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Why is Big Sur so ugly?
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I think the word for the look is not ugly, but childish. I am talking particularly about the boot desktop image. But that is probably natural for the people that make such decisions.
The stark mostly-white interface peppered with thin, low-contast font is getting to be too much to handle.
Every time I view the mail app in Monterey (which is very similar to Big Sur) next to my fiancé’s MacBook Air that’s running Sierra, I cry a little bit.
The interface from the Mavericks/Sierra timeframe was so much more easier to use by virtue of smart use of shading/borders, font sizes/colors, and icons.
Many of the all-white Big Sur/Monterey interface elements look completely amateurish and unfinished…. It looks like a mock-up and not a finished product. The various interface zones blend in together to where it’s sometimes counter-productive, especially when navigating sub folders and filing or pulling up older emails. I find it to be very helpful when the menu area, folders area, message list, and email areas are more distinctly separated visually, and when the fonts have a thicker heft/spacing to better differentiate sub folders from parent folders.
Everything in Big Sur & Monterey blends in together, seemingly harkening to the B.S. gibberish spewed from Apple during the iOS 7-introduction days, regarding making the controls blend seamlessly into the content, so as to not “distract” the user.
🐂 💩🚨
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I swear if some of the old heads on this message board had their way, our apps would still be covered in brushed metal, leather and green felt.
Um, likely not. Sure there may be some here that miss the Christopher Columbus compass and the Roy Rogers address book, but don’t mix up those heavy-handed-at-times skeumorphism elements with the common-sensical, intuitive interface elements that were function-first focused and built on decades of human interface lessons-learning but thrown out with the bath water by Jony Ive’s iOS7 form-first fashion ego project.
And don’t confuse old heads with function-first-form-second thinking.
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Um, likely not. Sure there may be some here that miss the Christopher Columbus compass and the Roy Rogers address book, but don’t mix up those heavy-handed-at-times skeumorphism elements with the common-sensical, intuitive interface elements that were function-first focused and built on decades of human interface lessons-learning but thrown out with the bath water by Jony Ive’s iOS7 form-first fashion ego project.
And don’t confuse old heads with function-first-form-second thinking.
iOS 7 had higher user satisfaction than iOS 6, so no, I disagree.
I think iOS 7 was a mess because of all the frame drops and performance issues that took years to fix but but from a UI/UX it was step in the right direction.
Skeuomorphism at the end of Jobs' era was showboaty, distracting, and made less room for content. It was so bad that when Jobs let the Mac team bring all the awful iOS 5 elements to OS X Lion, I simply stopped upgrading. I used Snow Leopard for many years -- I think up until Mavericks or Yosemite.
We'll probably never see eye-to-eye on this topic but flat design, when implemented correctly, is quite literally function over form.
Source? Proof? Curious to learn more objective data.
Here’s one area we’ll agree. UI elements like the 1800’s compass, country western address book, green felt Game Center could fairly be called as form over function, more art than science. Maybe the stitched border took up a little room around the margins. But those are vastly different from certain basic UI controls that were also reinvented in iOS7 and often not for the better but instead, different and for the worse by virtue of being less direct, less clear, less intuitive, etc.
UI controls should always be clearly easy to identify from the background and easy/clear to use efficiently quickly. UI elements should not be “hidden in plain sight” like text-as-buttons, which also are often small and easily covered by the fingertip such that the user gets no clear indication that it’s being pressed until you lift the finger (thinking of the countless times I have to press 2-3x the “Hide” text-only button on the iPHone dialer, or teeny tiny text-button controls in various apps like DirectTVStream in order to get the desired function). The UI should not be a stark white interface such that everything blends together, made especially bad with the use of low contrast, thin font that is much harder to read/navigate for many. I could go on with examples I’ve repeated dozens of times but why repeat. The overly minimalist flat-design whiteout form/aesthetic did rid the world of the skeumorphism that “made less room for content” for many, but it also “made less room” for intuitive, quick, efficient use in many instances at the same time. Less isn’t always more, often less is less.
