The iOS UX guideline no one talks about
I have an iPad that I like a lot. It is like 4 times quicker than even my flagship Android phones, and it mostly works.
There's one thing I notice however almost every time I use it:
Lack of consistency seems to be considered an UX guideline for iOS apps, and back when I used Mac it was the same there:
In every app that is produced or featured by Apple something is wildly different. Let's take a couple of examples:
Can you spot the differences? Here are some starting points:
– Undo has moved (next to the keyboard and easy to reach in Notes, top of the page, jammed in next to Table of Contents in Pages.)
– Paste doesn't exist in pages, you have to use the “tap the cursor” trick.
iOS/iPad OS is so full of these small annoyances that it seems like there is a UX guideline for it saying that every app should be ever so slightly different.
For the record:
Windows is well on its way in the same direction with the mess that is Control Panel these days.
There are actually a number of things I think were better before, and consistent UX is one of those things that had its peak somewhere around Windows XP and Office 2003. I do not want to go back, but I really wish UX designers would go back and learn to undo the mess that is Metro, Ribbon or in the iOS case the whole mess.
That said: I love my iPad as much as the best PC I had. It is
– quick, somewhat predictable:
– with the latest patch release I reboot it twice a week every time it jams my keyboard or something
– most of the quirks are documented somewhere
I actually like it so much I'm seriously considering getting an iPhone next time I have to get a new phone which is really soon ™ as I'm so extremely fed up with having to wait for Android to switch apps, finding back the state after the other app got killed in the background etc.