As you can see by the lack of updates on this blog — almost one month, goodness gracious — my day job has kept me incredibly busy. In this day and age, tech commentary generally tries to keep up with the speed of tech news, and it’s frustrating when you finally have the time to collect some thoughts on a certain subject, and you’re more than a week late.
Also, when I started this logbook, the format idea was to post short, frequent entries as I kept exploring each Big Sur beta version, and try to document differences and any progression or regression of what I’m most interested in when it comes to operating systems — the user interface. I ended up being busy a lot of the time, and only managed to get to 10 entries so far, but I hope I’ve been in part successful in showing what has been going on with Big Sur over the past months.
Little change
And here comes the first point I want to make (or probably reiterate): in general, from a visual and UI standpoint, the Big Sur we have today, officially released nine days ago at the time of writing, hasn’t changed much from what was previewed last June at the WWDC. And that’s… not good, in my opinion. Every time I’ve made this point in the past weeks, the kind of response I’ve received was something like, This is a major visual redesign for Mac OS. It’s likely that Apple has started with a lot of drastic choices that will be smoothened out over the next major, not minor, Mac OS releases.
It’s a sensible response, and very possibly describes what will happen, but it’s extremely unsatisfying for a user interface enthusiast like me. Because it feels like the work on the user interface isn’t getting the priority it deserves. And let me tell you: looking at the current visual state of Big Sur, the work on the UI ought to be Priority Number One on Apple’s list.
And random changes leading to friction
You can browse past entries in this Big Sur logbook for a more detailed look at certain UI changes. The overall feeling is that in an attempt to make Mac OS look more like iOS/iPadOS, Apple has introduced new elements and interactions that on the one hand feel alien to experienced Mac users, and on the other disrupt decades of Human Interface Guidelines with arbitrary and purely-æsthetic changes.
You have app icons that are now losing their uniqueness by going through the Big Levelling Machine and coming out all squares with rounded corners. This sameness in shape that originated in iOS had a reason: in a touch interface, apps are like buttons you press with your finger. This metaphor, on a regular computer with a more precise mouse+keyboard input method, weakens at the functional level, and can also become actively impractical when you have a crowded Dock and you start hunting for the app you want to launch because now all icons have the same shape and they’re harder to make out.
You have dialog boxes and alerts that have been imported as-is from iOS whose design on Mac OS — even within the new Big Sur æsthetic — looks weird and ultimately feels just like what it is, a simple copy-and-paste from another OS that was designed for a completely different category of devices.
You have other ‘imported’ solutions that, while bringing that sense of familiarity and homogeneousness across OSes Craig Federighi seems to care so much about, also introduce friction for no real reason. Take the Control Centre, for example. It’s one of my favourite features on iOS. Its essence is to be a control panel you quickly access to quickly perform certain routine operations, and over time it has become a bit more customisable so that you can have shortcuts to even more actions.
But almost everything about the Control Centre in Big Sur makes it somehow a slower solution and involves more clicks to perform the same operations you can perform in a much faster way on older Mac OS versions. And this added friction is not only limited to Control Centre. Managing notifications has become more fiddly and frustrating, again because of some arbitrary design decision. I fully agree with Marco Arment here. He tweets:
The important actions are now invisible, hidden behind a hover state that requires an extra click (“Options”).
Why?
I know the cost — it’s slower to use and less discoverable.
What are the benefits that make that cost worthwhile?
Whose job is it at Apple to fight for usability over visual appeal when a conflict arises between these factors?
Firstly, that hover state doesn’t even appear consistently. Especially the little ‘×’ in the upper left corner of a notification pane that has the important role of letting you dismiss the notification. Sometimes it appears as soon as you hover your mouse, other times it takes repeated attempts until it finally graces us with its presence. On top of that, it’s an awfully tiny target to hit. I often miss it, and I’m using Big Sur on a 13-inch retina display… Imagine using a 27-inch retina iMac, or the 32-inch Retina 6K Pro Display XDR.
Usability versus visual appeal
Secondly, Arment — in his typically lucid and succinct way to put things — completely nails the crux of the matter when it comes to Big Sur’s UI design: usability versus visual appeal. It’s the recurring theme whenever I encounter some user interface change or user interaction hiccup, and usability seems to always lose the fight.