Here's an interesting PDF
In a nutshell, iOS 6 was slightly less of a cognitive load because it was more familiar than iOS 7. However, because of the improvement of efficiencies in iOS 7 (like Control Center, and fixing multitasking), respondents were happier with iOS 7.
I'm sure if one digs deeper you may find similar cases but the point is there wasn't a drop-off in usability going from iOS 6 to iOS 7.
I understand this position. But we were already used to text buttons. Text buttons pre-date iPhone. The very website you're on has text buttons. Look at the MacRumors menu bar. Look at the footer.
Most of the world owns a smartphone. Having a little box around an 'Edit' text button at the top right corner (where it's been for over a decade) isn't going to 'improve' efficiency for anyone.
Also, how many people are pressing 'Edit' in any given app? Maybe once a day?
Does it need to be a prominent 'I'm-right-here-in-your-face!' button when you're spending most of your time using the content, not the OS UI?
There may be apps with garbage UIs like DirectTV's but there were always lots of apps with garbage UIs.
Have you used a modern iOS app? Or macOS? Most 'buttons' are icons these days.
Look at Mail, or Messages, or Safari, or heck even FCPX. Loads of icons. They don't need a little rectangle around them for most people to know what they are.
Anyway, we can argue about this for days but until you find a 'more' intuitive OS that's as powerful as iOS, and compare their usability studies, these are all just a matter of opinions and taste.
Thanks for that article, I never saw it before, it was a good read but also helps provide strength to some of my points.
Your statement above includes an apples-oranges example. First, control center and fixing multitasking could have been implemented in any OS, be it iOS 7’s flatter, vaguer OS or iOS 6’s “more obvious” OS. It’s rather unfair to reward iOS 7 for introducing certain high level interface improvements that could have been added to any maturing iOS.
Jumping down to the “Results by Platform” in that article, it’s the controversial aspects of iOS 7 that hurt it and were completely unnecessary. That article tends to brush off users’ “quibbles and controversies” over iOS 7" a bit too quickly, seemingly in an attempt to focus more on the benefits of new features introduced in iOS 7’s than the steps backwards in intuitive, efficient, obvious interface design. It’s those quibbles and controversies over the increased vagueness aspects of flat design & iOS 7 in general, plus the rather unnecessary complete revamping of all controls/icons across the board (seemingly for the sake of something new more than anything else) that penalizes iOS 7.
Rewarding iOS 7 for things like control center and multitasking is like putting two different cups on the table, filling only one with coffee, and then proclaiming the design of the first one as clearly better, and the design of the empty one as clearly worse.
Oh yeah? This article explains well my point, by focusing on the quibbles and controversies that the article you shared seemed to just brush off.
There were text-as-buttons too with iOS6. Yet as a whole, the HIG for iOS 6 (beyond the stitched leather, brushed aluminum, and green felt) had much more obvious, intuitive, and efficient interface that lent text-as-buttons to "just work" much more intuitively.
iOS 7 seemed to start to use greyed-out text as "available" while, prior, greyed-out meant an unavailable command.
iOS 7 started using text-as-buttons a bit too broadly; I have yet to use a post-iOS 6 video streaming service or music player for which the teeny-tiny buttonless icons for play, rewind, pause, etc. don't often require 2-3 taps to get the command to work. Things were much better when those commands had larger button shape areas for a more secure, definite pressing.
Now come on, you picked one function that, sure, does not need to be at the forefront at all times. I’m talking about various apps that require a slide or swipe or tap to access a function one uses constantly in that app. For the sake of a “clean interface,” it takes more work than before. That’s the major failing with iOS 7 and beyond.
However you do bring up another issue I take with the post-iOS7 flat design. Now that everything is flat and borderless, most times when one holds their finger to pop up iOS's edit tools, the copy/cut/paste/etc tools having a white font on borderless black background too often blend into the surrounding screen (especially bad in dark mode). It takes extra time to sometimes recognize the desired tool that's hiding in plain sight amongst the background content.
