Comment by drob518 2 days ago
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
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).
Exactly. I don't know how about "big design houses" like Apple, but in my small shop designers _only_ care about static screen stories. They don't care how user will click those icons, how focus will work, how any dynamic aspects of complex UI works.
In past it was "given" by desktop env, now it's all rebuilt in material or other design but without any advanced behavior, it only "looks good on static screen".
At a place like Apple, I can bet that it's not like some contract engineering shop where a blob of programmers just sit there blindly implementing whatever is written by someone else in Jira tickets. The final product that ships in the OS is going to be the result of massive, often heated negotiation between HI and the engineering DRI. A huge change to the look and feel is unlikely to be implemented if there's strenuous objection from engineering leadership.
> The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability
I bet designers aren't at fault here either because Liquid Glass violates at least three rules of design every second that passes.
https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design#good-design-is-i...
Instead OP mentioned "visual artists"; I agree. Liquid Glass is an art show; something that belongs in the realm of concept cars, not on the road.
The worst part here is that the style works decently on mobile but they shoehorned it onto a 25-year-old UI and shipped it.
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)_/¯
To be fair, there is sorta kinda a mobile version: Phosh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosh
And amusingly Ubuntu uses Qt for its phone clone of Gnome.
Allegedly the next gen MBPs will have a touch screen. I think Apple have pushed a touch-enabled macOS UI out a year ahead of the hardware: maybe to iron out issues; maybe 'cos they could... I worry that we're stuck with this shit for a few more years, 'til the touch screen goes the way of the touch bar.
yeah, but somehow consistency was not a concern when picking icons for menu items. as pointed out by some previous discussions on this matter.
i also hate this "consistency" idea. was working on mobile app for android/ios. and a requirement was for apps to look identical on both platforms. whyyyyy. sure for designer it looks nice, but as a user who uses either ios OR android im used to conventions of particular platform. why throw that all away just to look identical an both platforms.
Consistency is the absolute fucking worst design principle.
I hate it too, but to my surprise, all of my colleagues (with an iPhone) said they love because it looks great.
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 had friends use those exact words but replaced with "Windows Phone" and "Windows 8 Computer".
> It’s a mistake to look at what people say on the internet.
Touché.
The navigation top bar on iOS especially is a huge improvement overall. Especially for views that stack a safe area bar in the second line.
I suppose it’s exactly the programmer’s job to make sure cursor grabs the edge of the curved window border, not the arbitrary point outside.