Apple recently released a series of software updates that are, by most critical & customer impressions, bad. They are bad not because we react negatively to redesigns all the time. They are bad because people rammed decisions through that should not have shipped. They should not have shipped because of the basic principles of cognitive science. They should not have shipped because normative context already works well enough on their platforms. They should not have shipped because context should override consistency. They should not have shipped because Apple has always had taste as its key economic differentiator.
Now we are here, in this place.
On the other hand, the world is a confusing mess right now, so it makes perfect sense that Apple would turn all of their products into one, too.
Discussions of why translucency make for low-quality interface design are well-documented, of course, so I’m going to provide a few examples of obvious failures that have not yet entered the discourse, and then I will offer some next steps.
Example 1: selected states are wrong
Take Mail, a product that I use. Here is a screenshot that I have taken where one of the folders is selected. Can you guess which?
It is, despite everything, “archive.” The selected background is too dark & low-contrast to tell, and the text is darker and in the same font weight. This is an error. It must be fixed.
Example 2: disrespecting user input
Next we have mobile Safari’s presentation of Amazon, which is a web site. Can you tell whether I have dark mode or light mode turned on on my phone?
The answer, obviously, is not only “dark mode.” It is dark mode with the additional highly enjoyable cherry that closing that tab results in my URL field still somehow showing up in light mode?
Help me help you, Apple
These are the two easiest to describe in short order on a mailing list, but I’ve noted about 500 other rendering issues across first-party apps alone. Let’s not talk about all of the apps that Apple needs to accommodate every day. One of my Mac apps literally renders every other text label upside-down:
The downside of all of this is that we must now associate Liquid Glass, and really interface translucency writ large, with the ongoing apocalypse. The upside is that we now have an opportunity.
I would like to QA Apple’s interfaces. I would like to do this as a consultant for Apple, hired by Apple, for the span of one calendar year. I’ll get a Watch, TV, HomePod, and Vision Pro in addition to my current devices and use every single one of them daily. Every time I encounter an issue, I will exhaustively document it: what happens, what should happen, and how to recreate it. I’ll file bug reports in Apple’s bug tracking system. I’ll even sit in your Slack during business hours to answer questions.
Like with John Oliver’s inspirational redesign of a local minor league baseball team, the results of this feedback will be accepted as-is, because pretty much everything I’ll recommend will exist to fix what’s wrong. I’ve given up on the idea that you should redesign Liquid Glass. I know you won’t. I want you to fix Liquid Glass, instead.
As critique goes, Apple will be welcome to file a single comment in rebuttal of each point I make. I’ll then either remove the change, modify it, or move forward instead. In the end, you’ll end up with an interface that is not abhorrent to look at or use. Think of me as your cofounder reanimated from the grave to haunt you by email for a year. What would he have done?
In the west, top performers use Apple almost exclusively. The productivity and usability gains will spread to humanity more efficiently than any other work I could possibly do. Given this and Apple’s market capitalization, trillions of dollars in economic activity are at stake.
I am very serious about this offer. If you work at Apple and want me to poke at your interfaces for a year, know that I am very good at it and you may hire me to do so. Our fees for this work are $12M, with $1M payable upfront & nonrefundable by ACH or wire, and the remainder payable upon execution of our contract. To show you have some skin in the game, here is the Stripe link that will charge you for your upfront payment. I cannot possibly overstate how much that is an active Stripe link that anyone reading this can use, so unless you’re Apple, please be careful with it.
Beyond the money, I have a selfish motive here, which is that I use Apple stuff every single day and I’m distressed & heartbroken at the quality of their software. I thought we addressed Apple’s issues with professional computing years ago. We have not. I can help.
These ideas are 15 years old and remain evergreen
If you’re curious about the cognitive & usability issues that are inherent in this software, or if you work at Apple and want to know how to improve the software that you definitely made a lot worse on purpose for less than it takes to hire us, I’ve found a great resource for you: Cadence & Slang by Nick Disabato. It might be old, but it’s still quite useful!