The problem with iOS 7 and iOS 8 - bad design
There's this recent buzz out there, exponentially reinforced by Marco Arment's recent article “Apple has lost the functional high ground”, that Apple has lately reduced their famous attention to detail which may have put their “it just works” moto at risk. In particular, the latest iOS and OS X releases are seen as somewhat buggy. I believe that that is not the main issue, at least with iOS. The real issue is that iOS 7 is poorly designed (and iOS 8 hasn’t changed that).
Let me start by saying that the first time i saw an iPhone I fell in love with it immediately. The same has obviously happened to many people around the world, which explains the huge success of the iPhone (and iPhone like smartphones).
The reason for this is iOS (or the original iPhone OS) was magic. Every time I pressed a button, scrolled a list or even just looked at a beautiful iOS screen, it felt like magic. That magic illusion comes from both great engineering and great design (and also good taste). My passion for iOS was such that it led me to learn software development and create an app myself, currently available on the App Store 
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Well, I believe that magic was lost in iOS 7 and 8. Not only because of the bugs but mostly due to the inferior experience caused by weak, uninspired designed. You may say that design quality is subjective, and good taste even more. Is it really? Than go back in time and compare Windows 3.1 with Mac OS! If someone thinks Windows is better designed, I rest my case.
Anyway for the sake go argument, let me just pick one of the several severe design problems in iOS 7/8:
The text, borderless button. In fact buttons were not redesigned. They were simply removed and replaced by text or a chevron. These are not buttons anymore, just text links to an action. Apart from looking ugly (like 90’s html links) these “borderless buttons” have a few other design problems.
First, they do not invite touch. If you read Apple’s development guidelines (at least up to iOS 6), they rightfully say that a button has to have a minimum area of 40x40 points, because thats the size of a fingertip. If you see anything smaller than that your instinct will tell you that’s to narrow for you to touch it, and you loose at least some of the will to do it. Honestly, text does not invite touch (even click with a more precise mouse is debatable). So that’s plain bad design.
Second. Graphically, text poses some problems to a well designed screen or app. Lets say that you have to put some longer than usual text in a button (you may not even be aware of that, but it may happen an app is available in non-English language countries). Than iOS will truncate it or reduce it’s size. If you have a left button with a regular size text, and a right button with reduced size text, you know what will happen. Since there are no borders or anything to give a a similar size to the buttons other than text, this buttons will seem misaligned and tour screen will look like garbage.
Third, buttons will be confused with other text in your apps, even if you tell the user that text of one color is a button and of another color is not, that’s too much thinking required. And again, text of different sizes on the same screen, without any visual contours, just looks confusing and really bad.
Fourth, a mobile OS has to be intuitive. If you have lots of text in a screen (some that you can tap, some not), that will be confusing, specially since apple now usually gives the same background color (usually white) to toolbars and content.
This is just one of what I consider to be a large number of design problems that plague iOS8/9, and I’m not a professional UI designer, would love to hear from them on this.
Unfortunately I could go on and on…I still hope that Apple takes iOS to the drawing board again and redesigns it completely. With the loads of cash that Apple has, it would not be difficult to hire the best designers out there and make iOS jaw dropping again!! Just look as apps lake Paper from 53, Clear, even Yahoo news Digest. and an endless list of outstanding design Apps…
Comments
Incidentally, what is the point of the greyscale option in Accessibility? Who is that for? The only thing I can think of is for colour blindness, but even then I'm not sure that it would really help.
I wonder if it'll do anything for my battery life?
Hmm... Good suggestion about Button Shapes. I should've turned on that option a long time ago.