Comment by kristopolous

And it's the UX designer's job to specify the click target area based on best practices and usability testing with real users.

If this is the click target area specified by the designer (or it was simply unspecified) then it's absolutely the designer's fault. I'm a UX designer and I've made mistakes like this before, though this one is pretty egregious because the issue is core to the interaction.

It's sometimes easy as a UX designer to forget to specify some of the smaller details (though this example isn't what I'd call a "small detail"), particularly because they're the kinds of things you don't notice when they work, and I don't have to implement it. The developer has to sit down and write code for what will or will not happen.

I've made mistakes in the past where in an mobile interface I neglected to specify the click target area for some controls. Typically the minimum clickable area we'd use was something like 44x44 but the visual was smaller than that, and I didn't specify it, so the developer made the visible element the one that would respond to the click events. It was too small and it caused issues. I owned up to that one, I didn't want to let the developer take the blame for that.

I've also been fortunate enough to work with developers who would notice these things and then ask me if it was intended and whether they should increase the clickable area. I was always so grateful to have colleagues like that, and I'd always offer to set some time aside to come take a look at things on their local environment before they moved things forward just to catch any issues where they could immediately fix it instead of having to push fixes later on.

I don't know where the failure happened at Apple, but based on what I've seen from "Liquid Glass" it's clear there's some real institutional failures involving either the design leadership, the development leadership, or somewhere in between both. It's really quite embarrassing the quality of GUI and UX that has come out of Apple recently.

This is the first time ever where the hurdle of rolling back my iPhone to an earlier version of iOS feels worth the effort. I disabled as much of the liquid glass effects as I could because I found it difficult to read and now it all looks like shit, whereas before I could read it and it looked nice.

In this specific case, yea, the programmers might be at fault, but most of my gripes with Liquid Glass are not like this. They are design issues. This seems like maybe more of a bug stemming from an underlying design issue (corner radius being ridiculously large).

Is that something the programmer decides or are they just implementing what the designer decided?

I'm fond of saying that most problems in the software world are due to one thing trying to do two things, or two things trying to do the same thing. In this case, it feels like the former: getting the same implementation to cater to both desktop and mobile is obviously the most efficient solution from a development perspective, but not an end user (and ultimately business) perspective.

Because they absolutely can't have disparate visual styles in their product lines, practicality be damned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ll add a third perspective that’s probably often gone unsaid: I love it on Apple TV, and kinda like it on iPhone and Mac. It definitely needs to be improved though. There are definitely a whole bunch of usability issues, but they shouldn’t be too hard to fix. And Apple has shown willingness to iterate until they get it right. Unlike Microsoft which just moves onto the next thing (the system settings UI design in Windows 11 is fine.. but can they pleeeease just integrate all settings into that UI now.. how many generations of settings / control panes are there in Windows now?)

The huge corner radius is one thing I do wish they reverted in Mac OS.

I love it both on an iPhone and a Mac. It runs great and it looks great. It’s a mistake to look at what people say on the internet. They are usually hopelessly contrarian.

Apple designers used to build interactive demos in Macromedia Director, so I'm assuming they knew a bit about scripting. That probably helped them think in a way that really clicks with software development.

I've worked with some younger designers who couldn't even put together a consistent click-dummy once the client wanted to see flows outside the happy path. To be fair, all they really had to go on was their education and Figma's panels.

This is a pretty discriminatory comment that I’ve honestly seen zero hint of in reality. And this is coming from someone who didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I honestly rarely even find out what school my colleagues went to school. But the ones I know who did go to those prestigious schools are beyond humble.

True, if they'd kept the function keys and just added the touch bar above it it would have been great. Weird thing is there was more than enough space for both so I don't understand why they didn't do that.

Curious why you liked it so much. Removing the fn keys was a big no-no, yes, but also it was just located in a place I'm never going to look at. So why do you think it would've been a hit feature?

Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)

The fn keys you can almost circumvent, but the escape key? Common!

> You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons

I don't know, I conclude the opposite. If you need accurate color reproduction when you publish online, you are doing something wrong.

I used to co-own a small digital printing business, so I'm aware of what all of it means, and I had an appropriate monitor myself and a paid Adobe Design Suite subscription.

But for the web, when our setup is too good it's actually a detriment. It is predictable that you end up publishing things that require your quality setup. There is a good reason not to bother with a high quality monitor usable for serious publishing and photo/video editing when you only do web thing. Which is exactly why when I bought my last monitor, which is for business work and coding and web browsing and other mundane things, I deliberately ignored all the very high quality displays, even though the company would have paid whatever I chose. It is not an advantage for that use case.

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Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.