Design

Highlighting designs both good and bad

How to recognize when your tech website is being slowly transformed into an SEO-driven clickbait hellscape-to-be

If I do a search for “the best” on engadget.com, I get 10 results in the portion of the site that is revealed without further loading:

  • The best iPad accessories for 2023
  • The best laptops for 2023 (twice)
  • The best early Prime Day deals for 2023
  • The best 2-in-1 laptops for 2023
  • Fisker gives the best look yet at its 600-mile range Ronin EV (twice)
  • The best wireless earbuds for 2023
  • The best projectors you can buy in 2023, plus how to choose one
  • The best budget wireless earbuds for 2023

The story in bold doesn’t really count, as it’s using “best” differently.

These are the exact kinds of articles you find on pages that exist solely to be SEO results in Google web searches. And engadget is now stuffed with them.

What makes this funnier (or sadder) is that engadget has recently started recycling a number of these SEO-friendly articles, constantly bringing them back to the front page, often with few or any updates, seemingly to push this kind of SEO stuff to the top (I can’t say what their actual motives are, of course, this is just my best guess).

For example, their article on running watches, cleverly titled Best GPS running watches for 2023 does recommend the current Apple Watch Series 8 (though keeping in mind it’s nearly a year old and one might argue the Apple Watch Ultra is better for running), but then it recommends the Garmin 745 for triathletes. The problem here is while Garmin does still sell the 745, it’s now an old model that is not getting replaced with a newer one. The Forerunner line has been simplified and the upper end, once held by the 245/745/945 is now represented by the 265/965, with the 265 (and the 255 before it) absorbing features of the 745. Any of the 255/265 or 955/965 are better options for triathletes, in terms of price, functionality and longevity (the 55 and 65 series are mainly differentiated by the display, with the 65s using AMOLED).

The story has a byline of June 9, 2023, yet the first comments date back to March 2022, belying its recycled history. The comments are almost uniformly critical of the choices, too, pointing out issues of comparing old Garmin vs. new Apple. And the article is by the editor-in-chief, so there’s no ambiguity about whether engadget is okay with this sort of thing.

It’s transparent and kind of gross and makes engadget seem less interested in being about quality news and reviews and more about ranking high in Google search for the $$$. Which is a thing, I guess.

Device theme and why is YouTube crazy

UPDATE, June 26, 2023 (a day later): YouTube changed Appearance to Device theme again--and is once again blinding white on Windows 11.

Conclusion: YouTube is bad and should feel bad.

Or maybe I don’t understand it (this is possible–see below for details).

When I watch YouTube, I do so primarily on two devices:

  • My Mac Studio
  • My custom-built PC running Windows 11

Each respective OS allows you to choose an overall theme for the interface, and each OS refers to these as Dark and Light. I have both macOS and Windows 11 set to Dark because I find it easier on my old man eyes and particularly for working on images, photos or watching videos.

YouTube seems to go slightly crazy now every time I open the site on a different device and chooses to reset three settings each time:

  • Appearance changes from Dark to Use device theme
  • Always show captions gets checked ON
  • Inline playback gets set to ON

Also, why is one of these a checkbox and the other a toggle? See screenshot below.

YouTube being bad and it should feel bad. Because it is bad.

It also turns Ambient mode on, and this can only be toggled back off when you click on an individual video. It then remembers the setting for all videos, which is ???

Anyway, the issues I have are:

  • YouTube arbitrarily changing all of these settings
  • Changing them on what is now a regular and perpetual basis

But mostly:

  • What is “Use device theme” and why does it exist as a choice when the only themes the OSes come with are Light and Dark, both of which are covered?
  • Why does it switch to “Use device theme” and make the YouTube interface bright as the sun when I have all OSes set to Dark?

I thought it might refer to using one theme or the other and then customizing it somehow, like choosing Dark but having hot pink window borders or something. But while I do something like that in Windows 11 (well, not the hot pink), YouTube still interprets Use device theme as Light mode, which is wrong, and you know, as I’m typing this I think I may have discovered the issue. All this time I thought “device” meant hardware, but it may in fact be software–specifically, the browser. Because in Firefox, I have it set like so:

A few sites will impose their dark theme on you unless you specifically set the above to Light, so this is my way of insuring these sites stay light. YouTube may be using this setting. I am going to change this to Automatic, set YouTube to use Dark for appearance, and see what happens.

