[frankhsu]

I've been working on UI/UX design since 2012, and have witnessed several major shifts in design styles.

I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.

But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.

[the_other]

> I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible.

For the record (not that I'm in any position of note or have any real impact on any of this): I _liked_ iOS7's flat design. It felt to me like it got quite close to its intention: to highlight content, and withdraw the UI only to the bare minimum to get stuff done. It was sparse and clear enough that I didn't think about much. There were some "rules" that apps applied inconsistently (or couldn't actually be rules anyone could follow), such as where the primary action button should be (the "back" button was pretty obvious, but the "new"/"next"/"go"/"submit" would move around all three of the other corners depending on app - maybe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for that.

Sure, it lacked discoverability. I don't have a ready solution that solves for the "content-first" and "discoverable options" that I can offer.

But the flatness, the tidy icons, the slide-over layers that were at sensible and consistent illusions of height above one another all "worked" for me.

[wlesieutre]

I don't mind it on my phone, but agreed that the Mac version just is not good. I've never understood the obsession with making sidebars translucent, and the new version made it much worse, and expanded that philosophy to the whole OS. I've been using it since betas (that was a mistake) and I don't like it any better.

Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.

The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.

Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.

Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.

If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.

[wlesieutre]

I will give them credit for one good thing that has come from iOS to Mac: having Control Center in the menu bar is a nice change. A few things I want in the menu bar for immediate access, and for the items that don't quite make the cut it's nice to have all of them two clicks away instead of requiring a trip to System Preferences.

I do wish they would bring Bartender-style menuextra containment as an official feature though. This is particularly awful today for visually impaired users, who are using the "Larger Text" screen scaling, lose a chunk of the menubar to the display notch, and then lose even more space to the big spacing they put between menuextras a couple of years ago.

The amount of bullshit that comes with a work laptop and wants to be in the menu bar is crazy, and when you run out of menu space things just disappear. Where did the VPN go? Sorry, displaced by your VOIP system and wireless presentation remote drivers and Dropbox and Teams and ...

It's nice that this software is quickly accessible without being in the Dock all the time, but the menu extras need to learn the same lesson as Control Center (and the Windows XP system tray 24 years ago) and have a second level that isn't space constrained.

[lawkwok]

I hate the new system preferences. I miss how the old one had handcrafted icons and just felt more compact.

I understand the new design scales better but I agree that the search is broken. Also it’s not responsive and feels like a web app.

[frankhsu]

I agree with most of your points.

[tlb]

The change to non-skeuomorphic style at least made it faster. Liquid Glass makes it simultaneously harder to read and slower.

[frankhsu]

You are absolutely right. This is the core spirit of "Forms Following Functions"

What lies beneath the surface of subjective aesthetics should be the functionality of information acquisition efficiency.

[r00fus]

Non-skeuomorphic style simply allowed for easier adaptation to varying screen sizes that iOS devices were beginning to adopt at the time.

[cosmotic]

In what way was it faster?

[Nevermark]

Flat design was always atrocious, in that it utterly fails to take advantage of our visualization systems extremely effective autonomous recognition and interpretation of any 3D cue at all.

Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.

And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.

[cosmotic]

The flat UI trend started at Microsoft and Windows 8.

[hbn]

Google showed off the Holo design language in Android 3.0 which was a year before Windows 8.