Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Mac OS X Public Beta


The Bad

I've saved the worst for last. It's time to take stock of the dark side of the OS X interface. We've covered this ground before, most thoroughly in the DP3 review. Some things have changed since then, but I'm going to tell you right up front that a lot of things that should have changed haven't. Serious, fundamental problems remain. Buckle up, Mac fans, we're in for a bumpy ride.

As in the previous section, the information here will be presented in list form. Each item in the list contains:

  • A short one-sentence description identifying the problem.
  • A picture illustrating the problem (optional)
  • A longer explanation of the problem, possibly with comments about how it affects to different types of users.
  • One or more possible solutions to the problem.

This list is not presented in any particular order, and is not meant to be exhaustive. My focus is primarily on either fundamental problems that need to be addressed or smaller problems that are prominent because their solutions are painfully obvious and/or present in Mac OS 9 already. Here we go...

1. The Dock is centered.

Centered Dock

Explanation: The Dock is fixed in its position at the center of the bottom of the screen. It stays centered when it expands and contracts as items added to and removed from it. This effectively makes every item on the Dock a moving target. The situation is especially bad in the case of the Dock since so many different classes of items may appear there. For example, even if you initially launch your 5 favorite apps and never quit them or launch any others, they are still moving targets because each window you minimize also goes to the Dock, causing it to expand and move the items already there. Moving targets inhibit the development of efficiency-increasing muscle memory. Fixed targets are preferable, especiallyfor items that are clicked frequently and/or in rapid succession. The items on the Dock certainly fit that description, especially the running applications.To understand the magnitude of this problem, imagine if menus were centered on the menubar like this:

Centered menus: Finder

Switch apps and now it looks like this:

Centered menus: Grab

Think you can always flick the mouse to the same spot to hit the File menu in this scenario? Think again. More moving targets, more defeated muscle memory. I think the folks at Apple that decided to center the Dock should be forced to use an OS that centers menus in the menubar just like this. In fact, the default behavior in Beta is to show the application name as the left-most menu rather than its icon. This effectively makes every menu except the left-most menu a moving target since application names vary in length, pushing the other menus over by varying amounts. Luckily, Beta introduced an option to display the (fixed-width) application icon instead.

Advanced users are more likely to launch many applications, rapidly switch among them, work with many documents, and minimize many windows. They will be hurt the most by the small but continual effort required to acquire and click on the many moving targets in the Dock. Basic users will probably never notice the efficiency loss, but it is still there. This is something that usability testing has shown time and time again: efficiency losses that are imperceptible to the users themselves are often quite dramatic from the perspective of an independent observer (e.g. a stopwatch.)

Solutions: There are many possible solutions. The simplest is to allow the Dock to be anchored at either end, constraining its growth to one direction. Targets still move, but it should be possible to arrange a set of stationary targets at one end (say, the 5 apps that you keep running all the time.) A better solution would be combine user-configurable anchoring with a division of labor into specialized UI widgets: one (possibly Dock-like) interface component just for running applications, one justfor minimized windows, etc. Allowing files, folders, running applications, non-running applications, and minimized windows to all share the same UI widget (and therefore allowing them all to be disturbed by each other) makes stationary targets nearly impossible.

An Aside: Apple's Centered History

Since the iMac introduction in 1998, the aesthetic theme for Apple's hardware has been to center-align everything: logos, drive slots, speakers, etc. This has already caused functional problems.

Look no further than the centered drive eject button on the G3 and G4 towers. That centered button is attached to a large plastic bar behind it. When the button is pressed, it moves the bar which in turn reaches the actual drive eject button located on the right side of the CD/DVD drive mechanism and activates it. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. In reality, that plastic bar often flexes to the point where repeated presses of the external button are required. To this day, my wife cannot eject CDs from my G3 via that button. It takes a special touch to get the Rube Goldberg contraption to connect with the actual drive eject button, and she has not yet mastered it.

Given Apple's recent transition to a centered layout for its hardware designs, I'm actually surprised the menus aren't centered in OS X. The moral of the story: Apple has proven it is willing to sacrifice usability for the sake of adherence to an aesthetic theme. The centered eject button is one hardware example, and the centered Dock is a software example. This is a bad trend.

