I just hope Apple will fast track a UX update... but they probably won't, due to sunk cost fallacy, and the market and design trends will follow them.
This happens every time, a redesign comes out and people hate it. Same when iOS flat design came out. I dug into the archives, because HN has been around for a while now so we can do that, yay!
(hand picking / editing comments freely because I can)
> I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
> I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process.
> Look at his iMessage screen comparison [1]: yes, the old screen looks a bit geocities, but you can actually read text very well; the new screen is almost unreadable. The prime aim of iMessage is to make people read text, not to look cool.
> Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.
> I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
This happens every time, a redesign comes out and people hate it. Same when iOS flat design came out. I dug into the archives, because HN has been around for a while now so we can do that, yay!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5869121
(hand picking / editing comments freely because I can)
> I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
> I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process.
> Look at his iMessage screen comparison [1]: yes, the old screen looks a bit geocities, but you can actually read text very well; the new screen is almost unreadable. The prime aim of iMessage is to make people read text, not to look cool.
> [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattgemmell/9023510971/
> Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.
> I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856398
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I'm fairly sure I read the thread I'm quoting from at the time because all of these arguments are still fairly fresh in my head.