from Hacker News

Sloppy UI – A collection of sloppy iOS7 UIs

by romain_dardour on 9/19/13, 9:38 AM with 175 comments

• by dasil003 on 9/19/13, 11:42 AM

  Although I'm a perfectionist and I believe a lot of these issues should be addressed, the tumblr itself bothers me. It's the logical culmination of Fail culture where hipsters in armchairs laugh at the inadequacy of everything while producing nothing. All these things could have been constructive criticism in another context, but here they just serve to further someone's twitchy compulsion to be entertained for another 5 seconds on the internet.

  Yes I'm getting surly in my old age.

• by coldtea on 9/19/13, 10:23 AM

  This is quite bad -- only a small percentage are genuine examples of sloppu UI.

  It seems to be put together by one guy (instead of user submissions like similar sites) and not quite design savvy at that.

  Case in point:

  1) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61441688489 (this is supposed to show "poor alignment")

  2) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439801745 (this is supposed to show "stray dropshadows" -- didn't they guy get the memo that the iOS 7 UI uses them to show a 3D layer hierarchy?)

  3) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439835569 (this is supposed to show "poor contrast". Isn't it obvious that the top bar should not be visually striking and distracting?)

  4) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61440586435 (... this is considered "sloppy").

  5) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61440527405 (flat information hierarchy -- one of the few genuine sloppy UI examples).

• by devx on 9/19/13, 10:33 AM

  Most things about iOS7 seem inconsistent, and like they were rushed - which they were. I mean Johny Ive was head of UI for like 9 months only, and had to change everything in iOS in that period. These changes should've arrived in iOS8 in order to be well thought out and mature enough, but for some reason they decided to push them to iOS7.

• by nextstep on 9/19/13, 1:01 PM

  The "no return key in the twitter compose view" is intentional. That is a keyboard style option, and Twitter it using it to discourage users entering return characters in tweets. This is not even Apple's app.

  A lot of these "sloppy UI" examples are in non-Apple apps, intentional, or otherwise misleading from the screenshot.

• by da_n on 9/19/13, 11:59 AM

  Good collection. iOS7 is an obvious improvement over previous iOS versions (perhaps with the exception of the icons) and has done a good job of bringing iOS up to date visually. Worth remembering that there are a lot of inconsistencies in Android, a good article is here:

  http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/18/ux-things-i-hate-abo...

  Don't get me wrong, I much, much prefer Android and can't ever see myself moving back to iOS, but always good to measure things in balance, nothing is perfect.

• by whizzkid on 9/19/13, 12:48 PM

  Isn't Apple hiring the best/smartest/creative developers?

  How are these small/annoying issues are passing the test cases?

  Don't they have the same development cycle as they had while developing the first Iphone which was a huge thing at the time.

• by crb on 9/19/13, 11:22 AM

  I'd love to see a similar set of "'iOS 7-updated' apps running on iOS 6 or earlier."

  Before I upgraded yesterday, there were a couple of apps I saw (I think it was Shazam) where they must have emulated the iOS 7 feel, rather than using system-native widgets, so the result was a "business in front, party in the back" mishmash of UI on the same screen.

• by electic on 9/19/13, 4:20 PM

  The whole iOS7 UI is not intuitive at all. Look, I love flat UI but when I became and engineer and founder, started talking to customers, I realized that customers are simply not as aware as the people that designed and made software. They don't know what to click, they sometimes don't even know they can click something, and they often get lost. When you go to a Microsoft store and see people playing with Windows 8, you see this and it really hits you. People are lost, randomly clicking on text thinking it is a button. While Windows 8 and iOS7 look good in many ways, I think this release is a step backwards for people who might not be very tech savvy.

• by hemancuso on 9/19/13, 4:41 PM

  From what I hear nothing has helped improve Apple's autocorrect more than http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/

  I must imagine that this tumblr is already being poured over in Cupertino and radar's are being filed in right now. This tumblr is a good thing.

• by mvkel on 9/19/13, 11:52 AM

  Great examples. I hope you're sending these to Apple!

  One I noticed is a very slight difference in weight between the carrier text and the data status.

  It's so slight, almost the difference between "sharp" and "strong" in Photoshop.

  Also, people, easy on the "way to criticize but not offer any constructive criticism!" OP is effectively filing a ton of bug reports, which is a good thing.

• by vicbrooker on 9/19/13, 12:54 PM

  Personally I think that it's a bit misleading to lump bugs and questionable design choices under the same 'sloppy' banner.

  Good quality criticism regarding choices developers and designers have made have lead to some of the best debate and discussion I've seen on HN. Conversations that focus on criticizing execution (for example the UI bugs in the tumblr) have been some of the worst.

  As a developer I would get huge value out of having a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of iOS 7's language, particular as we begin (or have begun) redesigning our apps - hopefully that is something this tumblr can evolve into eventually.

• by nnnnni on 9/19/13, 12:04 PM

  See, this is really frustrating...

  I mentioned this SAME STUFF (specifically the horrible lack of contrast) months ago just to be met with downvotes and handwaving dismissal.

  NOW people agree. Better late than never, I guess.

• by thiagoperes on 9/19/13, 2:20 PM

  I'm really disappointed that Apple released the GM version of iOS 7 as final. So many bugs and glitches.

