Let’s talk about iOS 7 — it clearly has not been covered enough lately.

The new flat transparent toolbars have a curious quality: they create a problem which Apple specifically says they are made to solve.

Apple says nothing should distract you from your content. The user interface should not get in the way. In iOS 6, the website you are looking at or an email you are reading are squeezed between the heavy and overly decorated toolbars. They dominate the view, says Apple.

So in iOS 7 they make the content and the chrome indistinguishable. Before, though the chrome was indeed heavy, I was able to filter it out, because it was so different than the content. But now everything looks the same. It is so much harder to focus on my content.

The new user interface gets in the way.

When you enter a password, Terminal does not show anything:

This is bad as you get no feedback from the computer.

Displaying a bullet for each character is much better:

No one can see your password, but you can be sure that your input is being received by the system.

But if you password is long and you want to count the bullets to make sure you have entered all the characters, this display may give you a hard time. In most cases if you are unsure it is easier to just erase everything and enter the password again.

This can be improved by grouping the characters visually:

Now it is obvious that the password is 23 characters long. If you password is 24, then you have missed a character.

Alternative design:

If this is used ubiquitously, users will think of their passwords as of groups of terms, which will possibly not only make them easier to enter, but also easier to remember.

All user interface designers should know and apply the Fiitts’s law. It says that the larger and the closer the target area is, the easier it is (i. e. takes less time) to reach it. Immediate corollary: make buttons big.

What is not so obvious is that instead of making an element bigger, you can just enlarge the click area. I do this with the main menu on my site.

If I did not care, the click zones could have been like this:

They are actually three times larger:

This makes the links so much easier to click.

As visual designers do not usually denote the click areas, this is a trick for web developers to know.

By the way, making click areas too large does not pay off, as the Fitts’s function is logarithmic.

Some lawyers think they should shout at their readers by using all-caps text — this is how they communicate the idea “this is important”. Here’s a fragment of some Apple document:

The lawyers do disservice to themselves: all-caps text is much harder to read than normal one. If you are a designer, you are responsible for this, but unfortunately changing it is often beyond your power. So here’s what you do when no one is looking:

And all-caps becomes small-caps:

The text still stands out, but it no longer looks ugly and most importantly it is noticeably easier to read. We’ve used this trick in Getwear’s terms of use and other similar pages. See also: Typography for lawyers.