Sloppy UI – A collection of sloppy iOS7 UIs(sloppyui.tumblr.com) |
Sloppy UI – A collection of sloppy iOS7 UIs(sloppyui.tumblr.com) |
I am assuming that the “sloppy UIs” are from the general release.
There were tons of changes from beta 1 to the GM and there are still some UI bugs, but they are not showstoppers.
But what do I know.
Stopped reading there ...
Yes I'm getting surly in my old age.
The worse thing would be if people blindly said things like "iOS7 is just not intuitive" and went on to drink their PBR and evangelize about Phonebloks - instead, these are real examples of why iOS7 could be better.
At the very least, this thread is instructive for learning designers. I know as a younger programmer and designer, when someone said that "JavaScript has the weirdest quirks", it was useless unless someone showed me the quirks. Along came Douglas Crockford's Good Parts, which, while critical of the bad parts, was very instructive. I think this can function in similar ways.
It's not just "Fail" culture rearing its stupid head - the tone is far from embarrassing to Apple, and instead is generally descriptive of legitimate design failures.
[1] z-index, text overlap, mixed states, etc. These are not questionable design choices. They're bugs. And lumping them in only detracts from the site and the many legit design gripes (problems of focus, alignment, contrast, usability, etc.)
This is fail culture masquerading as design critique, and it isn't even doing that well.
Critique that doesn't actually tell what's wrong ... isn't.
Let's talk about the z-index issue with the AppStore icon. How is this reproduced? I have never seen that. How do I know it's not shopped?
All it says is "z-index". Not useful. Not really a critique to me, it's just too terse.
Google HAS produced a UI as bad as this. Actually worse. The Android UI, up until 4 was amateur hour. And still is not up there yet.
It's just held in much less scrutiny compared to Apple, because nobody expects much better.
I don't care what fanboys say or do online, on any side. I'm here to build good software. If someone has some constructive criticism, let me know.
The Apple community isn't concerned about a lack of Jobs, it's a portion of the non-Apple, Tech community that likes to shout this one out.
We already have plenty of people ready to call out crap. Half the discussions on this site devolve into someone arguing about perceived flaws in something.
What we actually need is people pushing up the level of discourse. A stream of pictures and pithy sarcasm isn't useful until someone else comes along and responds to it. The world needs more thoughtful analysis and advancement, we probably have enough tumblrs full of snarky images.
Crap, really?
There are, however, some valid reasons to upgrade in spite of iOS 7's drawbacks (don't get me started on how the new lock screen keypad makes it harder for me to unlock my phone with just my thumb).
* Call blocking has "finally" (gruber's favorite line lately) been implemented properly -- if you are one of those people who are increasingly getting more telemarketer calls on your cell number, this is a huge deal.
* Safari runs faster on iOS7 than iOS6. 90% of what I do is browsing, so this can be a tradeoff that is well worth making.
It seems to be put together by one guy (instead of user submissions like similar sites) and not quite design savvy at that.
Case in point:
1) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61441688489 (this is supposed to show "poor alignment")
2) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439801745 (this is supposed to show "stray dropshadows" -- didn't they guy get the memo that the iOS 7 UI uses them to show a 3D layer hierarchy?)
3) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439835569 (this is supposed to show "poor contrast". Isn't it obvious that the top bar should not be visually striking and distracting?)
4) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61440586435 (... this is considered "sloppy").
5) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61440527405 (flat information hierarchy -- one of the few genuine sloppy UI examples).
I may be confused by wording here, sorry: which one does "had to" mean:
* there was some external force pushing him (I'm thinking CEO rather than bloggers' complaints)
* he couldn't resist the urge
It somehow feels like the latter is what really happened, but I do not have any sources for that, and would be happy to know.
A lot of these "sloppy UI" examples are in non-Apple apps, intentional, or otherwise misleading from the screenshot.
Also, the blog is not called "Apple Sloppy UIs", but "Sloppy UIs". That still qualifies.
Tagline to the blog: "We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it." (emphasis mine)
Do they expect Apple to fix the UI of other people's apps?
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/18/ux-things-i-hate-abo...
Don't get me wrong, I much, much prefer Android and can't ever see myself moving back to iOS, but always good to measure things in balance, nothing is perfect.