• by ps4fanboy on 9/19/13, 12:55 PM

  "Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right." - Steve Jobs

• by nicholassmith on 9/19/13, 3:53 PM

  Some I definitely agree with (mixed font casing), some I don't, and some are plain bugs which are annoying but not a question of sloppy UI. There's a lot slipped through that it's slightly inconsistent, but there was plenty of inconsistent design through iOS1-6 as well and with OS X.x in it's various releases.

  Design over a large product like iOS or OS X is hard, it takes time to get all the edges smoothed down and given that iOS 7 is probably the result of a year to two years of work it's not a surprised it's rough. If it's a bug (or a UI niggle) report it to Apple, they may or may not be listening but it's a better solution to highlight it with them directly, as well as on Tumblr.

• by tzaman on 9/19/13, 11:14 AM

  So what - if I didn't visit the link, I wouldn't even know about these "sloppy" features.

  Done is better than perfect.

• by chrislomax on 9/19/13, 11:43 AM

  Another one, if you go to the timer app from the slide up control center, the "pause" is 2 pixels out of being centered. You can just about tell with the naked eye but if you open it in photoshop it's 2 pixels out.

  It's not a big deal but I thought Apple would be well on top of stuff like this

• by gurumeditation on 9/19/13, 12:55 PM

  Would they have preferred the metal and glass meets billiard room look of iOS6?

• by romain_dardour on 9/19/13, 12:43 PM

  To clarify things, we just posted this on the web site:

  We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it. It's all about intellectual honesty, not trolling.

• by ttflee on 9/19/13, 2:36 PM

  How many of these failures are due to insufficient testing on i18n?

  IMHO, using texts to replace icon based buttons is clever to simplify the working of screen resolution adaption, however, it does increase the possibility of inconsistency between different locales. I still remember NYTimes.app for iPad displayed ugly aligned date texts which is just too long to fit into the space left for them, only in Chinese locales, which they do not officially support, and I doubt that they really did testing on it.

• by mikeleeorg on 9/19/13, 5:41 PM

  Anyone know how many UI bugs were reported or seen with previous iOS versions? I'm just wondering if this is a usual part of each major iOS rollout, or a unique instance.

• by efnx on 9/19/13, 4:57 PM

  Many of the problems with consistency (capitalization, placement, return key on keyboard, etc) seem to be in specific apps. In those cases it's the designers and programmers of the company that make the app that are at fault. It's important to be familiar enough with the iOS SDK that you know which bugs are OS territory and which ones are app territory. I'm not trying to dis their eye for bugs, I'm just trying to shrink the surface bugs live on.

• by alecsmart1 on 9/19/13, 5:06 PM

  I don't understand how changing the design adds to functionality. Instead of giving a new half baked look, Apple could have concentrated on adding features to its existing look. Flat design is good but like most things its just a phase. Why not add background downloading etc. to the current design. From design point if view iOS 6 is fairly good and very consistent.

• by joeld42 on 9/19/13, 4:12 PM

  If these are the worst things that people can find to complain about in iOS7, then Apple should feel pretty proud of themselves.

• by rjohnk on 9/19/13, 5:17 PM

  What will probably happen is a quick 7.1 release to fix most small alignment bugs, and then iOS 8 will refine everything. I'm guessing iOS 9 will be the polished version of this UI design. Not making excuses, just postulating what might happen.

• by bdcravens on 9/19/13, 4:27 PM

  My only issue is that this is an OS that's been in beta for a few months, and yeah, the betas were pretty horrible in some ways. The OS has been live to the public for a day. How do I know what version these screenshots came from?

• by 37prime on 9/19/13, 5:26 PM

  Some of them are bugs found in the beta releases of iOS 7.

  I am assuming that the “sloppy UIs” are from the general release.

  There were tons of changes from beta 1 to the GM and there are still some UI bugs, but they are not showstoppers.

• by antonpug on 9/19/13, 3:49 PM

  Half of these are from Beta versions and do no longer occur... But nice catches, there are definitely somethings that could be improved, but others are just up to personal preference and interpretation.

• by bane on 9/19/13, 1:14 PM

  Most of these are pretty good points, some are just taste differences. In a different world, if these things were fixed, they'd belong on a "Subtle UI Greatness" tumblr.

• by nvk on 9/19/13, 3:18 PM

  Poll: Changing to Android after iOS7 Update? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412046

• by aaronbrethorst on 9/19/13, 6:48 PM

  Without Apple Radar numbers next to each and every one of these pictures, this is just unnecessary, mean-spirited trolling. "Hey, look, iOS 7 has bugs! LOLOLOL."

• by Felix21 on 9/19/13, 5:25 PM

  And they said we wont miss scott forstall who would surely not let anything like this out of apple.

  But what do I know.

• by _random_ on 9/19/13, 7:23 PM

  Hire more/better designers? No-no! Let's put money in the hedge fund instead.

• by happywolf on 9/19/13, 2:26 PM

  I agree with some of the reviews here: nothing is perfect, and I do think most of these are bugs. For example, the issue on facebook settings doesn't show up on my i5. Get a life, or show me what kind of non-sloppy you are able to produce.

• by enscr on 9/19/13, 6:53 PM

  The most tangential looking OS ever. Maybe iOS 7s would fix it.

• by tharshan09 on 9/19/13, 12:18 PM

  why is he referring to web terms? Or does it just happen to be common terminology across design?

• by dgesang on 9/19/13, 5:44 PM

  > We love Apple.

  Stopped reading there ...