For Apple, "beauty has come at a great price."

I've just read this fascinating, and rather scathing, piece from Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini about the usability failings of recent Apple devices.

They contend that Apple is far too focussed on the superficial beauty of their products at the cost of basic principles of good usability design. (Although personally, I think even aesthetically speaking the iPhone peaked with the 4.)

It's clearly a subject close to their hearts and it's nice to hear some respected commentators who've stayed off the Apple Kool-Aid. 

Here's a snippet:

"Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed. The only way of telling whether the keyboard will produce a capital or a lower case letter is to look at the keyboard’s up-pointing arrow, which is either black or white. Weird: First of all, this means that people have to recognize that the up-facing arrow is the control for upper/lowercase. Second, it means that they must know which color indicates which case. Quick—without looking at your Apple phone or iPad, which color do you think represents lowercase?"

Full article on fastcodesign.com here

[image: Michael Meyer via fastcodesign.com]