Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/uniformity_vs_individuality_in_mac_ui_design

by mqt • 16 years ago

100 47 16 years ago

redial• 16 years ago

For better or worse, I think he is right. Non-uniformity has been the norm in Apple's apps for a while, Garageband, Aperture, every iTunes release, among others. I believe the majority of third party mac developers used to be pre OS X developers, and because of that they had and incredible amount of respect for the HIG, but now, the (problematic) apps in the Mac App Store are coming from iOS developers, who didn't grow up with the guidelines. A different UI has given them an edge in the iOS App Store, and the are gonna try the same on the mac.

microtonal2• 16 years ago

Maybe. But if the HIG is not that important anymore, I think that should also imply that Apple should allow for other UI toolkits in its stores, such as Qt.

Xuzz• 16 years ago

There's a difference between "ugly attempt at matching the standard controls" and "extending nicely into a different style of UI".

reid• 16 years ago

This idea disappoints me. The system-wide Control-Command-D dictionary works in Twitter for Mac: That doesn't work in apps written in almost-facsimiles of Cocoa. That's only one example, but these's always something quirky about these replicas which is never desirable.

CrazedGeek• 16 years ago

Do the Mac App Store guidelines actually disallow Qt apps?

If I'm reading this correctly ( http://pastie.org/1236378 ), the only major requirements are that apps don't screw around with the HIG too much, and they don't use "deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta)". Admittedly, the only Qt app I recall using on OS X is Last.fm, but that seemed to be mostly HIG-compliant (a couple things felt a tad out of place, but nothing major).

thwarted2• 16 years ago

the (problematic) apps in the Mac App Store are coming from iOS developers, who didn't grow up with the guidelines. A different UI has given them an edge in the iOS App Store, and the are gonna try the same on the mac.

So we can retire the meme that any random iOS app has a more consistent user interface than any random Android app?

Sometimes it takes seeing the apps all next to each other to realize it like http://wellplacedpixels.com/ does (which effectively documents the inconsistency in iOS apps, and this inconsistency being praised ("beautiful software")).

thmzlt• 16 years ago

What about games? They have inconsistent interfaces in their platforms (and across platforms) and still work well.

I think it has something to do with the input methods. When all you do is to click buttons and fill in forms, it makes sense to have a consistent interface. On the other hand, some iPad apps produce a great experience based on their inconsistent interfaces (as in http://www.algoriddim.com/djay-ipad and http://www.korg.com/ielectribe)

Corrado• 16 years ago

I think maybe the OS X HIG is still in place, but it is migrating to the iOS HIG. We will increasingly see more and more apps falling over to the iOS "dark side" and culminating with the release of Lion.

Personally, while I loved my iPhone and think the iOS is a great thing on a small screen I'm not a big fan of the iPad. Let me re-phrase that, I'm not a big fan of the iPad's launcher. Anyway, Lion will be a big UI step, probably in the direction of iOS and away from OS X. That kind of makes me sad and worried about the future of Mac products. On the other hand, I'm very happily a Ubuntu and Android user and maybe they will pick up the torch and grow better and better.

haribilalic• 16 years ago

The most striking thing for me between Tweetie and Twitter for Mac (Tweetie 2), other than the dark sidebar, was the use of Helvetica instead Lucida Grande. It's subtle, but I believe it's a big step toward making an app feel like it was made for OS X instead of iOS.

Reeder for Mac, another port of an iOS app, is another good example. It uses Helvetica and it uses slide animations that make me think that the Reeder window has moved a few hundred pixels to the left.

trezor• 16 years ago

I must admit I'm not really surprised to see Gruber suddenly claim non-uniform application design is a good thing when everyone starts critizing Apple for 1. inconsistent UIs and 2. bad design. Also note how he completely focuses on the inconsistent UI-issue and completely ignores the part about bad design in the OSX App Store, probably hoping it will go by unnoticed.