It's weird. The iPhone 5s seems to be without a doubt the overall best phone out there. The low light camera, the processor, all that stuff blows me away, but yet I don't want one. I think the iPhone is like a really fancy and nice race car, that I can do nothing but admire, but all I want is a truck. Android is my truck.
How are these small/annoying issues are passing the test cases?
Don't they have the same development cycle as they had while developing the first Iphone which was a huge thing at the time.
Most of those are neither sloppy nor issues. The blog does a bad job of mixing a few real issues with a lot of stuff he just doesn't like personally.
Before I upgraded yesterday, there were a couple of apps I saw (I think it was Shazam) where they must have emulated the iOS 7 feel, rather than using system-native widgets, so the result was a "business in front, party in the back" mishmash of UI on the same screen.
It is worse in touch devices. At least in a desktop webapp you have the option of waving your mouse cursor over suspect areas and can get some kind of feedback (a balloon text or some change in the status bar etc.) On a touch device, you won't know until you touch!
I must imagine that this tumblr is already being poured over in Cupertino and radar's are being filed in right now. This tumblr is a good thing.
One I noticed is a very slight difference in weight between the carrier text and the data status.
It's so slight, almost the difference between "sharp" and "strong" in Photoshop.
Also, people, easy on the "way to criticize but not offer any constructive criticism!" OP is effectively filing a ton of bug reports, which is a good thing.
Good quality criticism regarding choices developers and designers have made have lead to some of the best debate and discussion I've seen on HN. Conversations that focus on criticizing execution (for example the UI bugs in the tumblr) have been some of the worst.
As a developer I would get huge value out of having a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of iOS 7's language, particular as we begin (or have begun) redesigning our apps - hopefully that is something this tumblr can evolve into eventually.
I mentioned this SAME STUFF (specifically the horrible lack of contrast) months ago just to be met with downvotes and handwaving dismissal.
NOW people agree. Better late than never, I guess.
The most frustrating part is that Apple fanboys now justify their love for iOS 7 using the exact same arguments they used to dismiss Windows Phone.
However, some of these (Z-Index? What?) should've absolutely been fixed before GM.
Design over a large product like iOS or OS X is hard, it takes time to get all the edges smoothed down and given that iOS 7 is probably the result of a year to two years of work it's not a surprised it's rough. If it's a bug (or a UI niggle) report it to Apple, they may or may not be listening but it's a better solution to highlight it with them directly, as well as on Tumblr.
Done is better than perfect.
Seems they're losing that attribute without gaining the others.
Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc). Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.
As for "incredibly well polished and thought out" it still is. For one, there's much more to a mobile OS than graphic design. How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
Second, most of those are some guy's pet peeves, not genuine problems. If he cannot understand why a red carret matches blue text, that doesn't make it into a genuine problem. Same if he didn't get the memo that drop shadows are used to add a depth to the UI layers and thinks they are stray leftovers.
Apple's new MO it seems.
It's not a big deal but I thought Apple would be well on top of stuff like this
The average iOS 6 app did not look like Game Center or Find My Friends (which was not even built-in). But I guess that's how it will be remembered now. =/
We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it. It's all about intellectual honesty, not trolling.
IMHO, using texts to replace icon based buttons is clever to simplify the working of screen resolution adaption, however, it does increase the possibility of inconsistency between different locales. I still remember NYTimes.app for iPad displayed ugly aligned date texts which is just too long to fit into the space left for them, only in Chinese locales, which they do not officially support, and I doubt that they really did testing on it.
I'm not answering every single case you mention. The examples I posted show how inconsistent the UI is.
Taste is in the eye of the beholder and I didn't mention what I find ugly but what shows a lack of afterthought.
Just one example here to answer, "Poor Contrast" (http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439835569) On an iOS device, this is not "Subtle" but unreadable.
That said, noticing alignment issues and font inconsistencies is not given and a lot of people won't give a damn about them.
http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/post/61658685474 This is the most outrageous. Apparently this mid-transistion screenshot demonstrates something poor. What? I have no idea. Is it sloppy in the same way this http://i.imgur.com/e5Vyv5z.jpg is sloppy?
