There clearly is selective memory. IOS 6 was not the pinnacle of perfection, while ios 7 is not the dumpster fire portrayed. Apple did some creative things as ios got much more complex beyond ios 6. I say where are concrete functional issues now? I don't see them. I only see peoples' opinions there are.
No there’s no selective memory. But there is clearly an inability for me to get my point across. I never said iOS 6 was the pinnacle. It was the high point, IMHO and the HO of more than just me, that it was the pinnacle of use of interface affordances and cues that didn’t make the user guess and tap as much. Staying “guessing” is inarguable, I feel, as numerous articles on the justifications for iOS 7’s paring down the cues was to promote exploration (a fancy word for hunting & guessing) for learning how to navigate the new iOS frontier. And tapping is inarguable, as more commonly-used functions are hidden offscreen behind hamburger/ellipses icons in the quest for a “cleaner interface.”
In my mind, iOS 7 did three things: A) it reinvented nearly across the board all existing interface cues (such as text in place of “tap me” button cues, tools hidden offscreen, different/new slide-to-access actions, a mandatory-minimalization of context-defining borders and colored zones to help the user subconsciously navigate the content *and* the controls, parallax to indicate “tap me” functionality in place of pressable-looking icons,e etc.), it B) introduced certain “new” features (such as control center, how multi-tasking open apps are shown, etc., and C) iOS 7 “freshened things up” to look different via cleaner/simpler less-detailed styling throughout, via flat design, via more pervasive use of white backgrounds, via low-contrast thin font often on those white backgrounds, etc.
B) did not need A) or C).
C) is unavoidable, as fashion/times change.
But, much of C)’s freshening might have been welcomed by folk like me if so much of the complete rework of A) wasn’t so heavy-handed towards the less-intuitive overly-simplistic-to-a-fault direction.
I’ve said (and read by others) a thousand times, things are *often* just not as intuitive or efficient as before, and they simply can’t be when cues are generally more hard to differentiate (flat design and frequently little differentiation between “action” and “info” as well as “controls” vs. “content”) or non-existent (hidden offscreen) compared to pre-iOS 7. Sure you can learn and adapt, just like those do who lose a limb. But every so often an app appears that is so quizzingly hard to understand from the get-go because things are so “vague” due to both A) and B) above.
And I'll reiterate that I believe due to the overhaul of ios to accomodate 64 bit, Steve had to partially in with this as this effort had to start a few years prior.
I don’t know, who knows. I don’t and you don’t. I’d hope an “expose” of iOS 7’s developemnt appears one day, sharing the development decisions and issues. So much of iOS 7 at launch appeared so disappointingly half-baked...much of it only to very quickly be throttled back or reworked in iOS updates not very long after its launch. Makes me suspect Jony and his team hastily inserted his magna carta with less robust development than was clearly performed before the first iPad OS launch.
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Also, along my criticism that iOS 7is was driven too much by C) at the expense of A), above: iOS 7 really wasn’t a major upheaval of an interface, it was just new paint on dumbed-down controls.
A major upheaval to possibly justify a radical appearance (and interface methods) would be an iOS/iPad OS reworked to say, better work for use with one hand. I‘ll always involuntarily roll my eyes when anyone repeats the “we learned how to tap on glass” as an excuse for discarding intuitive interface cues, but a reworked OS that responded to something more substantial such as the realization of frequent one-handed use would be much more respectable and justifiable for a major rework (And not just a rework because time has passed and things feel stale).
Or, a rework that, say, goes one-handed-operation one step further and makes the interaction more friendly to one-handed use while also requiring less taps with the thumb or other hand. Say, get smarter and return to differentiating the content vs. controls better, and introduce an interaction method that lets one pivot the iPhone such that the “cursor” moves around to the available controls on the screen, which are then selected by tbd action, either a thumb press or fingers squeeze of the sides of the phone. I’m not meaning to suggest I think this is a good idea but I’m using it as an example; I mean to portray that some major evolution of interfacing should justify a revamping of the on-screen interface cues (function first) and not be driven by a new Sheriff in town’s design aesthetic first and foremost. (Form should ideally closely follow function, and never the opposite, etc. etc. etc.)