Really though. Isn't it always this way with Gruber? If Apple or OSX does something better or different than the other platforms it's not only good, it's the standard. It's the only way(tm). End of story. Whoever disagrees be uneducated and unsophistitcated.

The second Apple strays away from that, his response is always "but this isn't important any more" or "this is a good thing, really". Really, Gruber?

I must admit I'm getting fed up with his appologyism. If there is still insight and actual content to be found in his blog-posts, he is making it very, very hard to find.

ugh• 16 years ago

Suddenly?!

This has been a long and gradual transition (not even all that much of a transition), what he wote shouldn’t be surprising to any longtime reader of Gruber.

This piece is also mostly about Twitter for Mac, an app that was not developed by Apple.

– edit: I found one relevant article from 2004: http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/does_brushed_metal_matter

“I’ve been thinking about brushed metal windows and Apple’s inconsistent use thereof at least since Panther shipped a year ago. So, why wait until now to write about it? Well, because I just wasn’t sure it actually mattered. And I’m still unsure.”

“This is precisely at the heart of my uncertainty as to whether these brushed metal issues really matter. Maybe it is just aesthetics — merely the color of pixels, rather than how the interface truly works — and I’m looking for serious implications that aren’t there, simply because I happen to think brushed metal windows look stupid.”

(Just as a side note, all the articles on Daring Fireball from around that time – about brushed metal, clickthrough and poofing – are in my opinion some of Gruber’s best. I would very much like him to write more about stuff like that.)

demallien• 16 years ago

Wait, you can't claim that Gruber is never critical of Apple. For example, he was one of the first and most persistent critics of the iPhone App Store's submission guidelines until they were amended by Apple.

It's true that he rarely criticises Apple's design choices. But I don't think it's because of any sycophantic defence of Apple, but rather because his design aesthetic is very similar to that of the lead designers at Apple. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to see him do a piece soon on the sub-par design of the Mac App Store, because it is sub-par (at least in some aspects).

tjogin4• 16 years ago

Here's a few links to Gruber criticizing the poor state of the HIG, and Apple's design decisions:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/hockenberry_hig

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal

http://daringfireball.net/2003/05/much_ado_about_click-throu...

http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective

http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/inconsistencies

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/themes

http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/more_smart_cut_copy_paste

http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/when_in_rome

http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/does_brushed_metal_matter

That Gruber rarely criticizes Apple's design decisions is simply false. Apple's inconsistency in UI design and application of the HIG is a pet peeve of his, and it has been for many years.

statictype3• 16 years ago

When OS X was first released he was very critical of it's ui. Specifically how Finder worked (and the whole brush metal theme ). He even alluded to this in this post. Now he's merely observing how things have changed. He never claimed that he liked it.

alsomike• 16 years ago

Apple is obviously following the innovations of web app design here. People use web apps with wildly different designs all the time, and yes, there are some usability issues with that, but when consumer OSes were first being developed some decades ago, HCI researchers assumed that everything had to look exactly the same between applications or users would freak out. The web never had a single HIG, so we found out that users are much more tolerant of differences, or at least they are now.

As web apps become more important, the notion of an OS HIG needs to evolve. Obviously an app needs internal consistency, but how consistent do two apps need to be between each other? An apt comparison is the world of typography: the rules for good text layout don't specify one font for every single book, we can handle the fact that different books use different fonts. But there are still rules for good typography, they're just more general than "All uppercase G's should look like this: G." This is the direction that HIGs would need to go, but whether this is a good thing is debatable. For whatever reason, I have a hundred or so books on my bookshelf and basically all of them have very good to excellent typography. Web sites and apps have nowhere near that level of consistent quality. Native apps are better, but now we're going to start to see more of the web's no-rules design norms applied there, which probably means a few really gorgeous apps and a whole lot of crap.

trotsky• 16 years ago

People use web apps with wildly different designs all the time because there are no UI standards and there is no basic toolkit. It's a bug, not a feature.

tjogin4• 16 years ago

Apple has been straying from their own HIG for years and Gruber has been criticizing them for it every step of the way. You assume too much.

martythemaniak2• 16 years ago

It's very simple to understand - when Apple does something that's inconsistent it is bold pushing-the-envelope. When Android (to pick one of his favourite targets) is inconsistent, it's because a bunch of socially retarded engineers don't know any better and they should be more like Apple.