There are also quite a few genuine design errors (Z index of updates available, alignment in the timer, ...) on the site.
It might appear odd in the context in which it appears, that is with the caret at the end of the line, but consider cases where the caret is between letters in a word.
When editing a section of text where you are looking to make a mid-word modification, being able to quickly and easily identify the caret position is important.
If the caret looks even remotely like any of the text being edited you may confuse it for the text or you may find it hard to see where the caret is.
The high text to caret contrast is only one solution to the problem of making the caret easy to find and easy to tell apart from the text itself.
On my stock Android 4.2 device the caret is a mid-grey within black text. On a small screen it is not clear to me with my inadequate eyesight where the caret is from just a glance. When editing mid-word a blue tab-style arrow is applied below the caret as a visual pointer. This sometimes obscures relevant text or controls.
As far as stock Android 4.2 vs iOS is concerned, I'd say that iOS has the superior solution in this case.
As someone with slightly less than perfect eyesight it's an absolute godsend.
Great contrast?
Nice bold color pair?
Not losing the caret because it looks like I or 1 or l?
This is the real issue.
There are few "complete redesign" success cases, but somehow Apple thought they would pull it in a matter of months.
I disagree that critique must inherently describe the problem. Sometimes, the problem is fairly self descriptive, especially with what this blog provides, which is obvious issues that most of the blog's audience will immediately understand as "sloppy" - that is, I shouldn't have to explain why the z-index issue is sloppy to justify my criticism, but if you want a bug report, I can explain how I got there.
One could postulate that Apple can fix third party apps by altering the available UI elements and interface guidelines. In fact, this type of alteration was done for iOS7 to guide developers into updating their app aesthetics to match iOS7.
That's kind of the interesting thing we're seeing here that doesn't fit your analogy: most of the people complaining this time around are the iOS people about iOS.
Jobs is definitely gone. Had he be around, you would've seen tons of cartoon boxes and pink slips delivered to One Infinite Loop. If he would've ever let update like that released into cyberspace (he wouldn't've).
IOS7 clearly shows that John Ive is lost without Jobs.
Thanks for enlightening me.
I understand what you're saying, and perhaps the name of the Tumblr should change to "Issues with iOS7", but that sounds pretty boring to me. Instead, we can all agree that sloppy/bad decision-making, sloppy QA practices, etcetera can be learned from, and that there is value in identifying (and avoiding) these mistakes both in the works of others and in our own work.
Are these possibly from an earlier beta ?
If you run your phone with the display off, say from 21% battery down to 11%, then it will cross the 20% reporting threshold. The next time that you unlock the phone and activate the display, you will get the notification.
It's not inconsistent; nor is it just being "optimistic" -- it may be poorly worded, but it consistently displays that same message every time you unlock the phone after the battery drains to 20%.
If the person who took that screenshot had waited another ten minutes, then the battery would probably have reached 10%, and the 10% notification would have been shown instead.
However, if this is actually happening in some transition, then leave it. We all know that there are only so many hours. Bring some polish to this transition with a future update. I can't see dinging them on design for a slightly sloppy transition.
Perhaps they made it past QA/testing because what is an obvious bug in a screenshot isn't necessarily obvious to generate or replicate.
I haven't seen any of those bugs in the time I've spent in iOS7.
Again, this is not technically bad, but if you flaunt having a "staggering attention to detail" this is a sort of slap in the face of credibility.
Having them design a larger hole to encompass the "iPhone" logo (even while still half-covering the babble below) would have, instead, sent a very clear "we cared" message to users.
"hon" also is an informal diminutive for "honey".
Where it counts Apple does not typically exhibit this behaviour, as evidenced by both new iPhones.
IMHO, this is the opposite of sloppy.
They did have a nicer one in beta 1 though where the message came up under the keyboard blurred
Wait what? When did that happen? When did Google get "superior engineering"? For search, web etc, perhaps. But as far as iOS vs Android is concerned that was never the case.
For starters, Apple design and engineered the iPhone first. Google's Android FIRST came out a whole year later. Early Android prototypes, shown by Google just before the iPhone was announced had half-size screens and physical keyboards, just like the rest of the smartphones of the day.