I will update this post with exciting details in the near future.

If it works, YouTube is still bad, because the language it uses is ambiguous–and it still changes three other settings willy-nilly on its own, anyway. But it won’t be quite as bad.

Addendum: If I was obscenely rich, I would totally start a competitor to YouTube.

Creepy photos done wrong, Apple Vision Pro edition

UPDATE, July 133, 2024: Apple is promoting the Vision Pro on the Apple Canada site, as it is now available for purchase by moose and other Canadians.

The image on the landing page is below. It basically reverses everything I list about the original image in this post.

Original post:

If you’ve seen anything about the Vision Pro, Apple’s new don’t-call-it-AR headset, you’ve probably come across this photo:

I’m here to tell you why it’s creepy and bad, and Apple should feel bad for using it.

In a list, of course!

  • The black void behind the person is off-putting. Where is she? Is she just floating in nothing?
  • The ultra-white starched dress shirt with the buttons done up to the top. This is incredibly twee and so very Apple. It’s a look that comes pre-dated. No one dresses like this.
  • The light around the fake eyes make them look dopey, as if the person is tired and wants a nap. They also look unreal and your brain will constantly be reminding you of this every time you see them.
  • The slightly-parted mouth is off-putting. She’s not smiling1You may argue that she is, in fact, smiling, but the fact that we have to debate it proves the point. So says I!, so why is she showing her teeth? It’s like she got a shot of Novocaine and her jaw is hanging slightly slack as a result. Also, the way the light bounces off her lips and chin is unnatural. Is she holding a flashlight at her waist and pointing it up? I used to do that to tell spooky stories when I was 12 years old. I also didn’t need a $3500 headset to do it.
  • The hair. It’s hipster hair. I’m willing to let this one go, though, because it is, in the end, just hair.
  • The ears do not look like they are part of her head. Again, this is a lighting issue.
  • Airbrushing. Yes, every face gets airbrushed in ads, and it still makes the skin look plastic and fake, like a glossy mannequin.

Other than the above, it’s a perfect photo to represent Apple’s Vision Pro don’t-call-it-AR headset (it’s totally AR).

EDIT: I made the following on request.

Bad Design: Web page images you can’t embiggen

This has always been a pet peeve of mine and while it seems less common now, I still see it more than I’d like (which is never!)

I won’t call out specific sites since I can illustrate this directly. Observe!

Let’s say I am writing an article about how a Mac Finder window does not show the + (plus) sign to open a new tab until after you have opened at least two tabs. I provide an image to illustrate this, like so:

This is a tiny screenshot. You can probably make out that there’s a window being shown, and multiple tabs, but that little + symbol? Maybe if you have superhero vision.

But this can be solved by making the image clickable! Go on, try clicking on it.

I have not enabled the ability to do this, so it remains tiny. Some sites go halfway on this if you right-click the image and choose Open Image In New Tab. Go ahead, try it!

Nope, the image is just plain tiny and largely inscrutable. This is bad design.

Good design is making the image pop-up in a lightbox that keeps you on the same page, lets you view the image in all its loving detail, then close the image and continue reading the web page in delight and/or wonder, like so (bonus points, though this is optional, the author can add a caption to indicate you can click):

Click image to embiggen

And that’s it! Make this a priority for Web 4 or whatever is coming up before AI runs amok and destroys everything.

Redesign hell ~or~ How not to change your blog after 18 years

I started this blog in February 2005, which means it’s 18 years old. In Canada, that means my blog can drive, vote in federal elections and join the army. It has to wait a bit longer before it can gamble.

But I don’t have to wait, and gamble I did!

Since WordPress has no easy way to work in a staged environment, when you want to make changes, you either have to go through the rigmarole of setting up a local server, or just make changes on your live site and hope for the best.

Which is what I’ve been doing the last few days.

