While OS X is an amazing operating system and I wouldn't part with it for the world, it does have some ugly problems that tend to get swept under the rug. Since user interface design is my thing I'm going to focus on that aspect of it, but these issues are by no means limited only to the UI.

In today's post I'm going to show you some UI from Tiger and I'm going to point out all the obvious flaws in its design. These are flaws that if I can spot, any one with some serious training in HCI should be able to see in the first few seconds of looking at it, and one does hope that Apple still employs such people (and that someone actually listens to them!).

Clicky for a full size version.

First of all it looks like a shining beacon of unified goodness. It could have been a brushed metal monstrosity, but someone put their foot down and said no. My thanks to that person.

Unfortunately they didn't similarly put their foot down on some other more pressing issues. Look at all those blue gradient bars. What do they remind you of? Perhaps a selected item in the iTunes' source list, or an item in the Finder's source list? What's the difference? These items are not selected, someone just thought it would be cool if they had a gradient blue background. Bad UI design point number one, don't make two items visually the same but give them different meanings.

How's your eye sight and colour perception? Perhaps if you're getting on a bit it might not be as great as it used to be or perhaps you're unlucky enough to have some kind of visual impairment. If so you would be forgiven for not noticing that little smudge to the right of the date column. That incredibly pale little letter I in a circle is actually a control which gives you more information about the selected item. It becomes a bit clearer when you've actually selected an item, but until you do so it might as well not be there. It behaves like a disclosure triangle. Of course it doesn't look like one until you've actually pressed it, and unlike every other disclosure triangle in the Mac OS it's on the right side of the item rather than the left. Granted it might seem confusing to put a disclosure triangle on the left side because it would imply it's action would open like a folder does in the Finder. This leads one to the conclusion that it's probably not the best item for the job and we should seek an alternative interface. This would be a prime candidate for a drawer or utility panel. In fact why not just use the Finder's Get Info panel?

'14 more...' it says. It's a good idea in this case to hide less relevant search results, people are used to having to dig a bit deeper for less relevant results and it makes for a less cluttered UI. Yes hiding things isn't necessarily newbie friendly, but realistically most people have Googled at least once in their life at this point in time. However what happens when you mouse over this '14 more'? It underlines like a link on a webpage. Cool so it's a hyperlink? Fair enough, bit weird to see a hyperlink outside of a web browser but it serves its purpose so it's fine right? Now what about all those other words on the right there. What are they? Lets mouse over and see. Well they don't underline so they can't be hyperlinks. But wait, the cursor changes to a hand? Oh so they are links. But that's not how the '14 more' link behaved. The cursor didn't change into a pointing hand and it underlined. These links on the other hand exhibit exactly the opposite behaviour. Lets just hope these people are not web designers.

The items on the right act as rudimentary radio button groups. In a saner reality than this one they would take the form of table column headers and popup buttons. But in this reality they are a list of rather awkward hyperlinks. Only they don't behave like hyperlinks, they don't underline and you can click them and scrub the mouse up and down to move between them. Like, um, well no other standard Cocoa control, but very much like the default behaviour of an NSMatrix (these are sometimes used to layout grids of controls in Cocoa apps, like the tabs in NewsMac Pro). What's bizarre though is that they act as one continuous list when you do this, you can click and hold down Kind at the top and drag down changing all the selections as you go until you finish at iPod mini which happens to be the bottom most item. What's the point in that? If you're a computer newb which is who Apple always claims to be designing for and you're a bit slow in releasing your mouse button you potentially can mess up not just the group of controls you were trying to change, but those adjacent as well.

Back to the '14 more' what happens if you click that item, but want to go back to the top 5? Well Another link appears, this time in the blue bar at the start of the results saying 'Show top 5'. This behaves in the same way as the '14 more' link. You click it and the original results are restored. Display the extra results again and then collapse the blue bar so the results are hidden. The 'Show top 5' link is still there. Before you click it, lets thing about what it says, and in its current context what do we expect it to do? Well expand the bar (it does say show after all) and display the top five items, right? Lets click and see what happens... it just disappeared! Where are my top five items? Oh I have to click the little disclosure triangle again. My that's elegant!

Anyway lets wrap this up now with one last oddity. Notice the scroll bar? It's on the right side of the grey bar of pseudo hyper-button-link things. Lets scroll. That's odd, the list of results scrolls but the grey box just hangs there, immune to this nasty vertical motion. Ok that makes sense, you wouldn't want these items to scroll. Well unless the Spotlight window was too small to show them all (go on try it, it's amusing). However normally in the case where we want one item to scroll and not the other we put the scroll-bar on the right or bottom edge of the area we want to scroll. But Spotlight knows better. So instead when you first look at the Spotlight window you think that the scroll bar will either scroll the entire content of the window down or it will scroll the items in the right grey pane. Shock it does neither! This kind of behaviour I could ignore on a web-page, which is where a lot of this design seems to have been lifted from, but this is an application, it doesn't need to make the kind of compromises a web designer does, it shouldn't be throwing out 20 odd years of well established behaviour for basic basic controls like scroll bars and buttons just because it looks cool. Bad design like this shouldn't be coming out of our beloved Apple, this is below their standards and just because it looks shiny doesn't mean it's good or right or that you should have to put up with it.

What other people are saying:

A community of quality - DrunkenBlog
Various posts about Apple's UI - inessential.com
Location Validation in the Dashboard Weather Widget - Daring Fireball
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Review - ArsTechnica