Since then Apple has consistenly beat Google on hardware features, from the retina display (with much better color rendition to boot) to camera innovations, the motion co-processor, a working fingerprint sensor (for a change), and 64 bit ARM (which means far more than "being able to see more memory which isn't even installed") etc. Consistently better battery life.
Well, maybe it's not a fair comparison, because Google is not a hardware engineering company. They had to buy Motorola, which wasn't the best in the business itself, anyway. But the above are still true for Samsung offerings too.
On the industrial engineering side, Apple's designs, machining, fit and polish is unsurpassed on the Android side. Including materials used.
In the software side it's the same story. The iOS Cocoa API is leaps and bounds ahead of the Android API. It was never plagued with issues with scroll lag and display latency (and also audio latency, which is why 90% of Audio/MIDI apps are for iOS). Doesn't have a nightmarish GC experience to tend to for more involved apps. More fit and polish overall. Heck, Android even gets 80%+ of all the mobile malware around.
The major points for Android devices were not better engineering per se, but stuff like bigger screens, different configurations etc. And extra features that got marginal use, like face unlock and near field communication, stuff that Apple could have if that's how they rolled.
Some good stuff Android had first was because Apple went conservative to implement them when battery life better permitted them (like background apps -- Android just unleashed them and the hell with it, Apple trying to get the juice, and hence experience, right first).
There's one genuine thing Android had going for it, and that's the Intents system in my opinion. The "quick settings change panel" was also another good one. I don't think we can go much further.
Agree with your general points but the Moto X also has a pair of interesting co-processors: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/the-iphone-5s-the-mot...
Personally, I don't think Apple's getting anywhere enough credit for their in-house processor design at the moment. If that's not engineering talent I don't know what is. Just look at the Anandtech review for proof of that:
The HTC G1 was also one of the early prototypes shown off. Android definitely came later, but they were already working on a large, capacitive touch phone before the iPhone came out.
> Since then Apple has consistenly beat Google on hardware features, from the retina display
Uh, no, so very much no. Apple was sooo late to the high density party. Android was shipping high density, high resolution phones a year before Apple did. Apple did leapfrog on the density front with retina, but they were definitely, unquestionably playing catch-up on this front, not leading the way.
> camera innovations, the motion co-processor, a working fingerprint sensor (for a change)
All of this was done by other companies first, and in some cases better.
> The iOS Cocoa API is leaps and bounds ahead of the Android API.
This is such a stupid statement. Both APIs have their advantages and disadvantages.
> The major points for Android devices were not better engineering per se, but stuff like bigger screens, different configurations etc.
Which was enabled due to superior engineering in some respects. True density independence, flexible layouts everywhere, architecture-neutral designs, etc...
You sir/mam are a fanboy of the worst kind.
For the record, I feel IOS 7 lost its way. Jobsy would have shot it to pieces and buried it before it saw the light of day.
And now it is clear that you don't know a shit abouit what your talking
By the way, Apple also invented the wheel and the sliced bread
Looking at Google Map, Google Search. Those "defining" application of Google, in addition of incredible engineering they redefined what a map and search engine should even look like, so design. Similarly, the iPhone, iMac, iPod were as much about engineering and than design.
In reality, Apple is defined by making money on hardware and Google on cloud software. It is a quirk that they got to clash, because they very much complemented each other.
Google get some slack with Android because they do not sell phones and the vast majority of users do not use Android UI anyway. On the hardware side, Android world provides hundreds of models, there is at least 10 flagship model at any single time. Each get its own amount of nitpicking but eventually all get lost in the noise of other Android news (announcements, prototype, announcement of prototype, benchmark war, "megahertz" war of the day).
Android 4.0+ has fantastic design, in my opinion.
I very much prefer the UI of my Jelly Bean Nexus 7 to this thing they call iOS 7.
And before anyone says I don't like change -- the new UI does make iOS<=6 look very dated, but the odd icon proportions, color scheme and unbalanced use of fonts (sometimes the font is just too light, sometimes the mix just feels.. weird) don't appeal to me at all.
What I hate is when Apple apologists say "you just have to get used to" the new look. I'm already used to the new look, but I still don't like it.
