pick a power feature and demonstrate that some users don’t know it. The more capable a system is, the more likely this becomes. Might as well write an article demonstrating that some users don’t know how to use Terminal, so obviously Mac must have slipped in usability since the original Mac did not have a CLI.
[+] [-] addicted44|6 years ago|reply
So, for example, everyone knew how to view a PDF. It's just that the author disallowed the most discoverable method.
They all knew how to right click, in the most discoverable way (trackpad), it's just that the author insisted they use the magic mouse instead, or know about ctrl+click which no one ever uses. That the magic mouse is a usability disaster is a whole other issue, but that's unrelated to OS X.
I havent used OSX in a bit, but the default app thing should be something that you can do through settings (at least Windows 10 makes it very easily discoverable that way). Apple, however, has always done a terrible job with default apps (for example, requiring users to change their default Browser, Mail app, etc through Safari, Mail.app and so on).
The Do Not disturb thing is ironically an iOS UI pattern that Apple has completely unnecessarily brought to the mac.
So are the invisible scroll bars. Mac OS X's scroll bars used to be easily visible (and more functional, because it immediately gave you an idea of the size of the view as well as allowed you to click anywhere on the bar and jump there directly).
Fundamentally, OS X has well described, discoverable and recommended UI patterns that cover all these cases. iOS and iPad OS don't. It's unfortunate that Apple has decided the HIG isn't needed anymore, but that's more of an Apple thing, than an OS X capability thing.
[+] [-] pedrokost|6 years ago|reply
And these are just the things I have noticed in the past week.
We utilize just a tiny percentage of options that are available to us, barely enough to get the basics of out tasks done. But we are completely oblivious that there are probably better/hidden/power tools available in the software we are already using that could help us achieve our tasks much more efficiently.
Interestingly, most people probably don't care about it, or are so oblivious of their lack of knowledge that they don't even search for better ways to do things.
It's hard to blame thought. Improving this state requires a mentality of continuous active learning, where you don't just wait for someone to show you how to do your task better, but to constantly expand your knowledge into areas you don't even think you need to improve. However, most of us usually have "better things to do" than reading software manuals.
[+] [-] Smoosh|6 years ago|reply
Compare to today where most people "learn" by immersion - you have to use Google Docs or Excel for your school work, so you adsorb just enough to get your work done without really understanding the fundamentals or the more complex or non-obvious features, since you weren't taught systematically or comprehensively.
Then you "know" Excel, or Word well enough to get by - but don't know that you are barely scratching the surface of it's capabilities, or don't realize that being more competent with the tool will make you more capable and productive. And thus the motivation/opportunity isn't there to invest that time and effort.
[+] [-] hhas01|6 years ago|reply
Most Excel users aren’t; and most don’t even use it for its designed purpose, i.e. user-programmable parallel calculations, but rather for ad-hoc ersatz databases.
Of course, said users are rarely any better at designing and using databases than they are at bookkeeping.
[+] [-] jml7c5|6 years ago|reply
While one can argue that UIs should be immediately understandable, it doesn't seem possible to pull off such a feat in many cases. Keyboard shortcuts are particularly problematic, as an always-visible list would take up too much space in most cases.
[+] [-] LeanderK|6 years ago|reply
Something like: how satisfied are you with x,y,z and then let them try to do task 1, task 2, task 3.
Just track these metrics and try to improve the UI according to this. It seems like the designers just live in a bubble without feedback from the users, this seems especially crucial during and after a redesign.
Maybe a small popup in apples own apps, like music. Something like: Want to use apple music for free for one month? Just answer these short questions and complete a few tasks! These things don't need to take longer than 10 minutes.
Even a small sample size could provide meaningful and statistically significant results.
[+] [-] StavrosK|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gburdell3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] preferenca|6 years ago|reply
The other Finder issues, however... well, it's become clear that Finder has become simpler and simpler in an attempt to make the computers more accessible.
Did you know: you can turn scrolbars on by default? A lot of common macos/finder complaints can be addressed by toggling settings, but it'd be nice if there was a single "pro mode" button, or something.
[+] [-] anonsivalley652|6 years ago|reply
1. Get KeyCue or something like it that tells you (almost) every keyboard shortcut within any application by using the accessibility API.
2. Turn on that accessibility mode option where it makes it possible to cursor through multiple-choice modal dialogs.
3. What I find maddening is AppleScript. It's incredibly powerful except for three deficiencies a) an inability to introspect applications to find their nouns and verbs b) the lack of complete AppleScript documentation c) they fired the AppleScript guy. You could do a lot in it if you only knew the syntax and how to call things. AppleScript needs a minor UI overall to show what possible keywords, operators, nouns or verbs could be used during contextual code-completion.
4. macOS (and iOS/iPadOS) support most *NIX Ctrl- shortcuts within text fields. Ctrl-k to kill to EOL, Ctrl-a go to beginning, Ctrl-e go to EOL, etc.
5. Assign keyboard shortcuts to speed-up common actions (both system-wide and within particular apps) that don't have hotkeys by default, like Command-Shift-, to open Settings.
6. Get BlueToggle & AirToggle to bounce BT and WiFi.
Bonus for iPad/iOS: use the triple-click accessibility feature set to only the Magnifier (with no zooming) with the darkening filter to get a darker display at night.
[+] [-] thdrdt|6 years ago|reply
To me Mac OS always had the worst UI experience. I can understand why people like it: it is clean and looks good. But clean and good looks doesn't make it good.
Windows has been good on average.
On Linux it depends on the distro and the version of the distro a lot.
Overall I think Ubuntu has the best UI experience at the moment.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|6 years ago|reply
How the heck anyone was supposed to know that, I have no clue.
[+] [-] mmis1000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] why-oh-why|6 years ago|reply
Correction: you do have 1000 discoverable actions, but you discover them in the menu bar.
What you found out with this article is that users are bad at knowing things, because there are too many things to know. I know all of those actions and their keyboard shortcuts, but I still have to occasionally "google it."
Either you have iOS 1.0 where everything is clear and easy to do — because there's very little to do — or macOS, where each app has dozens of features but can only surface some of them.
This is non-news.