It's those flat-design minimalist form-first cues that are the most painful. It's as if there's a fear of extra pixels.
No, I noticed way fewer garbage apps (with garbage interfaces) before, because the pre-iOS 7 human interface guidelines lent themselves to providing more obvious, intuitive tools & indications to help designers keep on a good path. Or, I noticed many more awful-designed apps after iOS 7, as various designers having varying degrees of talent introduced apps within the new HIG’s that exacerbated the vagueness of the post-iOS 6 HIG…things like light blue font on white backgrounds, or apps full of lots of unused white space, the pushing of often-used tools offscreen, the eradication of different-colored zones for tools vs. content such that everything just blends together and takes more cognitive power to work thru, etc.
No, they don’t need a button shape, but you’re focusing on that way too much. Go find a screenshot of the OSX Mail app with Yosemite vs. Big Sur or vs. Monterey. I find the cognitive load to use Monterey’s Mail up to be much higher than it was with Yosemite — the icons or folders or mailboxes did not have button shapes but there was much more distinction between various areas of the app (mail boxes, message list, message preview, tools/menu) etc. and the buttonless icons were much more differentiated from each other, lending to quick, intuitive use.
Same for Finder. Compare a Yosemite Finder window to that of Big Sur or Monterey. There’s no comparison as to which has less eye strain and less cognitive load.
There are (were) more intuitive OS/iOS’s having less cognitive load overall. iOS 6 was more intuitive than anything after it, even if the iOS’s after it had introduced new welcomed features. OSX’s immediately before Yosemite offered a more intuitive design language.
If one can argue the issue of adding “too much,” such as the uber-skeumorphic felt, stitching, brushed metal (which is where we were at iOS 6 and before), then certainly there can be the issue of taking away too much, which was the main issue at iOS7/Yosemite times and many of which still lingers today. Luckily for all of us, Apple and others have slowly started reintroducing elements through the UIs that harken back to less-vague, less-flat interface cues. There’s still a way to go though.
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I can't use Big Sur or Monterey. I've tried both on my 2017 MBP and I get migraines within minutes of using them. Prior to the headache I get eye strain, burning/gritty eyes, and I feel really spaced out and have trouble focusing. In addition to changing how the UI looks, I think they've altered how the graphics are rendered and its causing this irriatation. When I re-install Catalina (or any previous OS) its totally fine. Same hardware, so its got to be the software.
I find the same increased strain when using Big Sur or Monterey, as compared to any OS prior to and including Sierra (I jumped from Sierra to Big Sur and can’t speak to any OS’s inbetween).
I believe my issues are related to my gripes in my posts in this thread above, i.e., too much minimalist, monochromatic white space with too much eradication of the previously-helpful zones/borders/gridlines which reduced cognitive load and increased ease of reading/viewing/comprehension by defining the different interface areas.
Something as simple as alternating white/grey/white/grey lines to differentiate each music file in the Music app used to provide so much ease of use. Using the music app in Monterey is just awful, and results in eye strain for me.
Something as simple as different colored/shaded zones and darker, bolder fonts in the Mail or Finder apps similarly helped with reduced eye strain and increased ease of recognition/use.
I’d be curious as to whether Catalina’s apps were more similar-looking to those in Sierra.
It’s “subtle” (and sometimes not so subtle) cues and interface details like this that can make or break ease of use for some users, whether someone is able to identify the cause or not.
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When you compare Big Sur/monterey's Mail & Finder apps to prior recent OSX's, I'd say they're not too different from the Macintosh! (Or maybe that's what you mean lol)
Not sure. I notice the same eye strain with Safari 14 and 15 on Catalina as well. Even though the rest of the UI doesn’t cause this problem. Safari 13 is fine. My guess was it has to do with more extensive support for HDR or wide color in the UI and it causing the computer to use temporal dithering to render those colors on the 8-bit display. Maybe Catalina and earlier didn’t do this? I really have no proof this is what’s going on. It feels to me like a lesser version of what I experience with OLED iPhones.
