I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did

March 24, 2020 ; 8 Comments

Please do not use this post as an excuse to beat up the devs at Apple or Google. If you are doing that, you have missed the point of this post and you are being unnecessarily mean to individuals who may have no control over broader organizational decisions. Do not be that guy / person / jerk.

It is not uncommon that I raise an accessibility or usability issue with a client’s design or implementation and am met with either “But Google does this,” or “But Apple does this.” Mostly it is the default response to any issue I raise, but it is far worse when it is a reaction to a genuine technical failure or problem real users have identified.

That response does not address the problem I may have raised. It avoids. It offloads responsibility. It declines to even try.

Be Best

A very very quick selection of decisions that Google and Apple made that were counter to what experienced usability and UX experts recommended:

As I Was Saying

Arguing that Apple or Google did something a particular way will not sway me on its own. I am not alone in this (see Heydon Pickering’s Listen To Me And Not Google ).

Apple and Google get it wrong just as often as the rest of us. Their tendril-like presence in our everyday lives does not make them any better, and their people no worse. What ‘standards’ they have defined have been through brute force — Apple brought down Flash but wants phones with no physical affordances, Google built the most powerful search engine of the day but pushes half-baked features to its browser.

I don’t want more of Apple’s or Google’s cavalier “coolness” in interfaces. I don’t care that these untested or highly specific patterns are good enough for their teams to deploy. They can be immune to causing massive grief to their users, you cannot.

Anyway

If you want to sway me with your defense of your terrible UI thing, try harder.

I may have ranted about this in a Twitter thread:

Getting hammered lately with “Google does this” or “Apple does this” justifications for terrible UIs.



Google Material Design told us form fields were better without boxes, until they tested it.



Apple told us removing button outlines in iOS was better, until users complained. Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) March 23, 2020

A few days before I wrote this Nielsen Norman Group made a video arguing that there is a risk in copying the designs and patterns of famous sites, primarily because the context is different.