Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name (2015)
&gt; <i>It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible...</i><p>People harp on this, but what changed is that phone screens are tiny. It&#x27;s just not possible to show all commands and still show content. Also, people forget that &quot;gestures&quot; like the double-click were not intuitive <i>at all</i> and that Macs came with <i>manuals</i> which had to <i>teach</i> the basic concepts of computing (double-clicking, folders, windows, etc.). While young children seem to use iPads rather intuitively (and they don&#x27;t come with manuals).<p>&gt; <i>clearly see how to select that action...</i><p>Tapping is just as intuitive as clicking... and select-tap for a context menu is no worse than click-and-hold for a drop-down menu, or right-click for a context menu.<p>&gt; <i>receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action...</i><p>I see no evidence this is any worse on phones. To the contrary, iOS brought a whole new world of animated feedback that makes feedback even clearer spatially (e.g. an app or folder expanding).<p>&gt; <i>and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.</i><p>In the most advanced applications, yes. But &quot;undo&quot; was never a universal concept on the desktop -- it was mostly limited to text editing and actions in Office-type applications. E.g. in System 7 you couldn&#x27;t undo creating a folder or moving a file or an operation in the calculator, you&#x27;ve never been able to undo setting a preference or resizing a window, and you certainly couldn&#x27;t undo overwriting a file until Time Machine and file versions came along more recently. (And on iOS, things like drawing and text editing apps usually <i>do</i> have undo, same as on desktop.)<p>I would argue things haven&#x27;t gotten any worse, because they were never that idyllic to begin with, and that most of what does <i>seem</i> worse is forced by smaller screens, not by suddenly ignoring principles.<p>(edit: changed &quot;tap-and-hold&quot; above to &quot;select-tap&quot; which I meant to write, e.g. when bringing up the copy&#x2F;paste menu for text)