Well, they mostly changed the looks, so it's kinda of changing the colour of your car, it's not that the previous one was wrong, only different.
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iOS design language
- Thread starter Andrew73875
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Exactly. It’s still the same car and you drive it the same way, but it looks fresh.
Staying with my automotive analogy, a brand of cars might decide to make a new minor revision of a popular model. The new revision might have better bumpers, better seats, a more environmentally sound engine, all things that improve the experience. Then maybe they figured out they can install a cheaper default sound system and charge premium for the better one, something that cuts costs for them and worsen the experience for the customers. And then they change the colours. Some they replace entirely, some come in a new shade. Thing is, this won’t make for a better or worse car, but it’s what will get the newer version noticed in the street. Had it come in the same colours you wouldn’t have noticed, but with the new ones you will. Maybe you’ll stop and take a look at those fancy new seats, maybe you’ll even consider buying a new car.
Back to apple, I remember that El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra had been accused of being “boring” updates, as they looked identical to Yosemite; Mojave brought dark mode and got much more interest with that.
Back to apple, I remember that El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra had been accused of being “boring” updates, as they looked identical to Yosemite; Mojave brought dark mode and got much more interest with that.
Snow Leopard was released as a "refinement" update without big new features. Refinement of the OS was also the main marketing message:
Most people are happy with the OS that just works and looks great.
As Jony Ive said "rather than being consumed by reinvention, this is one of those fantastic opportunities to be very clear about what is right and we don't want to change. So that we can put all of our energy improving those aspects of the product that we can make better".
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I remember well, and it was promptly accused of being a boring update. Of course it worked really well, so it became quickly much loved.
It was not quickly loved and didn't "just work" when released. Snow Leopard had some serious bugs for months after its release, such as one that deleted the user's entire home folder. It was only later that people started praising the OS.
Are you saying iOS 7 was only a “change in looks?” I just want to make sure I understand. THX!
I wrote “mostly”, not “only”. Big difference.
But if they had added the features they added keeping the looks in line with iOS 6 and before it wouldn’t have been a controversial update at all.
The control center was a great addition and the new multitasking switcher worked much better than the old one, aside from these and minor improvements such as the better folders the most important thing for the end user was the new looks.
Thanks for clarifying. Though I disagree and would call iOS 7's re-imagined interface methodology a much bigger change than mostly just looks, which is my biggest critique of iOS 7 and everything since then.
Additions like control center shouldn't count as a "pro" of iOS 7. New features such as control center could be (and should be) included when "invented," and should ideally be added to an already-robust interface rather than be introduced in parallel with introducing a completely reinvented interface that many recognize as being full of compromises for the sake of "something new."
In which way the ios7 interface works differently than iOS6? The only thing I can’t honk of is swiping left to go back, the rest pretty much works exactly like before, with the interaction changeling only because things look different.
As for the control center, it already existed in the jailbreak world in 2008 or so, it was hardly “invented” with iOS 7.
As for the control center, it already existed in the jailbreak world in 2008 or so, it was hardly “invented” with iOS 7.
one thing that annoys me is that the data picker changes depending on what you are trying to do within iOS itself. For example, it already differs between night shift and dark mode or the calendar.
And of course most multi tasking gesture things on iPadOS are not intuitive at all. I would go as far as saying that most people do not even know it exists (for example, swipe up and drag an app from the dock to open it in a multi screen window? Who came up with that?) I still do not really know how these additional 3 dots at the top of the screen work nor do I really feel like getting into it.
And of course most multi tasking gesture things on iPadOS are not intuitive at all. I would go as far as saying that most people do not even know it exists (for example, swipe up and drag an app from the dock to open it in a multi screen window? Who came up with that?) I still do not really know how these additional 3 dots at the top of the screen work nor do I really feel like getting into it.
What do you mean?
Totally agreed. I pretty much use only pinch to go back to home and swipe to the sides to switch to the next app.
4 different apps / settings, 4 different ways how the date / time picker is presented
On Night Shift, it is an extra step on a separate page
Yet for Dark mode you can change it right from the same screen
For reminders it suddenly looks like this
while on calendar it is completely irritating
In a nutshell, most everything.
