The Software Design Trends That We Love to Hate
Finally someone calls out the idiocy of some new designs.
One of the common UI elements ushered in by iOS 7 is the button that doesn’t look like a button at all (and Google is moving in that direction with the Android L release). Touch-oriented interfaces tend to be a little too subtle about how to navigate them to begin with, but iOS’s new favorite trick of making the thing you’re supposed to click into highlighted, or sometimes not-highlighted, text means I’m prodding at my screen a lot more often now with too little or too much to show for it. And because the OS isn’t consistent about how it identifies buttons, I can’t build a reflex in response to certain colors or fonts. I’m always experimentally clicking around and sometimes ruining things.
Daring Fireball highlighted this problem a while ago with the short-lived blog UX Critique, which pointed out that a number of UI elements in iOS 7 are buttons masquerading as text, and sometimes vice versa. The blog shows, for instance, a screen for editing an audio file where the world “Trim” appears twice, one is a button, one is a title, and the only difference between them is one’s text is just a hair thicker.