Curiously the corresponding newer versions of iOS 14-15 and their associated Safari versions are totally fine for me. At least on LCD iPhones.
i wonder if a large petition being made would help apple to notice their new theme is horrible and must be reverted.
what do you folks think of this ? anyone would like to setup a petition to ask apple to revert their new theme ?
i for one would sign it.
their new theme is like a sabotage of their own product, in my opinion. and it's not even done properly.
many elements in toolbars have different sizes, often times they're also not properly vertically aligned, and lack consistency. of course i also find the color choices in the new theme are terrible. white on white. for example: input fields. white input fields shown on a window with white background and with white window-titlebar. there are many example like this one. apple is out of his mind and gave some clueless, tasteless individual the power to make UI decision. it's appaling.
what do you folks think of this ? anyone would like to setup a petition to ask apple to revert their new theme ?
i for one would sign it.
their new theme is like a sabotage of their own product, in my opinion. and it's not even done properly.
many elements in toolbars have different sizes, often times they're also not properly vertically aligned, and lack consistency. of course i also find the color choices in the new theme are terrible. white on white. for example: input fields. white input fields shown on a window with white background and with white window-titlebar. there are many example like this one. apple is out of his mind and gave some clueless, tasteless individual the power to make UI decision. it's appaling.
-----Some folks here in this thread might have some interest in and appreciation for the existence of something I've only found recently but which has actually been around as a thing for a little over a year now: airyxOS (web site, GitHub repository, MacRumors forums thread by another user.) From the project's read-me:
The OS's UI is still a work-in-progress, seeing as the project's still very much in its early stages of development, and it hasn't strayed too far from what I guess one could call 'post-modern' macOS design yet (apart from things which haven't been implemented yet and thus fall back to something simpler,) but, still, there's hope. I've left feedback that there should at least be options for users to bring an interface which returns some aspects of more usable aesthetics back up both as part of this issue and in the project Discord.
I just wanted to point out that the stats of 'usability of iOS 6 dropping off' along with 'people were happier with iOS 7' aren't entirely correct. Keep in mind you cannot downgrade an iPhone or iPad (while you can a Mac thankfully) so when folks naturally hit the 'update' button expecting improvements, discovering unnecessary UI redesigns instead, well, they were stuck with it, and the usage stats would be artificially inflated, and many people don't simply stop using something they now hate (not sure why people allow themselves to be screwed over but going on...) so the stats Apple were seeing suggested 'the users LOVE IT!'
I'd love to have seen a more scientific result with downgrading being an option, see how many reverted back!
I would have also loved to see a 'Classic 6' mode (mirroring Classic 9 mode in OS X) for those who hated the redesign as well. Would have been nice to at least offer a choice!
Oh well, here I am in Linux and Android running my favorite 'outdated' apps just fine and dandy, and saving $$. No one makes a phone I want anyway, and many are total downgrades with less and less features selling for more and more money. Not sure the logic. I miss 2010+ when the 'next big thing' was something actually better than it replaced, with more features, and groundbreaking new tech. Now it's just cameras. That's all they got. Cameras. The literal last feature I care about in a phone.
I'd love to have seen a more scientific result with downgrading being an option, see how many reverted back!
I would have also loved to see a 'Classic 6' mode (mirroring Classic 9 mode in OS X) for those who hated the redesign as well. Would have been nice to at least offer a choice!
Oh well, here I am in Linux and Android running my favorite 'outdated' apps just fine and dandy, and saving $$. No one makes a phone I want anyway, and many are total downgrades with less and less features selling for more and more money. Not sure the logic. I miss 2010+ when the 'next big thing' was something actually better than it replaced, with more features, and groundbreaking new tech. Now it's just cameras. That's all they got. Cameras. The literal last feature I care about in a phone.
