Apple is Bad at Design

Like many, I have long appreciated Apple as a paragon of good design. My interest in HCI was originally sparked by the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines1, and my appreciation for industrial design by the Snow White design language of the Apple IIc. Decades later, my career shift to design was enabled by the flurry of industry activity following the iPhone.

But, today, I don’t think Apple leadership even knows what “design” means.

When Tim Cook took the reins, he gave the Human Interface department to Jony Ive, previously only leading Industrial Design. The result was an embarrassment. iOS 7 was pretty to look at but so extensively departed from the company’s legacy of considered interface engineering that two of the key architects of that history were condemning it in public. These were not mere disgruntled former employees; Don Norman and Bruce Tagnozzi are giants in the field and have taught a generation of designers how to engineer usable interfaces by studying human behavior.

But the anecdote that I remember as most emblematic is that Apple’s new and oft-maligned icon set was not created by the software design team but delegated to a marketing group.

A few years later Jony Ive was clearly tired of it all and retiring in place to focus on jewelry, cars, and campus. Quite explicitly, two people took his place: Richard Howarth, a brilliant hardware designer, began leading Industrial Design. Human Interface went to Alan Dye, a graphic designer with a career in branding, whose fashion experience had made him seem right to work on the Watch. In a revealing interview, Ive described him as having “a genius for human interface design” but I am not convinced. Neither that Dye has this talent, nor that Ive really cared.

For the 6 years that have elapsed, I’ve seen little evidence that Apple has much passion for human interface. Every new OS version seems to introduce less usable patterns, and laughably obvious quirks abound2. Though I must admit that their heavy borrowing from Palm’s webOS to compensate for losing the home button on the iPhone X was a good move.

So, a hardware designer hired a graphic designer to take over Apple’s Human Interface team, and now we have a design language that appreciates the hardware design, is pretty to look at, but harder to use. Can we stop calling them a great design company yet?

Well, not quite. Apple still stands out from their peers via design-adjacent competencies. The experience of being a customer, through purchase and service, is far from perfect but significantly better than average. When they make questionable decisions about software design, their engineering competence means a new design language can be effectively implemented across a complex OS and rapidly adopted by developers. And the UX of using their products undeniably benefits from their ability to design and, harder, manufacture physical products at scale.

I still admire the company, but the core reason I became a fan has been seriously compromised. We can only hope that Ive finally makes his retirement concrete, and Dye is either replaced or delegates authority to some real HCI nerds like those who made Apple great.