Really, Grubber is the tech writer equivalent of Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin - he's got so much vested in his ideology, he's gonna push it as hard as possible no matter how much mental gymnastics are needed. Amusing, but ultimately worthless.

sudont• 16 years ago

No, he isn't.

"One thing I should make clear, given some of the email I’ve gotten this week, is that I’m rooting for Android, big-time." --Gruber

Personally, I'd rather not see his articles here as they never contain any discussion of the topic, rather tons of bitching about the man himself.

jckarter• 16 years ago

A big difference between iOS and OS X is that desktop applications have more than 20 years of UI research and convention behind them, while touch interfaces have less than half (maybe even less than a quarter) that. There's thus a lot more room for experimentation in touch interfaces since there isn't as large a body of best practices. Apps that try to go their own way UI-wise on OS X are more than likely going to end up subtly violating the norms of OS X application behavior that standard Cocoa apps all follow implicitly, much like Qt apps on OS X do. Indeed, Gruber's example of Twitter 2 already misbehaves in a number of head-scratching ways: among the ones I've noticed, hitting cmd-W from the tweet list hides the entire app rather than closing the tweet window, and the "compose tweet" box floats over everything even when the app is in the background. I think the tolerance for UI annoyances like these is a lot lower, and apps that try to go their own way are going to expose them a lot more than apps that stick to the tried and tested standard widgets.

zoul• 16 years ago

Good point. One of the main reasons against non-standard UI design is that there is a huge amount of behaviour attached to the standard UI and once you start implementing your own interface elements, you’ll almost never get everything right. Keyboard shortcuts, accessibility, system hooks for other apps, etc.

gregschlom• 16 years ago

The question in the title remembered me of this quote:

"Good design is design that surprises, something that is unexpected but immediately comprehensible and pleasing."

Source: http://info.psu.edu.sa/psu/cis/phalloran/Teaching_Learning/g...

Hopka• 16 years ago

First time Gruber embeds images into a post?

fingerprinter• 16 years ago

This feels like Gruber being Gruber.

For me personally, I love Apple hardware, love the iPhone and like the iPad. I am just not a fan of OSX. I was, for about a five year period, but have gone back to Linux this past year in Ubuntu and have not looked back.

I bought my first mac in 2003/2004, Power Book G4. Tolerated the slowness that the UI had b/c it gave me something I didn't have in any other OS: A *nix base w/ a great UI.

Over time I feel that OSX's lead in this eroded as Ubuntu kept getting better and better and OSX stagnated. Now I feel I can have a rock solid Linux (Debian based Ubuntu) with a really good UI that just works without weird restrictions. OSX isn't the only player in town anymore in that front and since I can install it on cheaper hardware, that is awesome.

statictype3• 16 years ago

I think the cold truth is that in the OS X era, Apple's designers have been increasingly favoring eye candy over usability and consistency. OS X certainly looks better than just about any other OS I've seen, but other things like Fitt's Law and consistency have taken a back seat.

gnok• 16 years ago

Do you have any examples of violations of Fitts law in OS X that weren't present in OS9?

statictype3• 16 years ago

Those small traffic light buttons come to mind. The traffic light buttons are tiny and extremely difficult to acquire targets. The resize handle is another. It's not only small, often times it's right near the dock at the bottom and ao whenever you try to resize a window you end up moving over the dock. This is exacerbated by the magnification effect on the dock of it's turned on.

chadk• 16 years ago

Consistency is still important, especially on the "truck" computers which are much more prone to damaging actions by novice users compared to iOS. Hell, messing with standard interface elements can even mess advanced users up. Opened up Logic or Sound space designer recently?

