[gfodor]

I hate posts like this that lay out some first-order criticism of a design as if the designers did not consider their obvious concerns. It also sounds like you are making judgements based upon screenshots without actually using the software.

As far as messages go, it seems that the contrast is appropriate for the bubble at the bottom of the screen. The presumption, I think, is that users will scroll to read previous messages and the contrast will be fine where they are reading. The contrast for old messages is reduced to reduce the distraction from content the user is not reading, since it has already been read. How often do you read previous messages in a conversation vs. the last message? This difference clearly has dictated Apple's design.

Second, the concern about white text above the photo not being readable is laughable. If you really think Apple hasn't considered the idea that some photos will have lighter colors I don't know what to tell you. If you watch some of the intro WWDC videos it's very clear that Apple has thought through very carefully the various automatic treatments and text rendering they are applying to ensure they are readable by the user. Any places where things are not perfect will be corrected later.

If you want to criticize iOS 7 you can do better than conjuring up things that would only be true if Apple literally had zero design skills.

[Vieira]

That kind of thinking adds very few to the discussion. I respect Apple and I know they are a reference in terms of UI/UX. This does not mean however that they are immune to making mistakes. Your argument is, from what I understood, that as they are very good they must have thought of it and if they choose to do it anyway then it must be the best way. I do not agree.

Even for the message at the bottom of the screen there was more contrast before when the text was black. In a room it does not matter much but out, in the sun, you can tell the difference. Anyway, even if you read the most recent message most often than others (which is probably true) you often need to read the previous ones for context if the reply arrives some minutes or hours later. If you are out, previously you could read the last two or three messages without problems. No you have to scroll so that the previous message is under focus to be able to read. And what is there to be gained? Isn't the fact that older messages appear before the new ones not enough to hint about their order?

Again you raise the argument that Apple always knows best and therefore it's laughable that I point out such a thing. Of course Apple would never make such a mistake. Just look at both photos and ask yourself which one can you read best. Also look at screen of the (beautiful) weather app and see if you can check your signal or even the time[1].

Also do you think that yellow text on a light background is a good idea in terms of readability? Because that's the color of the "actionable" elements in the Notes app.

[1] http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ios7-app...

[gfodor]

I posted it above but just to re-iterate if iOS 7 ships where background images render the status bar, text, etc, unreadable due to an obvious "white on white" or "black on black" issue, or at least if this isn't somehow addressed otherwise, then I will (figurtively :)) eat my hat.

I'd argue most of my beef with the armchair commentators is they are making what appear to be deep criticisms of iOS 7 without having actually used it, and without taking into account the fact that it's beta 1. They are shipping a new "letterpress" text treatment in UIKit, my guess is that they will apply this treatment to text if it is sitting on top of a similar-colored background, but probably have not worked out the details yet. I could see it being a reasonable technical and design challenge since you may need to apply a treatment to only part of a glyph. I'd ask the poster what their "duh, so obvious" solution is to their "duh, so obvious" observation. (Note: "leave the status bar alone" is not a valid answer here, since the design goal is to have the content in iOS 7 take up the entire screen. If you have a problem with that decision, argue that point, but realize it has nothing to do with status bars anymore. Even if Apple left this pretty glaring flaw in their design, they may have decided to do so because having content take up the entire screen is worth this cost, and the onus is on the critic to explain why it is not worth it, not that they are too stupid to have noticed this edge case.)

Basically if you see something and it's something that 99% of developers would identify as a potential edge case, you can be sure Apple considered it too and at least made an explicit design decision to deal with it or punt for later betas. If they made an explicit design decision, which is assumed, then you should try to understand that decision and then critique that decision and its tradeoffs beyond Comic-Book-Guy-esque "this is so obvious they are so dumb how could they miss my clever edge case I've discovered." Let's say Apple really do see that white on white is an issue, and actually decided to leave it that way and ignore the case altogether. Why would they do this? At least address this question if you are going to critique the design. The OP assumes it was an oversight, not a design decision or technical debt, which is kind of insulting to Apple designers and engineers.

I would prefer if before starting a complaint about text legibility, colors, contrast, and so on, if people would include a disclaimer of if they have actually based their opinions upon viewing the design on an actual device.

[shock-value]

> The presumption, I think, is that users will scroll to read previous messages and the contrast will be fine where they are reading.

That's a wrong-headed and frankly stupid presumption on Apple's part, if true. You're arguing to make the top half of the messages screen unreadable (or at least more difficult to read) in the name of a gimmicky gradient effect?

> If you really think Apple hasn't considered the idea that some photos will have lighter colors I don't know what to tell you.

They haven't in the beta. Unless you set the image to be basically all white (in which the overlaying text turns black) the text remains white. Even on the default "live" teal background the text is hard to read. Hopefully this will change in the release, but considering promo shots show the lock screen as it is now, I'm not hopeful.

> If you want to criticize iOS 7 you can do better than conjuring up things that would only be true if Apple literally had zero design skills.

Wait, so you are saying that if Apple didn't employ "good" designers, his criticisms about the new UI would be valid, but since they do, his criticisms are baseless? Please go ahead and defend that logic, should be good for a laugh.

[gfodor]

My issue is the OP fails to realize design is about tradeoffs, and points out where the new design sucks and where the old design is better, but shows his hand by not considering why the new design may be better. ("arguably looking better", what does this mean? Why does it look better? Perhaps there is a functional purpose to it that he/she is overlooking?)

The new message UI is obviously trying to fade out the older messages since, if you assume the latest message is the most important content by a large margin, older messages are a distraction. I am not going to say this is a wise design, but the blindness the OP has to this dynamic shows they are firmly in the "Apple are idiots" camp, without an attempt to see what is actually in front of them: tradeoffs.

As far as the white on white issue, it's obviously a bug or to-do. Mark this post, I will eat my hat if iOS 7 ships and there are cases where you end up being unable to read text upon user-defined backgrounds like the home screen or lock screen due to some obvious issue like light text on light background.

[shock-value]

Just regarding the message UI...

First off, I don't think they are explicitly trying to fade out older messages. The received message bubbles are gray and don't seem to have a gradient effect going on; it's only the sent ones which are colored (green or blue) and have the gradient. So I think Apple's goal here really was just a gimmicky gradient effect for the colored (sent) messages.

More evidence for that is that the bubbles themselves don't seem to change colors as you scroll; rather they are just sort of a mask for an underlying gradient layer underneath (so you can have one large bubble which fills the screen and is light on top and dark on the bottom).

But even if their intention was to make older messages fade out, it was still severely misguided. It is trivial to discern which messages are older (they are higher in the chain and therefore further from the text input for a new message). Users of iOS have been familiar with this for years (and isn't the new UI supposed to move away from explicit visual cues since the assumption is people are used to it by now?).

Moreover, it actually hurts usability, since users now have to scroll more often to get messages in the readable portion of the screen if they want to read through a conversation.

And, on top of all that, if there is only one sent message in the conversation, there is actually no way to bring it into the readable portion of the screen due to the snap-back! (Further evidence that this was intended to be no more than a visual gimmick.)