That was Jony's supposed driving force for the rework. Otherwise it would be rather odd for Apple/Jony to say that iOS7 works the same as before but is just nicer/newer looking (in their opinion).
The wholesale reinvention across the UI of moving to "text as buttons" is a huge functional change. To this day I have yet to read a solid explanation of what was broken before, and how the change is better and fixed/improved things. I’ve only sensed that the change was for something different and new. But it was a very poor decision for several reasons, and is much more than just an appearance change. First it's a step backwards for easy/quick cognition -- text as buttons removes the prior ability to clearly differentiate actionable items from info-only items, as well as for indicating "state," as in, enabled or not enabled. Secondly, it adds complexity that was previously necessary -- in the initial version of iPhone/iPad OS's, I thought it was wonderfully elegant and obvious how, when you opened a contact after a call or text, the number just used to contact you was highlighted blue. That stuck out for me since whatever phone I was using prior (Palm Treo?) did not have that feature that felt so "obviously" needed. With iOS7, blue text no longer could be used so they had to add a RECENT type of indicator, much less elegant.
The imagined strategy of using colored font to different actionable from info-only black font then removed the option to use different colored text in an app for indicating different states/info/options. Last, and maybe most importantly, the tap/contact area of a single word is much smaller than a button shape such that it's often hard to connect and get an action the first time, and secondly your fingertip covers the text so you lose the benefit of seeing a color change to indicate "pressed." Poor execution of a reinvention in iOS 7.
The forced-use of circles as an theme for indications and controls was (and remains) just dumb. 5 circles for signal strength indicators in place of the industry-standard bars was quickly fixed. The entire clock/stopwatch/timer app interface was wholesale unnecessarily reinvented from something that looked obvious for use instantaneously, to a minimalist space-age interface that took some thought to initially use. When apps got updated in iOS7, the entire icon was clouded out and a circular clock/circle would advance until it was updated. The shading was so dark, it was not possible to see what the app icon stood for, and depending upon the icon color, you couldn't see the update status circle itself. This replaced the blue bar that would advance across the bottom of the icon; nothing there was broken and in need of reinvention. Same for how a webpage would load in safari; before, the entire address bar would advance in blue left to right as the page load; iOS 7 brought in a simple small underline that would advance, which was hard to see unless you focused on it. Change for the sake of seeing something now, and not without negative functional trade-offs.
In fact, and I don't know if Apple/iOS 7 or Google is to blame, but the shifting towards using underlines to indicate a "selected item" is also a to-this-day poor "improvement." Less obvious for function, less elegant for form.
iOS7's pervasive shift towards using faint, light-grey text throughout was a huge interface change that was not only more difficult to read than darker text of the prior 3 decades of computers and hundreds of decades of the printed word/symbols, but also completely obliterated the decades-old understanding that light grey text meant not-selectable or not-selected (depending upon the button shading). Huge change from prior interface norms. Not sure what someone thought was broken before.
iOS7's calendar was an initial fail in that it was not possible to easily look at calendar entries in list view.
iOS7's weather app was a major fail in that the flat-design outline-only weather icons were difficult to read quickly and required extra time and concentration to understand. A hollow sun looked like a hollow cloud looked like a hollow gusty wind icon. What was wrong with a yellow sun, white cloud, and blue wind that used to enable instant understanding.
Well those are just some of the major interface changes, all for the worse, some of which were rightfully corrected quickly, and some of which still unfortunately linger to today.
I found that reinvented interaction to be a change for the worse.
Similar to how iOS 7's app update circle obscured the app icon, the "slide the entire message to the left" for acting on emails was disrupting. Much preferred sliding and seeing buttons to press while still being able to recognize the message. iOS 7 slide the entire message line offscreen to where you no longer could see the message, which again, was a fancy new animation that didn't fix anything wrong before but also reduced the ability to see what you were acting on. Life is full of interruptions and sometimes when you're working on a mobile device, your attention is called away just after a swipe. Then when I return minutes later, I often have to unswipe to see the message again in order to act on it. The new animation swipe was merely fun for the design studio to work on something different; in real life, it doesn't offer much more than you had before other than being something different and new.
iOS7's voicemail message screen was pure utter trash, where tapping on any message resulted in the screen shifting and morphing into a completely different state. Any follow-the-bouncing-ball screen changes are unsettling and distracting when you have to move your finger and refocus on what you were working on. This is a reason the Backstage in Microsoft Office 365 apps is a fail to many. Before iOS7, maintaining the voicemail controls in one location atop the screen made much more sense and was quicker and easier to use.