What I have learned:

  • After 18 years, my site has accumulated a lot of legacy cruft
  • This cruft can do interesting and/or alarming things when you poke at it
  • Different parts connect in unexpected ways. Imagine if your elbows connected to your knees, it’s kind of like that.
  • Things that should work logically will often defy logic
  • Sometimes it turns out to be user error
  • More than a few times, really
  • But not always!
  • Planning ahead is a good thing to do
  • I should have planned ahead, which I did not do
  • But even just starting on this journey, I have cleaned up a lot of that cruft:
    • Old, inactive widgets have been purged
    • Outdated links and thingies have been removed
    • Legacy stuff has been converted over to blocks where possible
    • I’ve backed up all the weird CSS changes that are in Simple CSS
    • I’ve documented every weird thing I’m likely to forget
  • I’ve experimented with colours, but right now it’s just a sedate green/grey combo
  • I will actually need to figure out what I want to show up front and what will be tucked away

Currently, the site looks a lot more green. I added some nice rounded corners on the individual posts because round corners are the new hot thing. But it’s otherwise pretty stripped down and ready for more serious remodelling. This stuff takes a lot of time, so I’m not sure how quickly it will happen, but at least I’ve started.

Advertising for giants

Who is this type of graphic supposed to appeal to?

This is featured in a Dreamhost article on blogs and I assume it comes from a stock library of images, since there’s no attribution. But look at it.

What I see is random gigantism. This woman has absolutely massive arms and hands (her fingers can probably crush that laptop’s keyboard with a firm press), relatively normal legs and a freakishly small but happy-looking head. Is this woman cheerfully looking up cures for gigantism? Maybe methods on how to placate the menacing mint green blobs looming behind her?

I don’t know. But I do remember I’d seen a video on this art style before, and you can learn more about Alegria/Corporate Memphis and more via this excellent struthless documentary on the topic, appropriately titled “The world’s most hated art style”:

Oh, Apple: Chapter 98

Yesterday, Apple updated its base iPad and iPad Pro models, along with the Apple TV box, via press release and tweet. Speaking of tweets, here’s one showing how you charge the Apple Pencil on the 10th generation iPad (that’s the one they announced yesterday if you aren’t a hopeless tech geek like me):

I had the 10.5″ iPad Pro from 2017 and it used the first generation Pencil–it charged just like in the Old shot above, though I used the female to female lightning adapter to charge it via cable rather than risk it snapping off while plugged into the iPad in what was an ill-considered charging scheme.

Speaking of ill-considered, the new iPad still only supports the first-gen Pencil, but eliminates the lightning port in favour of USB-C, thus creating a situation where there is no way to charge the Pencil (the 2nd gen Pencil charges via induction by magnetically attaching to a side of the iPad).

Apple’s solution is to now include (another) adapter with the first-gen Pencil that allows it to connect to a USB cable, which then plugs into the iPad. This is also how you pair the Pencil. It’s cumbersome and requires two separate items (the adapter, the cable) in exchange for previously needing none.

It’s silly and dumb and Apple is rightly getting roasted for it.

Some are speculating that Apple did this because they finally moved the front-facing camera to landscape mode and couldn’t figure out a way to also includes the magnets in the same space to allow induction charging. That’s possible. Did Apple make the right choice? Will more people use the front-facing camera than a Pencil? I really don’t know. It seems like six of one, a half dozen of the other to me, but I can’t help thinking Apple either should have found a way to make induction charging work, or not move the front-facing camera until they could. This solution is an awkward, muddled compromise.

And it’s an excellent example of the current state of Apple.

Also note: The iPad Pros announced do not get the landscape camera, because they’re just getting a spec bump. Fair enough, you might say, but people are inevitably going to wonder why the low end model now has a superior camera to the high end, and rightly so. Apple wasn’t forced to spec bump and release the updated iPad Pros at the same time–but they chose to.

This is also an excellent example of the current state of Apple.

(I didn’t even mention the absurd $120 increase in price for the base iPad, which Apple acknowledges by keeping the old $329 model in the line-up. We’re at a point now where it makes more sense to buy older Apple stuff than the latest, because the latest is overpriced, even by Apple’s lofty standards.)

Oh, Apple. Why are you always such an easy, juicy target?

Bad design: The placement of the front-facing camera on iPads

The iPad copied the iPhone when it came to front-facing (selfie) camera placement, by putting them at the top of the device when holding it in portrait orientation.