2. The height of Dock click targets is finite.
Explanation: The click area of a Dock item is defined by the icon's click mask. In the past, this caused problems with very small/thin icons. (See the hammer screenshot in the middle of this pagefor an example.) The clickable area of icons in Beta seems to have been improved (the Project Builder hammer icon is now a hammer on top of several large pieces of paper—a much larger clickable area.) But the problem I'm describing here remains: no matter how large the clickable area on the icon is, it does not extend to the bottom edge of the screen despite the fact that the Dock itself does.Again I'll use the menubar to illustrate the problem. Imagine a menubar in which the click targets for the menus did not extend to the top of the screen. In other words, if you flicked the mouse to the very top of the screen above a menu item and clicked, it would not activate the menu item. This would defeat the biggest advantage of a global top-mounted menubar: it provides click targets of "infinite" height. This greatly increases the speed and ease of targeting menus.Apple knows this, of course. They did extensive usability research before deciding to use a top-mounted global menubar. And it's apparent that Apple has not totally forgotten about this simple and fundamental truth, since the menubar in OS X still behaves the same way. But someone needs to tell the folks designing the docks about this new-fangled, super-advanced "infinite height" research from 20 years ago.
Solution: Make the clickable area of dock items extend to the bottom of the screen.
3. Text labels in the Dock are not visible without a mouse-over.

Docked folders
Quick, find the folder with the MP3s in it

Explanation:Items in the dock have names, but those names are not visible at a glance. The user must place the mouse over each item to display the name. Some items, such as applications, have icons that are usually unique enough to identify them. But other items are more generic, particularly documents and folders. Some image documents and minimized windows benefit from icons that are previews of their contents, but even that is not a complete solution since one minimized text editor window tends to look just like another, for example. Folders are even worse: they all look the same. Requiring the user to come up with unique icons for every folder he wants to dock is, again, not a good solution. Always-visible text labels are the solution. Unfortunately, the current Dock position at the bottom of the screen makes this difficult since names longer than a handful of characters will clash with the labels of neighboring docked items.Bruce Tognazzini, founder of the Apple Human Interface Group, describes some early Apple realizations in this area:

In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto "A word is worth a thousand pictures." This still holds true.

But it seems that this knowledge left Apple along with Tog (and the rest of the original Mac human interface group.)

Solution: Add an option for always-visible text labels in the Dock. Allowing the dock to be positioned on either side of the screen may provides space for text labels to extend without hitting each other. A smaller font size for the labels may also help.
4. The Dock obscures windows' resize widgets.

Click the image above to play the movie

Explanation: The movie above is taken from Apple's recent Worldwide Developer Conference. It shows an Apple employee giving an unrelated demo. During the course of the demo, a window opens that extends nearly the full length of the screen. The Apple employee wants to resize the window but cannot get at its one and only resize widget because it is stuck behind the Dock. Windows can only be dragged by their title bars, and those title bars are not allowed to go off the top of the screen in Mac OS X, so obscured windows cannot be moved up to reveal the resize widget. To solve this problem with what looks like a well practiced move, the Apple employee slides the window over to the right until the resize widget peeks out from behind the dock and resizes the window. This is a maneuver that no computer user should everbecome good at.Apple is planning an API that will let applications ask how much "usable" space is available for them to display their windows in such a way that their resize widgets are not obscured by the Dock. But this is not a complete solution since the Dock may be resized at any time. This is even easier in Beta now that the Dock is resizable via a simple click and drag on the divider.
Solutions: Allow windows to be dragged off the top of the screen, provide a key sequence to show and hide the dock, provide a key sequence and/or widget to make windows shrink until their resize widgets are visible, remove the Dock from the bottom of the screen, or do all of the above.
5. Dock organization is arbitrary.
Explanation:A supposed example of Apple "listening to its users" is the division of the Dock into two pieces in the DP4 release. Only applications (running or otherwise) may go on the left side, and everything else must go on the right side. This was their reaction to complaints that the Dock in the DP3 release held too many different types of items and was too confusing. Let's really examine what they did. First, they separated out one of the item types: applications. That leaves the remaining 4 item types (URLs, files, folders, and minimized windows) still jumbled together. Next, they decided that applications should go on the left side and everything else should go on the right. Why? Why not? It's basically arbitrary. There's nothing about applications that makes me think "left." Just one more thing to remember, I guess.This is now the one and only organization scheme of the Dock, and it is enforced (applications may not be dragged to the right side and vice versa.) The right side remains jumbled, and the number of items and functions handled by the dock has not decreased. An assessment of the DP4 "user requested" changes: a very tiny band-aid.
Solutions: Look no further than what the Mac community thought Apple's reaction to the Dock complaints would be. Almost universally, Mac users thought that Apple would almost certainly do one or both of the following: reduce the number of functions handled by the Dock, and (the most popular prediction) add some sort of hierarchy to the Dock. To this day, many people still expect hierarchy to be added to the Dock in some "later release" (although most have given up hope of Apple every reducing its do-everything burden.) Dock hierarchy seems eminently possible, technically, and is probably inevitable, but the fact that Apple seem to think it "listened" the user complaints about the DP3 Dock and subsequently "fixed" them by creating and enforcing a completely arbitrary organization scheme is very disturbing.

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