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.

As you may know, modes are bad. Even worse are timed modes often used in the human interface of consumer electronics.

A mode is a state of user interface in which the same user action leads to the same result; in different modes, results of the same actions are different. Photoshop is famous for its exuberant use of modes: a click within an open image may do anything depending on what tool and options you have selected. The problem with modes is that you are not constantly aware of the current mode, which leads to errors: you want to draw a line, but accidentally create a gradient fill.

Now imagine a TV remote. Left-right buttons change volume and up-down buttons switch channels. These four buttons are also used for menu navigation. Now, when you are in the menu and you want to make the TV louder, you press the right button through habit. Unfortunatelly, now the button means “make screen aspect ratio wider”. The menu is not just a mode, it is a timed mode: if you don’t press anything for 10 seconds, the menu will be closed. If you are trying to set up this TV with a help of a user manual, you will be very frustrated: every time you look up the manual, the menu disappears and you have to start over.

Timed modes in a car UI are not just frustrating, but can also be dangerous. To change the audio bass level, you have to go to the menu, find the EQ settings, select “bass” and then adjust it with a knob. By the time you get to the necessary menu item, the traffic light turns green, so you have to postpone the adjustments until the next traffic light. Chances are, you will then need to navigate the menu again. If you know that the interface will not wait for you until the next traffic light, you will be forced to adjust bass while driving.

If you cannot avoid modes in your user interface altogether, at least don’t use timed modes. If I have changed my mind and don’t want to set up the TV or adjust the bass, I will just press cancel myself.