Moving Targets

I was reminded of Apple's WWDC 2013 intro recently:

"The first thing we ask is: What do we want people to feel? Delight. Surprise. Love. Connection. Then we begin to craft around our intention. It takes time. There are a thousand no’s for every yes. We simplify, we perfect, we start over, until everything we touch enhances each life it touches. Only then do we sign our work: Designed by Apple in California."

Ironically, this was the event that introduced iOS 7's design. Also ironic that "it takes time" coincided with the rushed yearly cadence. Apple have been signing lots of shoddy work for so long.

Why can't they make the buttons smaller? But this is not "modern".

However, I immediately got rid of the stupid categories. I had 3 emails from my ticket system in the inbox. One email was a "promotion" and the another one was an "update". This is a dumb as the random follow-ups from 2 years ago.

I'm encountering a similarly frustrating issue when logging my medications intake on my iPhone.

After long pressing on the notification, 3 options appear in the form of text: (1) Log as taken (2) Log as skipped and I don't remember the third option.

However, within a second or so, a small icon appears on the left of each option shifting the first one up in such a way that as I'm about to tap on it (Log as taken), it's actually the second one that appears under my touch target and so I end up logging 3 medications as skipped, have to open the Health app, then manually update the log for 3 pills separately..

This is not the Apple that I used to love.

My favorite version of this is the mobile version of Apple Maps.

If you’re the sort of person that regularly uses different transportation modes — not just driving, but walking, biking, and public transit — then there’s this years-long super annoying bug where if you look up a location and try to bring up directions, then try to tap on the icon for car/foot/bike/bus, that row of icons will have jumped upwards just as the directions interface was rendered, and you end up instead tapping on the text box to search for a different starting location. That, in turn, brings up the on-screen keyboard, pushing the rest of the display upward and away from where you were trying to tap. And hey presto, you’re now playing three-card monte trying to figure out what’s going to be under your fingertip as you try tapping on the juggling icons.

I don’t know why the interface needs to be constructed from the bottom & push things “up” as interface widgets are instantiated, which almost always triggers this moving icons problem, rather than anchoring the interface in a consistent way so that when we tap on a frequently used icon, we can reliably predict where it’s going to be. This seems like it should be a straightforward issue to fix, but as this post shows, it’s emblematic of a general UX problem with all of Apple’s interfaces and they way that UIs get dynamically constructed on the fly.

There needs to be UI / UX commandments.

THOU SHALT NOT MOVE THE UI UNLESS TRIGGERED BY AN EXPLICIT USER ACTION.

THOU SHALT NOT DISPLAY THE UI UNTIL ALL OF IT IS READY TO BE DISPLAYED IN ITS CORRECT AND FINAL PLACE.

THOU SHALL NOT USE HOVER ZONES.

Naturally the punishment for breaking these commandments is death.

@Bri: Time to bring back Scaphism /joking