I agree and in an earlier post stated that iOS7 should be given no credit as being better because of control center. Control center could have been an added refinement to the prior iOS easily.
iOS 7 thru today's interfaces rely too much on exploration and discovery instead of baking in near-instantaneous obviousness based on human nature and decades of user interface best practices. Jony and his designers had time in their studios to massage their chins while ruminating thoughtfully when coming up with new "reinvented here" breakthroughs, while the users would benefit more from interfaces remained focused on refinements for being intuitive, efficient, and preferably thoughtfully beautiful.
As was most everything else.
Equating "changing the color of your car" to "iOS 7's interface vs. prior interfaces" makes sense only if you're changing from a blue SUV to a light silver left-hand-drive Prius.
Users wanting "exciting" OS overhauls are so barking up the wrong tree. Once you have a well-established interface, it makes so zero sense to do a 180-turn redesign. When it comes to fashion, food, wall colors...it feels OK to want something fresh and different. Plus those not wanting to change really need not change. However, at no time do manufacturers force across-the-board changes like relocating zippers and buttons to our backsides, or changing from a 3 or 4 pronged fork to 1-prong for the sake of something new. Nobody tears down the walls in the house and replace them with drop ceiling panels. But a change to (or back to) bell-bottom pants, fine. Change the wall colors, fine. Or refine a wall by replacing wood paneling with drywall. Great. The point is, it's great to desire a fresh coat of paint here & there, or more significantly, a great new app that uses an already-great interface. But wholesale reworking of basic interface elements that were previously refined after decades of learning only make sense if you're Google or Windows circa-2010 who's competing with Apple and needing to make something safely different... Apple's reworking their interfaces from 10 years ago made zero sense then and we're still paying for it in certain respects to today.
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Basically everything you described is just a skin, the interaction works much the same as before. It is a much worse skin, that hinders usability, but I suspect there are plenty of themes in the jailbreak world that restores most of the old look and that once you applied one of those you’d barely notice a difference from iOS 6. Now, I might even be tempted to jailbreak one of my devices again to see how it goes, thinking of it...
You cite the calendar and as it looks by default it’s a mess, and I was at a loss the first time I launched it, but tapping around I quickly discovered you can make it look a d behave pretty much like the old one. The fact I don’t really know how to do that precisely is a testament to how unintuitive the new interface can be, but the option is there.
The time selectors, on the other hand, are wildly inconsistent, as you noted above, and were turned from something easy and FUN to use to the current boring and unpredictable mess.
It’s not all bad, though: the new (copied from android) suggestion features of the keyboard were a good idea, for example.
Don’t agree here: I really find the swipe to go back and swipe to delete features to be small but useful improvements.
You cite the calendar and as it looks by default it’s a mess, and I was at a loss the first time I launched it, but tapping around I quickly discovered you can make it look a d behave pretty much like the old one. The fact I don’t really know how to do that precisely is a testament to how unintuitive the new interface can be, but the option is there.
The time selectors, on the other hand, are wildly inconsistent, as you noted above, and were turned from something easy and FUN to use to the current boring and unpredictable mess.
It’s not all bad, though: the new (copied from android) suggestion features of the keyboard were a good idea, for example.
I think we're seeing two different things. It's ok if that's your stance. I feel I'm more sensitive (and critical) of anything I perceive as being worse than before. As in, it wasn't broke, it's less obvious (and more distracting sometimes) to use than before, and it's not necessarily better now that I've adjusted to the new method. So what was broken and how was it "fixed?"
Why should someone need to jailbreak to regain what used to be there?
I think in the same sentence you agree and disagree with me. I think I've done a decent job brining up the steps backwards, so I would ask out of curiosity to learn how others feel:
What's some of the small but useful improvements in the swiping the message header offscreen vs. the prior method that left the message in view?
And after you relearned the new calendar, did it help you to find fault with what was broken before? What was broken and then fixed?
I think you mean the post by @contacos above, with which I agree.
