I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described
I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
Seems like you could make the corners round (not making a judgement on that in any way) and still give the resize handle a more sensible size/shape/location right? As in this isn't a visual design problem.
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.
>I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.
The point is that Apple's own design team was.
In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
It's a throwback to BDUF.
that’s a lot of words to say “bad at their job”.
If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.
Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Of course it's not "a conspiracy", but it is a major, gigantic, huge, alarming failure by Apple. Resizing a window is just about the most basic and useful thing a window system can do after opening a window, and Apple totally messed it up. It's like they've never worked with a window before, but TBH though, their window system has always sucked.
I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.
Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there as the final quality filter.
Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.
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