That's kind of ironic given that the Android blogs and _some_ comments on forums (including hacker news) are all "The UI is Android ripoff" (while the Windows Phone camp is "The UI is a Windows Phone ripoff")
My point was that controversies like these design hiccups, the shape of the case, etc. are not new to Apple.
In some ways the design issues are significantly less severe since they can be corrected without new hardware.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nerdtalker/status/380217872380739...
And why I wouldn't want them? Are you deciding what I want or not?
No, Apple's deciding and the market votes with his wallet (and judging from their actually buying stuff --and at the quite expensive end of the market at that--, it has voted much in favor of those decisions for a decade or so).
There's always some people, call them sui generis, or mavericks, or loonies, that do want a floppy drive in their laptop, and not even because they have a specific business needs. They just love these flexible plastic suckers. Others can't live without physical Blue-Ray disks (just as some people swore by Betamax or quad cassetes).
And in the case of phones, some just got to have a 440 dpi screen (despite not seeing much different from 300), near field communication, wireless charging, 4G support in 2009 when it would burn through batteries of the era in 1 hour, and what have you. It's their choice. Just not a very popular one, or what most people would call sane, especially going forward.
So, feel free to use whatever, just don't complain if it's not what the era you live in deems relevant.
So, when Apple said that the MINIMUM screen size for tablets was 10" people talked with their wallet and this was the right size.
When Apple released iPad Mini people talked with their wallet and this was a right size along the regular iPad?
> There's always some people, call them sui generis, or mavericks, or loonies, that do want a floppy drive in their laptop
Really, do you have top put a nonsensical analogy to try to defend the indefensible?
Non-iOS 7 apps on iOS7 render the older keyboard, which is really annoying.
Tell that to my mother, who used her phone's built in FM radio daily until her retirement.
It's clear from the tone of your post though that dissent is useless.
An older woman close on retirement is not exactly having her finger on the pulse of what's current, does she now?
I mean, I'm giving an example of a similar obsolete feature ("like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs") and your counter-argument is what a retiree does?
Might as well have replied "well, my grandfather rocks floppy disks on his 286 just fine".
EDIT: actually I value most the web browser and the internet connection, but as an app, it is close to the top
Well, it is clear that you like stupid analogies and you have not clear what it is obsolete or not and radio is not obsolete.
>> How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
As an iPhone 4 user who upgraded to iOS 7, I would have loved the option to turn off all those extraneous animations that force me to wait for them to finish running before I can do anything.
In other words, I want to lose some "how it looks" features because they drag the whole thing down ("how it works") for me on my phone.
FYI: The iphone wireless chipset (BCM4334) already contains an FM radio. Apple has chosen to ship the phone with the functionality disabled. Presumably to push people towards itunes offerings.
When Apple released iPad Mini people talked with their wallet and this was a right size along the regular iPad?
Is there even a question here?
Nobody said "10 was the one and perfect size until Apple added 7". Just that Apple releasing a 10" only, for the first versions of the iPad, was a wild success.
Apple had decided to release a 10, and then they decided to add a 7 to that line. Both were mass bought. So clearly both were good market decisions.
Other vendors had a 7 even before -- their sales were 1/10 the iPad 10 available at the time or less.
>Really, do you have top put a nonsensical analogy to try to defend the indefensible?
The "indefensible" being a company offering a specific feature set of their choice and not every possible feature desired by some users or offered by some competitor?
If the resulting products sell well, then surely, they didn't make a mistake in ommiting stuff.
I don't know how you can defend the contrary. Based on some unalienable right to get what you like in a specific product from a specific brand?
And this new skin at times burns my eyes, especially some of the nauseating color choices.
Thank goodness I don't use Game Center. The colours for the bubbles make me want to literally throw up -- I don't know if other people are like that, but certain colours have that effect on me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=chapter+and+verse&oq=chapter...
Nope.
https://www.google.com/search?q=free%20verse ?
Nope.
Something just random, that I didn't think would have anything interesting?
https://www.google.com/search?q=seventeen+verse
Nope. What search terms replace "verse" with "vs" for you? Or do you google comparisons constantly?
Or are you just a troll?
Seems Google does this for things that are likely comparisons (e.g. oranges and tangerines), which seems reasonable.