Maybe regular users _are_ getting more used to different looking widgets (eg. All the different kinds of custom buttons on websites) but I don't think the HIG should be binned just yet. It needs to be abstracted: specific UI concepts/patterns, rather than specific colors of dropdown menus etc. That said, universal, system level elements like window controls shouldn't be messed with IMO.

toddmorey• 16 years ago

I really agree with this perspective. I think folks get too hung up on the actual appearance vs. the usability. Sometimes I don't like the look when apps recolor standard controls, but I don't find them less usable. Just don't change usability patterns like keyboard shortcuts or the ability for a window to be minimized to the dock.

jasonkester2• 16 years ago

That screenshot sums up my experience with Twitter nicely: A dozen random thoughts, truncated to fit a certain size, thus requiring investment to decipher, which at the end reveals somebody talking about something that's only really interesting to themselves, and actually makes you feel slightly embarrassed for them.

My assumption was that other people were using some form of magic tool that filtered out relevent stuff and presented it in a coherent form. Since this looks like a screenshot from the author's own system, it seems that even power-users are seeing the same useless garbage that I do.

Why would you install something like this on your computer?

nollidge• 16 years ago

On Twitter, you don't follow people who talk about things you're not interested in. It's that simple.

Now, obviously, nobody's 100% interesting all the time. So, yes, there is a "magic tool" to filter out uninteresting things: your brain. You see something that relies on context you're not privy to, you skip over it. It's that simple. You don't read Twitter, you scan it.

Everyone who criticizes Twitter seems to think that people use it to read boring things. No, I don't usually care what the people I'm following had for breakfast - except when Patton Oswalt describes his quick eats on a busy day [1]. Now, you might not find that funny. In which case, you stop following him, or you just furl your brow and keep skimming.

[1] http://twitter.com/#!/pattonoswalt/status/23362445531684864

jasonkester2• 16 years ago

Was that link an attempt to point out something good on Twitter, or to point out one of the tweets that you have to filter out to get use from it? It took a while to parse, then turned out to be, well, let's say I want my 5 seconds back.

Actually, can anybody here point to a single good Twitter message so that I can see what one looks like?

larsberg• 16 years ago

Well, all the OSX users should just Thank Steve that the XCode designer is no Visual Basic so at least you're limited to people with a significant amount of development savvy doing non-standard UI. Otherwise, you'd have the hodge-podge horror that's been visited upon Windows for the last decade and a half or so.

It'll get there, though, just wait! I'll chuckle when I see the first 200x200 OK/CANCEL buttons in AppStore screen shots :-)

Entlin• 16 years ago

"In Mac OS X, Apple began experimenting"

Just a little nitpick: Actually, it started already with OS 9. Who does't remember the ugly brushed metal changes to Quicktime Player 4 and Sherlock 2? Apparently Gruber :-)

Timothee• 16 years ago

I think that HIG and default UI libraries are great to give the default app a consistent and decent look and UX. It makes it possible for anyone to write an app that behaves and looks at a good enough level.

But, unique interfaces that stray away from these are just fine as long as it results in a better UI/UX. iOS apps have shown in a lot of cases that developers that care can make something that are highly customized for the better (e.g. apps from TapBots (http://tapbots.com/) or TapTapTap (http://taptaptap.com/))

hkuo• 16 years ago

I don't think people should look at this as an all-or-nothing debate. I think there is an importance to following an HIG as a basic guideline and stray from it as it seems appropriate or for the sake of creativity. It's when it strays too far from it when things can become problematic.

Just like with traffic laws, not coming to a full stop at a stop sign is not equal to speeding down a highway going in the opposite direction of traffic.

Apple straying and introducing a metallic patten does not equal the extent of an Adobe Air application forcing me to hit an icon button to access preferences rather than through the common menu bar location. One is aesthetic while the other is functional. And basically, one irritates me way more than the other.

Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design

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