Apple has enough money now that they can take pretty big hits and just literally lie about how much users love their "new innovations." And we now live in the age of consensus over reality so people will eventually just say "lol if my favorite actor or singer luvz it so do I lol."
Plus, pretty much _every_ product and service is declining in quality, so relative to all other equally declining products, apple's position may not actually shift much.
Plus, pretty much _every_ product and service is declining in quality, so relative to all other equally declining products, apple's position may not actually shift much.
Yet people still line up for Apple products each year, and many still cling to the long outdated notion of Android being for 'poor people' and this and that about 'green bubbles'. Lordie. I miss when people knew what brands = quality and stopped buying from companies that produced junk. Back when companies didn't change stuff unless enough of their customer base clamored for it. The era when shareholders either didn't exist or at least didn't affect a company one bit. I am still not sure what happened or if it's even possible to revert back to the 1960s version of the free market again. This future sucks and I want to find that DeLorean and go back to when things made sense!
Consolidation from a lack of anti-trust enforcement is also partly to blame.
(across loads of industries)
We have very few options anymore, relatively speaking.
What happened to when if a company angered their customer base it could mean chapter 11 bankruptcy? Nowadays customers buy buy buy even if a company produces crap! Doesn't matter who! It's like no one understands voting with one's wallet anymore. Is the latest smartphone so darned important you put ethics aside?
Somehow if right to repair ever makes it as a law (even though it shouldn't have to be a law!) I can only hope people take better care of their stuff! I mean I paid a lot for my S20 FE, and I take care of it. But most people rent their phone on contract and it's full of scratches, dents and a spidered screen a few weeks in, like if you don't own it, you don't take care of it.
Somehow if right to repair ever makes it as a law (even though it shouldn't have to be a law!) I can only hope people take better care of their stuff! I mean I paid a lot for my S20 FE, and I take care of it. But most people rent their phone on contract and it's full of scratches, dents and a spidered screen a few weeks in, like if you don't own it, you don't take care of it.
This was Microsoft from the mid/late 80's until...the iPod opened people's eyes and Apple's computer offerings became the cool kid on the block everyone loved. It looked good *and* it just worked. meanwhile, Microsoft would completely revamp their software every few years, which always to me felt like an admission that they blew it before...but now look at THIS!! (only to repeat the same forced reinvention a few years later). But it was all we had to choose from at the time.
Now, oh so ironically, Apple seems to follow M-soft. Apple is still better than M-soft to many of us but much of the interfaces feel...not attractive, not 'it just works,' but it's all we have to choose from for those who don't want M-soft.
Except there are. There's not buying the new model in the first place. Unfortunately people got this mindset that a device either ceases to exist or will get instantly hacked once support ends. Even if they do the exact same things with the exact same apps as they did a decade ago. Makes me wonder what they really use their phone for that makes them so vulnerable to hacking soon as support ends.
The planet can't handle our current rate of consumption. We need to SLOW DOWN. Tech just isn't innovating anymore and there's no reason to go for a new phone these days. they've hardly changed unless you count making them the size of a basketball player's hands and adding in tons of cameras as if that's all that matters. The days of true innovation have ceased in favor of cookie cutter nonsense much like everything else from cars to houses to appliances. I really truly miss the era when the Galaxy SIII was a leap ahead of the Galaxy SII and so on. Heck, I miss when one could notice the difference between a Ford and a Studebaker. Today you can't tell any car apart because they all look the same and have those annoyingly huge plastic grilles.
Also we all know what happened to Apple, the once king of favoring people opening up their systems to the point that Steve Jobs made sure the inside was perfect! He died. Then instead of doing the right thing and make Scott Forstall CEO, Tim had to whine like a spoiled child and get his way just because he was there the instant Steve died.
Apple truly died with Jobs. The essence of what it was just went POOF.
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