about bad UX design and iOS 18's photos app
If you Google, "ios 18 photos app," most of the results you get are either reddit threads or blogs discussing how bad it is. You might see some comments calling out people for being overly-dramatic, saying "you'll get used to it."
I think some complaints about the new redesign are a bit dramatic, while some hold more merit, but I think one reason trumps them all: Apple is breaking their own rules about a swiping gesture that they teach to users in every other first-party app. And that is the swipe-left-to-go-back gesture.
Back swiping on iOS is a gesture that universally means you go back to some previous page. Most times, there's also a left chevron button in the upper-left corner that will accomplish the same thing. But on the new photos app, back swiping switches between the "Years," "Months," and "All" tabs in the main photo gallery, and the left chevron is gone. If you want to exit to the main landing screen, you have to click the "X" in the bottom-right corner. This can all be seen in the screenshot below:
credit: macrumors.com
I have a huge problem with this kind of design decision because it clearly was made among a group of people who don't really care about consistency and who most likely just wanted to do something entirely different.
Taking a fresh approach to something isn't a bad thing, but when you spend years teaching users the rules about how to interact with your software, and you make exceptions to that rule in a few places, you're creating a bad user experience, flat out. Back swiping ALWAYS goes back (at least in first-party Apple apps). I can't see any reason why you would change that in one of the most highly-used interfaces on the phone. I've had the new redesign for about a week now, and I've probably accidentally back-swiped at least 20 times due to muscle memory.
Google Maps also tried this "X" button in the lower-right corner back in October-November, but quickly removed it and brought back the left chevron in the upper-left corner. I'm guessing they realized it made no sense to arbitrarily make users un-learn something they've been taught to expect for many years.
Digging deeper, I think this is a problem you see far too often at software companies in general. People need to justify their job, so they create arbitrary work for themselves. I've worked with many great designers, but I've also worked with some that jumped into entire redesigns that were based on zero user research or really any kind of foundational reason for doing it. Sometimes implementing redesigns can take up to 6 months to a year, so you better have a damn good reason for it!
UX design is a powerful asset to have at a company, and when you have highly-qualified people in those positions, you can end up with some great software as a result. But if the wrong people are in charge, or even worse: they don't have much to work to do, that's when bad decisions start happening. If you are in one of these UX positions, the best thing you can do is actually use the software yourself and conduct user testing to see how others interact with your designs. Designing things in a vacuum is objectively bad, and that team at Apple should feel bad for fucking with years of learned interactions.
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