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by apozem 1467 days ago
This is the thing - if you're going to be like Apple and dictate design, you have to get it right. macOS and Apple hardware is not to everyone's taste, and they make mistakes, but they prototype and dogfood and iterate like crazy and they have thumbnails in the damn file picker.

When you're picking a file, you can even tap space to get a blown-up preview of an image or PRF. I use this feature almost every time I need to pick an image.
2 comments
bityard 1467 days ago
One thing I'll give Apple credit for is in the early days of OS X, they had (and perhaps still have, if it's the same thing) a document called Human Interface Guidelines. They actually did real experiments with real people and came up with a set of UI patterns that were proven by science to make software features and UI discoverable, usable, and clear, with the least amount of cognitive load.

Things like, the buttons on a dialog should should be a verb indicating the _action_ the user wants to take. Like "Run This" and "Go Back" instead of "Yes" and "No". (Or worse, the old Windows "OK" and "Cancel", which is rife with ambiguity in so many cases.)

And the tone of the document was that it was intended to be useful to _all_ user interface designers of all software and on all platforms, not just OS X. I just skimmed over the current edition and as far as I can tell, these days it's basically just about how to stay "on brand" with the Apple experience when writing your own UI.

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bscphil 1467 days ago
For what it's worth Gnome also has an HIG: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

And they have claimed in the past to have done UX testing with actual users.

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hda2 1466 days ago
> And they have claimed in the past to have done UX testing with actual users.

How many testers were there and how were they selected? Are they representative of gnome's current and future user bases?

I think I read once that their test group was basically the developers and their mediate friends. If so, then this is not how you do UX testing.

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bb010g 1467 days ago
Here's my favorite Human Interface Guidelines version (2009-08-20): https://web.archive.org/web/20101113134550/http://developer....
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int_19h 1467 days ago
Windows also had a similar document. E.g. here's one for Win7:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guide...

The problem is getting the app developers to actually follow them.

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Filligree 1467 days ago
> When you're picking a file, you can even tap space to get a blown-up preview of an image or PRF. I use this feature almost every time I need to pick an image.

Wait, what? That would have been super useful, but how was I supposed to find out?

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apozem 1467 days ago
It's not indicated anywhere visually. I don't even remember how I found out about it.

This is a downside of macOS and iOS design - lot of hidden gestures. For example, you can right-click the text title of a Finder window to open a quick navigation to all the parent folders of the current directory.

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skykooler 1467 days ago
Wait, what? I knew about the spacebar thing but this one is new to me.
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jamesgeck0 1467 days ago
This works in every Finder window; if there's a window with files you can use Quick Look. I'm not sure if it's documented anywhere anymore, but it's been around 15 years.
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brigade 1467 days ago
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 or https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/view-and-edit-files... I guess?

First one also mentions the ⌘-click on a window's title

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