What I like (and not) in iOS 7 beta (1) - Look
Before starting
I’ve heard a huge amount of criticisms about the new iOS 7, about different levels of problems, like color consistency, flat & simplicity principles, guesses about what happened in Apple, etc.
While I believe one thing is more important than any of those.
There’s a very best saying in movie The Grandmasters:
When it comes to martial arts, you just need to know 2 words. Horizontal and vertical. The guy on the ground is wrong, the last man standing up is always right.
Same rule applies to making a product.
That thing is customer satisfaction, or say user experience, or in Apple’s word, “feel”. Which approach to it you chose is not the top priority.
So here comes this series of articles, in which I’d like to talk about what I feel after I got iOS 7 beta installed on my iPhone 4S, and started using it. My using stories; my, user stories.
Look
My lock screen is changed to this, and 4 things got my attention:
- The time/date text, is not very easy to read as you can see with this background picture, I like my picture though, and I liked a lot of others even lighter than this. So it’s the text’s responsibility to be readable.
- The symbols and text at the screen top, with their shadows are not making an recognizable sense. Makes me wonder why the shadow is like that, I don’t want to wonder that though…
- When I rotate the iPhone (I got this from Apple’s ads), it feels like the picture is pretty deep inside of my iPhone because it also moves, which is pretty interesting but not necessary in my usage.
- “slide to unlock” makes me not very clear about sliding what, which is fine though, because I tried just sliding this text, and it moved away, I learned it. But I’m not sure if my mom can know what to try and learn the same thing, she had no problem in iOS 6.
Then I come to the home screen, and see a lot of new icons.
1. The icons with red rect don’t look good enough to me, aesthetically.
- Camera: the icon looks convex and tappable, but with different extent from other convex icons; the thin lines and shape at the bottom of the camera plus inset effect, makes me feel *uncomfortable*. I don’t know how to describe the feeling but it’s not comfortable.
- Settings: this icon looks so crappy, not only the contrast feels depressing, but also it reminds me the turbine killed a guy in LOST. (Turbine, I even rarely say this word in my mother language…)
- Contacts: this head shape looks… stupid here, at this size with this color, having this detail of the hair, cheek, and neck’s shape.
- Reminders: I just don’t know what the graphics means. And again, I don’t want to wonder.
- Safari: that gradient blue, plus red pointer looks out of aesthetic. It feels like people with bad taste just pick up clothes with the most vivid colors while pairing up dress, and they think that’s beautiful. Btw the busy scales make me feel really busy…
- Music: comparing those this is fine actually. But the top part gradient doesn’t feel very smooth.
2. And the icons with yellow rect look weird. Why are most icons convex or flat but these 2 concave? (Again, I don’t want to wonder.)
Then I go to the second page.
I have my second screen full of folders, yea I’m a fan of organizing.
But the folder, and these folders together, don’t look good. I was wondering what the translucent white panes were, again. Then when I opened one I understood, it’s a special region of the surface glass, when you open it visually it’s zoomed in, from there you have the second screen.
I like the second screen (except the title is not very readable), it’s simple, helps me focus, and visually not weird. But the first screen doesn’t look good. So many light gray spots on screen makes my retina iPhone not sharp anymore, and it blocked the beauty of my background picture, which is unacceptable.
Comparing to this, the sense of “special region of glass” it’s making is not important at all.
At this point I finished “looking” at my iPhone, and to go deeper, read next: What I like (and not) in iOS 7 beta (2) - Smart Phone