It makes perfect sense for a phone, since you are basically never going to hold it in landscape mode when taking a selfie, which is what most people will use their phone’s front camera for.

No one takes selfies on an iPad. Okay, there are obviously some (odd) people who do, but for most the front-facing camera is used for a couple of things:

  • Face ID to authenticate on the iPad Pro
  • For video meetings using Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, etc.

For video meetings, it makes little sense to have the camera at the top, because most iPads are in landscape mode for these meetings, which means the camera is now off to the side. The same applies to Face ID, which often has trouble “seeing” my face when I have the iPad on my desk, usually forcing me to lean to the side that the camera is on to get it to work. It’s a minor but persistent annoyance.

In a rare display of independence, Samsung has actually moved the front-facing cameras on its tablets to the top when in landscape mode–like they should be!

Apple should do the same. They should have really done it about ten years ago, but doing it now will suffice. They have a chance this month when the rumoured revision of the base iPad is released. Will Apple do the sensible thing? (lol no)

UPDATE, October 18, 2022: lol yes! Apple announced the 10th generation iPad via press release and it has a front-facing camera in landscape mode! They also raised the price from $329 U.S. to $449, so, uh...enjoy the new camera placement, if you can afford it!

Speaking of buggy software: Everything Apple produces

When you speak to old Mac geezers (OMGs), they will often wax poetic about Snow Leopard as being the best version of OS X (and remind you it’s the Roman numeral 10, not the letter X), not because it came with a boatload of new features, but because it didn’t. Apple advertised it as having “0 new features” because it focused on improving existing features and fixing bugs found in Leopard, the previous version of OS X.

Back then (roughly the first decade of the 2000s) Apple released its updates on a “when they are ready” schedule, which meant you could go almost two years between updates. That changed in 2012 when Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) came out a year after Lion. Henceforth, all Mac OS updates would come out on a yearly basis, ready or not.

Ready or not.

iOS updates and the rest of Apple’s lowercase-Uppercase OS releases followed suit, and now yearly releases are the norm.

And they are a bad idea, bad for the industry, bad for users, and Tim Cook should feel bad.

Why? One word: Bugs.

Apple has tacitly admitted it can’t keep up with yearly releases, because it now regularly leaves out major features until “later”. Just this year they delayed iPadOS 16 altogether from September to October just to get things working properly. Yearly releases are not sustainable, they’re dumb, and serve no one when they come with incomplete or missing features and copious glitches. Apple is the 800 pound gorilla in consumer electronics, so if they change course, the industry is likely to follow. And they should!

And the thing is, if Apple switched to updates every two years or “when they’re ready” people would still buy tens of millions of iPhones, plus oodles of iPads, Macs and AirPods, not to mention staying subbed to the cash cows that their services have become. But Apple is not only gigantic, they are incredibly conservative and unlikely to change course unless forced by circumstance or the law (but mostly the law).

Why do I think this? Why am I posting now?

Because watchOS 9 is a bug-riddled mess and since I use my watch for my running workouts, the glitches affect me on a regular, ongoing basis. None of these issues happened before watchOS 9 was released (Apple eventually forces updates, so you can’t even just stay put, eventually you’ll need to upgrade).

Among the bugs I’ve encountered:

  • Stuttery or missing animations (not a big thing, but annoying)
  • Unreliable heart rate monitoring, especially at the start of a run (this is a big thing)
  • Music playback on the watch being permanently muffled when interrupted by a notification. It happened today (again) and even closing the music app did not fix it. I restarted the app and tried three albums before the music finally popped back to regular volume.
  • Pausing music playing from the watch via the AirPods (clicking the touch control on one of the earbuds), then unpausing, and the playback switches to whatever you were previously listening to on the iPhone. It’s like having someone come into your living room, quietly pick up the remote, change the channel from whatever you were watching, then just as quietly leaving the room.

I suppose I should be happy most things are still working. But bleah, the yearly updates are clearly not going to improve, so I really wish Apple and the whole industry would move away from them.

Bad design: Hiding common options behind extra clicks

There are a bunch of examples for this one, but I came across the one below when I was using the venerable Microsoft Word.