Those inconsistencies are, I feel, the result of implementing something different from before that now needs active thought to "follow" and implement. Much of iOS 7's reinvented interface elements that continue thru to today were not intuitive, which means: it's hard for various different programmers and designers and app developers implement things consistently when they're not "obvious/intuitive" and "easy." The bad effects are especially pronounced when less talented developers try to create something within Apple's current HIG. A more robust, intuitive, function-focused HIG lent itself better to producing apps with higher odds of being robust, intuitive, efficient, etc. Work with garbage tools, create garbage output.
It's a whole new discussion how iOS7-today's iOS's vague/minimalist interface elements result in less-talented app developers creating utter messes as they dance around trying to implement less-obvious less-efficient interface elements. The LIFX, Wyze, and Simplisafe apps that I use daily were ruined beyond recognition once they "upgraded" to a flat-design icon and a wasted-white-space reinvented app.
Again, that's something that could have been added to any interface, and not just an updated reinvention like iOS 7.
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I think we’re basically arguing semantics here: you say that the nee interface works differently, I think it doesn’t, it looks differently. But since the new skin is so bad the interaction becomes less intuitive, effectively making the GUI less practical.
Marketing. Every few years they have to do big redesigns to keep people interested in the “new thing”. Blame it on capitalism, if you will.
Nothing was broken, minimalism was trendy and skeuomorphism “old”, so we got iOS 7.
They shouldn’t. I’m just saying the functionality is all still there, hidden under that minimalist skin.
I agree that the default view is a mess while pointing out that the old one is only a few taps away.
It’s one tap less, doing the same thing is slightly faster than before. Never had any issue with deleting mails by error.
I didn’t. I switched to the old view and forgot about the new one.
see above.
Totally agreed.
A bigger question is why Apple still has vestiges of iOS7 still left over. Phone screens got bigger but all they did was stretch the OS. The 'back' shortcut. Notification center. Control center. Spare home icons: all are out of reach of a thumb when using the phone one-handed.
Using an iPhone 13 as an example there should be *zero* user interactions outside of the bottom 2/3 of the phone display. How can this be solved? I am glad you asked....
- Adopt the universal screen-edge 'back' gesture from Android.
- Completely remove the notification shade and control center from the top of the screen. Instead have control center sit one screen to the right in the otherwise under-utilised app switcher view and have notifications come in from the bottom-up, a solution Palm came up with 13 years ago. The app-switcher would then let you pull up the notifications.
- On the lock screen notifications would appear as normal and replace the camera swipe with control center as it already has the button at the bottom.
I think the issue here is that iOS is running on iPhones of different screen sizes. Starting from iPhone SE 1 and up to iPhone 13 Pro Max. Ideally, the UI should be different on all of these iPhones. Like it was different on iPads and iPhones in the beginning.
"Let's redesign it all. Let's redesign, reimagine and rebuild every single app from the ground up, specifically for the iPad".
Some UI elements which are perfect for iPhone SE 1 screen are not suitable for iPhone 13 Max and vice versa.
As you mentioned, all important UI elements should be reachable by a thumb.
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Reachibility? Not the most obvious solution, but it exists, and totally changed my perception of handling large screens when I went from an iPhone 4 to a 6S
Reach the top of the iPhone screen with one hand
Use Reachability to lower the top half of the iPhone screen and make it more easily accessible with one hand.
support.apple.com
There are also UI elements to consider that you don't always want within immediate reach, like buttons that you don't want users to accidentally touch, or less important buttons that don't need constant access. Those are fine being left further out of reach, especially when you don't want to or can't cram everything in one place at the bottom.
Wow. What made Jony change his tune so abruptly just a few years later? Or was he maybe crossing his fingers out of Steve’s view, squeezing a Scott Forstall voodoo doll in his pocket, and just playing nice when he said this?
I don’t follow… iOS has this. I think it had it first!
Reachability is a complete fudge of a solution. Is that really the best the millionaire software designers at Apple can come up with?
It doesn't work the same across every app. On Android I can swipe in from *any* screen edge and it takes me back a screen or up one level depending on what my previous interaction was. Apple's back swipe only works in certain situations, for example a web page or back up from message>inbox>All folders in mail, at which point it stops. Its not the same and not as useful.