<story><title>Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/jony-ives-errors-why-ugly-isn-t-always-bad-design-but-beautiful-sometimes-is-9c5fde886263</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scarface74</author><text>Skeuomorphism wasn’t a failure. The iPhone and the touch interface were new to the market. Making the interface look familiar was important at the time even though it went too far. The iPhone did well from iOS 1 - iOS 6 and I don’t remember too many complaints until iOS 6.</text></item><item><author>idlewords</author><text>Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.</text></item><item><author>thomasjudge</author><text>This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked</text></item><item><author>bangonkeyboard</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;That vague hostility towards humans keeps peeping through.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A story recounted here last year [0]:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model&amp;#x27;s sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive&amp;#x27;s worst tendencies. [1]&lt;p&gt;Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17056930&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17056930&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cultofmac.com&amp;#x2F;488008&amp;#x2F;jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphone&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cultofmac.com&amp;#x2F;488008&amp;#x2F;jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrischen</author><text>Even today I feel like the new flat UIs are a bit too flat, like how some input fields (like in the Phone app on iOS) are completely invisible so you don&amp;#x27;t know that they&amp;#x27;re there.</text></comment>
<story><title>Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/jony-ives-errors-why-ugly-isn-t-always-bad-design-but-beautiful-sometimes-is-9c5fde886263</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scarface74</author><text>Skeuomorphism wasn’t a failure. The iPhone and the touch interface were new to the market. Making the interface look familiar was important at the time even though it went too far. The iPhone did well from iOS 1 - iOS 6 and I don’t remember too many complaints until iOS 6.</text></item><item><author>idlewords</author><text>Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.</text></item><item><author>thomasjudge</author><text>This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked</text></item><item><author>bangonkeyboard</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;That vague hostility towards humans keeps peeping through.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A story recounted here last year [0]:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model&amp;#x27;s sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive&amp;#x27;s worst tendencies. [1]&lt;p&gt;Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17056930&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17056930&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cultofmac.com&amp;#x2F;488008&amp;#x2F;jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphone&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cultofmac.com&amp;#x2F;488008&amp;#x2F;jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PunksATawnyFill</author><text>Exactly. GUIs are supposed to look like things: buttons and displays, because the state of those things is immediately understood. Simple beveling and shadowing on a rectangle can tell you if the button is on or off. No one is calling for it to have a &amp;quot;brushed-metal&amp;quot; finish or dust motes on it.&lt;p&gt;Ive&amp;#x27;s (and others&amp;#x27;) asinine &amp;quot;flat&amp;quot; look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.&lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#x27;s childish and ridiculous &amp;quot;skeuomorphism&amp;quot; wasn&amp;#x27;t just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table.  WTF?  You don&amp;#x27;t interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?&lt;p&gt;iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The &amp;quot;LCD&amp;quot; panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can&amp;#x27;t poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.&lt;p&gt;Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is &amp;quot;flat&amp;quot; UI.</text></comment>