UI ambiguity, exhibit №917

I maintain several vintage and obsolete Macs and iOS devices. The main reason is because I like to squeeze any possible residual usefulness out of them while enjoying their operating systems’ user interfaces, which were better designed than what we have now. But another, equally important reason is that all these devices are little UI time capsules: with Mac OS, I can go back to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther by firing up an old iBook G3; with iOS, there’s still a first-generation iPod touch in the household, running iPhone OS 3.1.3 (yes, the iOS name debuted with version 4 in June 2010). I like to routinely be able to examine the UI of older versions of Mac OS and iOS in a ‘live’ setting rather than having to do Web searches fishing for screenshots.

Now, with these older iOS devices in particular, battery life is what it is, and I don’t always remember to keep them all charged at all times. It happens with my Mac laptops as well. Whenever I revive one of these devices, if it’s still able to access iCloud and other Apple ID-related services, I get a notification on all my other Apple devices that a certain device has now access to FaceTime and iMessage.

The wording in this notification has changed for the worse in more recent versions of Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS. This is the current wording:

‘A Mac’? Which Mac? If I don’t recognise this device (whose name you’re not telling me straight away), I can remove it in Settings. Yes, I can do the extra step of going to Settings > Apple ID (or Apple Account) and look through the — long, in my case — list of devices to see if some new device with a name I don’t recognise has perhaps appeared there.

There are, of course, far worse examples of bad or ambiguous UI; what’s annoying for me in this case is that this is yet another interface regression. The older version of this notification — which I still see on iPhones running iOS 12 and on Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra and 10.14 Mojave, for example — was clearer and did not require me to take the extra step of verifying the device in Settings:

I can immediately recognise which Mac (or iOS device) it is because the notification itself is telling me its name. And yes, to be perfectly pedant, this should generally be a non-issue because such notification is expected after signing in on a recently-revived Mac. But the notification doesn’t appear immediately afterwards; there is always some delay, and there have been times in the past where I saw this warning pop up on my iPhone while I was out and about, and caught me slightly unawares. Given the vagueness of the new wording, I did stop in my tracks and — since it wasn’t a good time to fiddle with my phone — I rushed to find a quiet spot to enter Settings and check my devices. The device list took a long time to finally load, and while I waited I recalled I had recharged my 11-inch 2013 MacBook Air the previous evening, so the warning was probably about that sign-in. Even so, there were moments of uneasy trepidation as I was waiting for the device list to display. When it finally did, nothing was out of the ordinary.

Some may argue that the fact that the new wording for such warning ‘makes you look’ and check is a sign of better security and better UI. But I don’t agree, and the reason is that people very quickly learn to dismiss any warning that has become predictable and annoying. At least, with the old wording, I can dismiss the warning while seeing a device name I recognise right there. (Of course, if your name is John Smith, I hope you’ll call your Mac something different than John Smith’s MacBook Pro). Dismissing a warning with a more generic wording in this case is a bit riskier, because what if someone else has actually gained access to your Apple ID and added their devices?

Attention to details, Apple. Do you remember?

Update: On Mastodon, Gregory makes a great point, something I overlooked due to the fact that I see this alert mostly on my desktop Macs, and it’s a bit less intrusive there:

The problem is deeper. It’s that this is a modal. It demands your attention right this moment. It stands in your way when you’re clearly in the middle of something else.

These kinds of in-your-face attention-diverting modals are a pet peeve of mine. And I absolutely don’t understand how Apple — the company that always prides itself on its UX prowess, and that is endlessly imitated — could be fine with this for as long as iOS has existed.

It could’ve been a notification. It could’ve been an email. It could’ve been any number of things that allow the user to deal with it on their own time, but for some unfathomable reason, Apple thinks it’s okay to rudely interrupt the user like that when they unlock their device with a clear goal in mind. Same goes for low battery alerts, by the way.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ll also leave a link to a six-year-old (but evergreen) post by Gregory, where he talks more about similar disrespecting disruptions: Respect your users.