On the death of the HIG and the triumph of eye candy over usability
What for years has differentiated Macs, and Apple devices in general from their UNIX and Windows brethren? The user interface, both physical and virtual. In recent years many including myself have noted the ever degrading quality of Apple's user interfaces, increasingly eye candy has been the sole motivation behind many user interface decisions and usability and consistency have taken a back seat. Look at how many variations there are of the dark unified look, no two the same in fact. Apple even mixes and matches widget styles in its own user interfaces with totally different styles for widgets in one window than in another (GarageBand is a prime offender here) where there is no functional benefit of doing so. If you want to go all unified then just do it, don't give me a grey scale checkbox in one pane and an aqua one in the next because it looks shit. Yes a user knows they're both checkboxes but it doesn't mean it's not butt ugly. You don't put one random blue key in the middle of a keyboard do you, why on earth would you do it in your UI? It's a level of inconsistency that even Linux isn't guilty of, and as someone who used to use Linux before the rise of KDE and Gnome I can tell you what a horrifically inconsistent UI looks and feels like.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg, Apple produces a handful of applications, there are thousands of 3rd party developers out there, myself included, who look for UI design direction from Apple. We've reached the point now where most of us have twigged 'the HIG is dead', in so far as UI consistency is over, it's every app for itself now. A good example is the incredibly hyped popular Disco. It's a fab application, I've already bought my copy and I'm impressed by its simplicity and functionality. But the user interface is awful...
What you cry, how can it be awful, it smokes and shines and shimmers?! Yet those things don't excuse its most basic of usability failings - like an application from the 1980s designed for a Mac Plus it stubbornly won't allow you to resize its application window, making browsing the list of files you're trying to burn excruciating. You can't even look inside a folder to check what files are present once you've dragged them into the application, you have to resort to going back to the Finder. You can't give your disc a name longer than about 20 characters, not because of a limitation in the file system but because any bigger and the text wouldn't fit in the fixed size window. It's semi-transparent nature makes it look ugly as anything when it's not sitting on a nice clean background (as you'll find it in all the promotional screenshots). Its use of non-standard character spacing and inverted colour scheme makes it look alien on my Mac desktop. Is it trying to be a dashboard widget or a prototype for an Aero UI? It does away with the concept of selecting files with the mouse to perform an action on them, a concept as old as the Mac itself, its File menu contains one item 'Close'. How is repeating a list of buttons over and over a more elegant solution? You could miss the scrollbar by about two pixels and accidentally remove a file from the list, something you could easily not notice you've done which could lead you to accidentally not backing up a critical file - an egregious sin for an application whose primary purpose is for backing up data.
It's only a beta and I'm sure many of these issues will be fixed and I really don't want to heap on these guys too much because it looks like a really promising app. But it's inadvertently become the poster child for what happens when you abandon the HIG and go for the purely eye candy UI. If this is to be the future of application design on the Mac then we've truly lost the most precious thing about our platform, the quality of the user interface.
Update
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has given me a mention and done their own analysis. They get a bit hung up on the look of the UI rather than addressing the usability points I've raised, but it's nice to give this issue some exposure lest other developers think that Mac users will accept such a functionally crippled GUI.
posted by Rory Prior @ 12:33 AM
16 comments
16 Comments:
Agreed, it would be good to have some consistency, and you'd expect that from Apple in its own apps, at least. I know the apps are evolving quicker than the OS but I'm not sure I like the way it's heading (iTunes).
Also, I think Disco is butt ugly and simply trying to hard. It looked alright in the screenshots, but there was no need to make every window semi-transparent. Plus, I think it would have done better to at least try and fit in with the OS a little more, its monochrome look is dark to the point of depressing and there's very little reason for a lot of the effects it employs.
I wouldn't care, but with guidelines out the window there is the risk of a move to the tasteless.
All the effects are one of the things I don't understand either, who made the decision that spending hours simulating smoke was more important than making the main application window display more than six files at a time?
It really doesn't make sense for Apple to be so inconsistent in their applications, it wouldn't kill them to share the artwork between all the iLife apps. Heck it would even save them money, they wouldn't have to have their graphic designers keep reinventing graphics for basic widgets in each release.
Why Rory, the reason to keep the Disco window a minimal size (and not resizable) is so clear to me. It's so that you can look at those cool as heck, non-standard, black scroll bars.
I kid.
Some good points in your disection of Disco. And that delete button being only a pixel or two away from the scroll IS scary. Please tell me there's some kind of verification that you actually want to delete something! But then if there was, we might never get to see those smoke visuals. Darn. ;)
Huh? You're a fan of Disco but you don't like the interface? Far as I could tell Disco is 90% interface, basically a wrapper for the stuff Disk Utility can already do, but in a 25x25px window with ten sets of custom widgets and smoke coming out the sides. The only real functionality it seems to offer is the Discography function or the disk-spanning thing, which I don't think are very big deals.
Regardless of that, though.. One thing that hits me whenever I read any of the posts that resulted amongst important Mac people after John Gruber did his talk at that C4 thing is that I feel anxious and upset that people are giving in.. I don't want people to say "The HIG is dead, just do your best", I think the HIG is very valuable regardless of what Apple are doing!