The design problem is especially common on mobile OSes, but as you can see, it’s not limited to smaller screens where companies might argue space is limited and there is a need to compact options down to only showing the most essential out front.

Word checks spelling and grammar using its AI-driven Editor, which is also available in Edge (browser) and the online version of Outlook, among other apps.

It works as expected, highlighting a misspelled word and offering options when you click on the word. Observe:

Note the three-dot menu at the bottom, next to Ignore All. What do we have here?

Two of the options, Ignore (basically “ignore this one instance”) and Add to Dictionary are pretty common options for spell checking, and having these in the main pop-up menu would not take up much more room, particularly for a program that is going to be running on desktop and laptop PCs with decent-sized to humongous-sized screens.

So why is the user forced to click on three dots to even see these options? There is no good reason, which is why it’s bad design. It’s simply in line with the current fad of minimizing UI, even when it makes no sense to, and makes the experience worse for the user.

Good design would at least offer the first two options to the main pop-up, so you’d have:

Ignore
Ignore All
Add to Dictionary

Then you could bury the other options behind the three-dot menu, though I think it would be better to just include all four of the sub-menu options in the main pop-up. What if the menu is too long because someone is using Word on a 2005-era netbook they got for $10 at a garage sale? Just dynamically have the pop-up appear above instead of below the misspelled word. Even the tiniest usable screens would be able to accommodate the pop-up menu somewhere.

Bad design: Ambiguous UI buttons

Yes, I promised to be more positive, so think of this as me highlighting a UI issue in hope of a positive change. It’s a stretch, just go with it!

The Cider app is currently in beta, and generally I find it to be a superior and certainly a much better-looking experience for listening to Apple Music than Apple’s own decrepit iTunes program (the fact that it still exists on PC years after being retired on Mac shows the contempt Apple has for people who don’t fully buy into their ecosystem).

If you have an album in Cider queued up that is in your library, you’ll see a strip of icons above the list of songs like this:

Remove from Library is pretty clear, so let’s move on to the other two.

Play: The button is red. Does this mean it is waiting to be clicked, then the music will start to play?

Shuffle: This button is also red. Does that mean shuffle mode is currently toggled on? Or off?

Answers:

Play: This is what the Play button looks like when music is playing. It’s also what the button looks like when music is paused.

Shuffle: This is what the Shuffle button looks like when shuffle mode is off. It’s also (go ahead, guess!) what the button looks like when shuffle is on.

In other words, these buttons convey nothing about their current state. To me, this is bad design, but as you’ll see below, it’s actually pretty common, so it would seem to be the expected convention as I’ll explain below.

By comparison, the new Media Player for Windows 11 is…well, it’s exactly the same. The Play and Shuffle buttons don’t change state when these options are on:

Both buttons will highlight on mouseover, but neither otherwise changes when clicked. How do you know shuffle mode is on? You don’t!

I believe the thought here is these are “top level” buttons used to initiate an action, and are not meant to represent the current state. For that, you look at the full set of controls, which do reflect changes when music is paused or playing. Cider again:

Music paused

Here, the shuffle icon is highlighted, indicating shuffle is on. The Play arrow indicates music is paused. We can confirm this by clicking on Play and seeing the change:

Music playing

So, am I complaining about nothing? Maybe, a little, but I still think a button should change to reflect the current state regardless of where it sits in the UI, so I’m still hoping UX gnomes will fight to get these changed.

P.S. I am obviously not a UI/UX designer, so if all of this seems silly and obvious, remember that…I am not a UI/UX designer! I’m just a slob with a website who would prefer more informative buttons, regardless of what current conventions are.

I am not tired of “Woke Sci-Fi”

I don’t even know what “Woke Sci-Fi” is, so I can’t be tired of it (I think), but apparently it’s a thing because it made it into this randomly-served ad in today’s BookBub newsletter:

I’m also unclear if “Gamer Kids vs. The Deep State” is the plot of the novel or a part of “Woke Sc-Fi” that I should be tired of. I do know that appealing to my alleged political leanings negatively in order to induce me to read your novel is a strategy that will never work. Convince me you write an interesting story and I might click your link. Otherwise, pass!

(I also made sure the image won’t link directly to BookBub’s ad server this time and make my post look like lunatic nonsense, or at least no more than usual.)