Wow, SwiftUI and all of the competent designers retiring has made
#Apple so bad at UIs. I helped my mother set up a MacBook Air yesterday. We set the UI size to the maximum so she could see it easily. Around half of the setup boxes then had buttons that were either off the bottom of the screen or obscured by the dock (and therefore not clickable).
Almost all of them had huge amounts of empty space in the middle and so could easily have fitted if some idiots private aesthetic had been considered less important than accessibility at Apple.
All of them were either modal or app-modal (hey, Apple folks: you might like to read your own Human Interface Guidelines, they explain in detail why this is stupid). You couldn’t progress or go back until you’d hit the button that was off the screen and, because some were system-wide global, you couldn’t go to settings and change UI size without killing the thing that produced the box.
All completely preventable if anyone in QA had bothered to try the first-time setup flow on an Apple device using each of the five UI-size options.
Oh, honourable mention for
#Microsoft if you install Word or Excel, the first launch window is a massive thing (which, at least, can be scrolled, unlike the Apple ones) giving you a bunch of options to buy an M356 subscription. There is no option anywhere in that window for logging in with your existing subscription. There is an option in the app menu, but it’s greyed out. If you close this window, the app exits. In your next release testing, try asking someone on your team to figure out how to log in from a fresh install. I eventually figured out the flow, but I was very close to the point of saying ‘let’s just put LibreOffice, Pages, and Numbers on this and not bother with the M365 stuff’. And I have a PhD in computer science and worked at Microsoft for five years: how do you think a vaguely normal human will do?
