A Responsibility to the Industry

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

If that sounds too dramatic, maybe the rest of this post won’t be for you.

One reason that developers struggle with implementing Liquid Glass is Apple’s own evolving implementation of it. From just the first few beta releases, enough of it has changed to make it difficult for some developers to understand what exactly Apple’s vision of it is. It also communicates a level of uncertainty about things that haven’t yet been addressed about its various concessions with long-standing UI elements in macOS especially. I do not want to list them all.

When Apple themselves have not yet reasonably prescribed what standard UI elements look like in this new design system, how can any developer responsibly implement them in good conscience? Isn’t there something about this that just reeks? Adopting a standard control means it can change without your involvement. This has always been true to some extent, but the stink of it keeps getting worse as trust in the company’s vision erodes over time, right?

Another reason that the industry is showing signs of reluctance is because Alan Dye did not prove he understood the platform, any platform, before he assumed the role of its lead designer. He’s not just a newcomer to these platforms, but to software design as a whole. He never had any experience creating anything for Apple platforms before he was entrusted with this position. That’s crazy.

To be a leader at a company, one merely needs the job title. But to be a leader in an industry, you must earn its respect. Steve Jobs earned that respect. Many developers had little issue with following his vision. To a large extent, Jony Ive earned that respect, too. I don’t see that ever happening with Alan Dye, however.

Compare this to someone like Scott Forstall. Scott joined NeXT in 1992 and led the creation of the Mac OS X user interface as we know it. I have nothing but the utmost respect for Scott, because he has long-proven to know what he was doing.

The power vacuum left by Steve ushered in an era where various executives at Apple were fighting for control. I don’t really know what happened, but if Jony Ive were to have made an ultimatum that it was either him or Scott, maybe Tim Cook didn’t think Scott was as important to Apple as Jony.

Whatever actually happened, by letting Scott go, Tim significantly altered the course for Apple. It has since become almost a parody of itself as a luxury brand. In my own estimation, Jony didn’t just lack experience in software design, he never respected the profession. If you look at the self-congratulatory Designed by Apple in California book the company published, you’ll notice that it’s all about hardware that only begins with Jony Ive’s contributions. Products are reduced to soulless slabs of plastic, metal, and glass.

I don’t want to belittle that work. It is also important. But it is impossible to isolate Apple hardware from Apple software. The whole point of Apple as a company was to make both the hardware and the software. Different components with different expertise, intertwined. It is this specific pairing that is so integral to Apple’s identity.

Imagine introducing the original Macintosh in 1984 with a blank screen. Without a MacPaint window with a cursive “hello.” These two components are equals. And they need to be treated like equals. Software design cannot be treated like it’s subservient to hardware design. The software must acknowledge the hardware and the hardware must acknowledge the software.

It is in Jony’s failure to recognize software as an equal to hardware, as a legitimate field with its own experts, that led to Tim making ultimately a very bad call to let people like Scott Forstall go. It is by giving Jony more power that fed his ego and allowed him to sell products like a $17,000 gold Apple Watch that absolutely no one needed.

The Macintosh was famously pitched as being the computer “for the rest of us.” The whole point was its inclusivity. That’s the vision I believe in. That’s the vision I trust.

So without Jony ever having to prove an understanding of software design, he placed Alan Dye, an iPhone package designer, in charge of user interface design. Jony was not qualified to make that decision. And Alan was not qualified to take the position.

To be perfectly clear, the position Alan has is not just to lead software design at Apple, but design for the entire platform, including millions of third-party developers and apps. Because Jony said so. Then Jony bailed on Apple anyway.

Sigh.

I have never witnessed anything that points to either Jony or Alan being good at this. And so it’s hard for me to see any reason to trust this direction.

It’s not the industry’s responsibility to follow this vision, but rather it’s the responsibility of this one person to consider the entire industry when designing a system for it.

It is in this that I struggle the most. Apple does not have answers for everything they uprooted. Fundamental UI paradigms have been recklessly reorganized. Carelessly compartmentalized. That any of this has been done without every consideration to the vast amounts of collective work that third-party designers and developers have to do to in their own products is just simply unconscionable.

It’s so far past the point of ridiculous to think of just how much effort the entire industry is putting behind altering virtually every app to fit into models designed by someone who should not even be in this position. It cannot be overstated how truly absurd it is.

We once lived in an era of computing where apps followed some kind of basic structure, but had relative free-reign with regard to its visuals. That allowed apps significant space to differentiate. Two apps that mostly do the same thing often looked entirely different, both feeling at home on the same system. With iOS 7, a lot of that kind of differentiation went away. There was more pressure on iconography and typography to visually distinguish one app from another, but if you leaned on Apple for iconography and typography, you gave up effectively all of your own brand.

It’s true that Aqua too was opinionated, but great apps ran in parallel with it, with other visual materials and motifs. Early iPhone and iPad apps similarly ran parallel with the system, solidifying their own identity, while complementing the system UI. What came from that is a much more diverse platform with character. There was a visual quality that became associated with software on Apple platforms. It was visibly done with great care. If a developer wanted to lean on Apple’s basic system elements, they had a good looking app. But a great app could still taking advantage of the functionality of system UI while not subscribing to the visual treatment.

Consider how implementing Liquid Glass comes at the cost of basically giving up on differentiating your app from other similar apps. While Apple benefits from all apps looking the same, do you?

Thinking again about two apps that mostly do the same thing, under the direction of Liquid Glass, these two apps might look and behave much more like each other than before. Worse if one of the apps is yours and the other is one of Apple’s own.

It is therefore irresponsible to design a system for this scale that standardizes functionality coupled with visuals. In order to get the standard functional elements of this UI system, you must also subscribe to the visual component of Liquid Glass. That puts designers and developers in a tough position, wondering if they really want their apps to look and behave exactly the same as an Apple app. The selling point of many third-party apps is not being an Apple app.

For all of this to be largely dictated by a person who has little-to-no support amongst industry experts? I frankly can’t believe it. No one I know would ask Alan Dye to design their app. Adopting Liquid Glass is no different. Why would anyone subscribe to a design system created by a person you don’t consider to be a good designer?

And so, it becomes perfectly clear. The only reason many people will adopt Liquid Glass is because it will be more work not to. No part of that sounds like an industry endorsement of Alan Dye, Liquid Glass, or Apple design.

If Alan Dye wants this job, then it needs to be clear that it is not us who have a responsibility to Alan Dye. It is Alan Dye who has a responsibility to the rest of us.

By the way, one of the reasons that the right side of the Finder icon should be neutral in color is because it is always the leftmost icon in the Dock. Any app icon should be able to sit to the right of it. You can rearrange the rest of the Dock however you want—and people do—but that’s the one icon you can’t screw with all that much. Whether or not that was ever an intention of its design is irrelevant, because the reality of it being this way for years has become expected by every user, and thus anyone who has a visceral reaction to that icon changing isn’t wrong. They’re likely mourning the loss of the relationship between that icon and whatever icon that sits next to it. Oh did you have Mail there? The blues don’t match. Sorry!

I said it before. I don’t like using my time to point out what are obvious mistakes as an expert in this field to people who are in positions of power that aren’t experts in the field.

I just want whoever’s in charge to understand the implications of what they do when they design at this scale. What seems trivial to someone who doesn’t understand something like this will inevitably bother people who cannot articulate why it does.

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