Think about how less immediate a lot of little things have become. Replying to a message from the notification you’ve received, for example (see this tweet by Wojtek Pietrusiewicz). Or take the Bluetooth indicator in the menu bar. Previously, the icon had a few very recognisable states, such as:
- Greyed out icon: Bluetooth is off.
- Black icon: Bluetooth is on, and there are no devices connected.
- Grey icon with three horizontal black dots across it: Bluetooth is on, and there is at least one device connected.
- Black icon with a little battery icon at its side: at least one connected Bluetooth device has a low battery.
When you only connect one device to the Mac via Bluetooth, seeing the grey icon with the dots gives you a visual confirmation that the connection has been established. You don’t even need to check by clicking the icon and pulling down the menu.
In Big Sur, when one or more devices are connected, the Bluetooth icon simply stays black. The only thing this tells you is that the Mac has Bluetooth on. But even if you only connect one device, you have to invoke the menu to be certain that it’s paired and connected. This is a minuscule detail, I agree, but it’s a step back for no apparent reason all the same. An intelligent improvement would be what my friend Donovan Bond suggested: A visual indication of how many devices are currently connected would be great.
Mind you, such annoyances aren’t huge if you examine them one by one. An early impression of Big Sur’s UI I had around the time I started testing the betas (first half of August) was that the visual redesign was ‘kinda nice’ if looked from afar, but frustrating up close the more attention you paid to the various little details. In this sense, it truly reminds me of iOS — an operating system whose interface I’m overall okay with, but which becomes progressively tiring to use the longer the session. It’s like talking to a quick-witted person whose jokes and sarcastic remarks are enjoyable during relatively brief interactions, but get a bit too overwhelming over the course of much longer conversations.
And the problem is that I don’t typically use my Macs in short bursts of activity or for short sessions or to carry out brief and spur-of-the-moment tasks. I have my iPhone and iPad for that. Ever since I started testing Big Sur on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro I’ve realised I don’t really like to engage in long sessions with it. Especially at first, it started to feel like I was using some kind of third-party iOS-inspired skin installed over Mac OS, and after a while I was sort of thinking of a way to ‘reset it to default Mac OS’, so to speak. Now this feeling has waned a bit, but hasn’t gone away completely.
Cognitive load, my ass
In a now oft-quoted interview for the Independent, Craig Federighi remarks:
We’re living with iPads, we’re living with phones, our own sense of the aesthetic – the sort of openness and airiness of the interface – the fact that these devices have large retina displays now. All of these things led us to the design for the Mac, that felt to us most comfortable, actually in no way related to touch.
I’ve never felt more comfortable moving across our family of devices as a user, which I do hundreds of times a day than I do now, moving between iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur. They all just feel of a family – there’s just less cognitive load to the switching process.
I’ve used iOS since it was still called iPhone OS, and of course I’ve used Mac OS for more than 30 years now, and I’ve never felt that ‘cognitive load’ Federighi talks about when switching from one OS to the other. I also never had a problem recognising that the two systems were from the same company. And neither did any of my friends or acquaintances, whether they’re Mac or Windows or Linux users, whether they’re tech-savvy people in general or not. And here we have someone who, I believe, has used Mac OS for as long as I have, and is also the VP of Software Engineering at Apple, talking about this ‘cognitive load’ when switching from one platform to another… And, well, I have a really hard time believing him, you know?
At the same time I’m in full agreement with Michael Tsai when he says:
The cognitive load that Federighi mentions just isn’t something I’ve (consciously) experienced. And one could make the argument that it’s confusing to make systems that work differently look the same. But I take him at his word because it certainly explains decisions like the awful iOS-style alerts. That design provides no benefits for touch; it just makes macOS look more like iOS, which he considers to be a plus.
What I do believe is that it’s the software engineers at Apple who have been progressively experiencing a cognitive load in trying to bring forward different operating systems with different ages, histories, and design such as Mac OS and iOS. It’s been a while, I’m sure, that they were aching to simplify software development across all platforms, and the best way to do that was to unify all of them. And if you look at all of them, which was the outlier until now? Mac OS, of course. Who cares if it was the oldest, more robust, more consistent UI-wise. It was the odd one out, and now that Apple has regained complete control of the platform at the hardware level with Apple Silicon, the software has to play along.