Even if the HIG seems to be designed for the era of 10.3, I honestly believe that 10.3-era apps, pinstripes and all, were the most beautiful and functional apps and that most developers should aspire to be like them. I love toolbars with different shaped icons on them, and I like clearly defined non-unified windows, and I liked the strict regulations on how big things should be, how buttons should be laid out, all sorts of things people ignore now.
And so I think it's not true to say the HIG is dead.. it's in need of an addendum saying "Forget about brushed metal, use Mail 2.0-style sidebars if they fit better than drawers and feel free to use iPhoto-style dashboards", but fundamentally I feel it's on the mark and would make for better and better apps in 2006 going forwards. But without this direction, and with this defeatist attitude, we'll end up with apps like Disco and Voodoopad and Skype and all sorts of apps aspiring to this vague "Look like iLife\Aperture\Leopard\whatever!" idea rather than held by the explicit, useful, relevant guidelines of the aging HIG document.
I like the simplicity of Disco and some of the eye candy is nice, it's just that as I've mentioned above there are some really egregious usability problems which no amount of eye candy can make up for.
I agree most of the 10.3 era apps were the best looking, Keynote is a great an example of a beautiful Aqua app. I think it is possible to adopt new interface styles without abandoning the core principles of the HIG and that's something I strive to do in my own applications. Hopefully things will calm down a bit when we finally get to see what Leopard looks like.
Josh if you remove a file from the disc you're about to burn there is no warning, it simply vanishes from the list, and because there is no selection indicator moving to another file it's quite easy to miss. Imagine if you're backing up a list of files direct from your digital camera and they all have similar file names: DCF001221.jpg and the like, it would be incredibly easy to knock out a file (or two) and never notice.
You can't type a disc name with more than 20 characters, but you paste more than 20 characters in the name field. Visually, the result is awful (the exceeding text extrapolates the limits of the field and/or wraps in more than one line), but at least it works, and Disco burns the disc using the long name. Maybe they fix this in the final version.
I thought disco was awful, a sheer triumph of style and no features.
I also think Apple are to blame for a lot of the interface differences we see. Simply because they do not offer the widgets to developers so they can use the same look.
How many people copy the dark plastic look? lots, and because there's no standard way to do that everyone has a different shade and style, including InstantGallery.
I know a lot of devs (myself included) are hoping the dark plastic look will replace brushed metal in Leopard (this is speculation and not some insider knowledge mind you) when we get to see the final UI. That would bring some much needed consistency back to the platform.
I don't understand. Is this an Apple developed application? If not, why is this being dugg?
It reads that Apple is fucking up HIG conventions/usability, but in reality it's an independent company.
Your title, "On the death of the HIG and the triumph of eye candy over usability" seems a bit late/misguided. Aero/Leopard and even some Linux GUI bowed long ago to visual, inefficient, controls and UI.
Anonymous, the point is that the UI chaos Apple has sewn is starting to be reflected by 3rd party developers who no longer feel it's necessary to make an application Mac like so long as it superficially looks pretty. I saw a number of people predict this once we started to get more UI styles than just brushed metal and aqua, and Disco is one of the most high profile examples right now of the result of this.
Leaving the GUI behind for a moment, how can you say you like this app? It's absolutely horrible. Some of the reasons you mentioned, but no mention is made about how difficult it is to use.
How do you name the CD?
Where do you add a custom icon to the CD?
Where is the ability to burn an ISO image?
Maybe these items are indeed available, but it took me two minutes of using Toast to find them, and I absolutely can't find them in Disco.
There are a whole host of issues with Disco. And a trendy semi-transparent (God I hope that Fad goes away quick) UI isn't going to save this app.
Jim - yes there is more wrong with the app than I've covered, however I'm not reviewing the application just pointing out some of its usability flaws which stem from the non-standard UI choices made.
One thing to note is that Disco makes burning DVDs reliably from VIDEO_TS folders Just Work. This is obnoxious, but possible, to do on the command line, but Disco takes the guesswork out and gets all the fidgety compatibility things (AUDIO_TS folder present? name in caps?) right. To some people, this may be worth the price of the app.
What I would have liked to have seen, though, was _any_ indication of what it was going to do. I had no idea it would Just Work until the end, when I tested the burned DVD.
Anon, I think that's just another indication that they got their priorities all wrong when it came to designing the UI.
I just tried out this app that everyone is talking about (for all the reasons). It's bloody awful. The only redeeming feature I found is the simplicity in creating disk images...which I can do anyway in Apple's free tools.
The black transparency looks like something out of Vista, and the it doesn't seem possible to resize the main window. WTF?! You can't 'select' rows, or expand folders. If this was a widget, they might get away with it. But who is going to buy this? It needs posting to perversiontracker.
The animations are nice but overdone and the whole thing is overdesigned to ridiculous proportions. This is a fairly simple app, the core functionality of which couldn't have taken long to implement. The developers should seriously rethink their future on this platform - either that or they should switch to Windows.
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