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Apple's design 'drives up support costs, makes gadgets harder to use'

And they don't hire us any more, say Apple greybeards

Apple's design has fallen from the high standards set by Donald Norman and Bruce Tognazzini, reckon... er, Donald Norman and Bruce Tognazzini. The two UX gurus and former Apple alumni now think "Apple is giving design a bad name".

Nothing new, you might think. But because Apple is now so influential, poor design from Cupertino is now almost universally imitated, spreading inexorably across rival platforms, particularly websites, like a fart in a cinema.

"Why are you so self-absorbed?", the pair ask in a new essay. "Worse, why does Google follow all your worst examples?"

Norman and Tognazzini argue that computers are getting harder to use, because Apple's abandoned basic principles of discoverability (finding features) and forgiveness (being able to undo an action), in a pursuit of aesthetic purity. If it looks beautiful it ships. By pursuing a "Bauhaus minimalist design ethic" Apple is driving up support costs across the industry.

"Good design should be attractive, pleasurable, and wonderful to use. But the wonderfulness of use requires that the device be understandable and forgiving. It must follow the basic psychological principles that give rise to a feeling of understanding, of control, of pleasure…. These are all principles we teach elementary students of interaction design. If Apple were taking the class, it would fail."

Other anti-user crimes the pair note include low contrast designs with thin illegible fonts, and ambiguity. "Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text?", they ponder. It's hard to tell.

The pair were pivotal in establishing human interaction design as computers moved from the Neolithic command line age into the GUI age in the early 1980s. Norman established HCI (Human Computer Interaction) as a discipline, joining Apple in 1993, while "Tog" helped design the original Macintosh. The pair have been critical of Apple for many years. For example, here's Tog ragging on the just-launched Mac OS X in 2002, and calling for it to incorporate gestures.

"The mouse is dead; it's time for a change," he wrote back then.

Crazy talk, I tell you. Crazy.

Steve Jobs dismantled Apple's storied Advanced Technology Human Interface Group when he became interim CEO in 1997, and after Jobs' death, hardware designer Jony Ive assumed overall control of design at Apple. That's why everything is white.

Read the whole thing here. ®

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