ThinkMac on Spotlight

Rory has some reasoned thoughts on Spotlight's user interface...

In today's post I'm going to show you some UI from Tiger and I'm going to point out all the obvious flaws in its design. These are flaws that if I can spot, any one with some serious training in HCI should be able to see in the first few seconds of looking at it, and one does hope that Apple still employs such people (and that someone actually listens to them!).

It's not an exhaustive list, and I agree with all of them. Like most bad UI, it all seems immediately obvious once it's been pointed out to you. Rory is one of those Mac devs I'm trying to keep an eye on, because his approach to software reminds me so much of the others I like. I.E., quality is the cake, features are the icing, not the other way around. It doesn't hurt that he sent me a movie not long ago showing his efforts to shave pixels off his app, and the website looks pretty sweet in it... (QT 7 required)

One of the things that's strikes me every time I see Spotlight -- and articles like this just reinforce -- is how much of Apple's interfaces are becoming webified. I.E., the links in spotlight look like hyperlinks, not native controls. Mail.app literally has the same thing, although they generally are underlined.

I first saw this a long time ago at NSLog where he was saying Windows UI sucked just for this reason.

After Tiger shipped, Michael McCracken put up a short but very solid writeup showing these aspects to good effect, spanning Mail.app and Dictionary.app and the like:

However, using link text where buttons make more sense, not making link text noticeably different from non-link text, relying on mouseover effects to show that text is active: these are troubling - especially because some of those problems have been overcome in web design, and are the mark of bad websites. Now, bad websites and Apple's flagship desktop applications.

I haven't put a lot of thought into it, which means I haven't made up my mind, but his conclusions make a lot of sense. It doesn't hurt that he also does BibDesk, which is only two characters away from another Bible app for OS X.

Posted by drunkenbatman
August 05, 2005, at 09:43 AM

Comments ⁽¹⁴⁾

Posted by: Linden at August 5, 2005 10:50 AM

Ooh, what good points. It really does take someone who knows more about these things to point them out. How do you learn about this kind of stuff, or is it just practice and experience?

Posted by: Jay Contonio at August 5, 2005 10:50 AM

Holy crap that app is gorgeous!

Posted by: mw at August 5, 2005 11:48 AM

Indeed, once you´re shown these flaws in spotlight´s UI-design all seem pretty obvious and I can easily agree to criticizing all of them. Personally I would like OS X´s UI to be much more consistent - at least across the interfaces that came directly from Apple. It gets more and more annoying to see a new UI for nearly every new function of the OS or for reincarnations of already existing apps (mail anyone?).

(Especially the widgets I find way too different looking - from one another as well as from the whole OS - and too colourful in a weird way: "My gosh, what´s this supposed to be? OS X for kids?" But that´s another story.)

When I do ask myself: "Hey, why haven´t you seen all these flaws yourself?", I tend to think it´s a matter of how one approaches stuff like this. Seeing Spotlight´s interface for the first time I thought: "Well, it looks nice and it works for me, so everything´s fine (fully trusting Apple´s UI designers and their common sense)". But a more constructive approach would be: "Well, let´s see what they´ve done how and how they could´ve done better!"

Thankfully some people do look more thorough at stuff like this. I can only hope, AAPL takes notice of these comments and listens to advices for improvements. So thumbs up for pointing these UI flaws out - and thumbs down for me now having to look at Spotlight´s interface in a new way (knowing it´s faults, that is). :)

Posted by: RM at August 5, 2005 12:06 PM

I'd be happy if it worked properly with exposé instead of being some sort of window/app hybrid that you can't select once you use it.

Posted by: Aaron at August 5, 2005 01:19 PM

It's nice to see that Rory thinks well of you DB. The first screenshot of NewsMac Pro give drunkenblog.com 5 stars.

Posted by: jay at August 5, 2005 01:56 PM

Nice QT7 clip - I can't get enough of that Zissou Cow!

Posted by: Oliver at August 5, 2005 02:46 PM

I started off using NewsFire for my RSS needs, then I switched to NetNewsWire. HOLY MOLY how the heck did i miss this app!

Posted by: Twist at August 5, 2005 04:34 PM

I don't like a lot of Apple's UI design lately but I can't say I like the NewsMac one either. I see a good deal of functionality in it but it needs some polish. Reminds me a bit of Mail.app only worse. And yes I will confess, I am a NewsFire user and I did pick it mainly because it was prettier than the others ;)

I agree completely with the article though. Of course I never access this view since I prefer the options of using Command+F to limit my searches a bit and thus avoid waiting 3 minutes for the results. Of course you still get a lot of the bad design elements in this mode as well. I especially hate those ugly blue bars they stole from Windows XP.

Posted by: Skatch at August 5, 2005 08:11 PM

Argh! Spotlight's interface is horrible. The text links are up there on my hate list. The 'i' in the circle as well. Getting info on files is now a painful process involving trying to get your mouse to a tiny little circle and clicking. And if you want info on more than one file, better be prepared to spend a lot of time clicking on all those little 'i's.

FTFS is second on my list right after FTFF. If Apple were a person, I'd give them a kick in the shin for the stupid interfaces for both Spotlight and the Finder. I don't know why that strange thought popped into my head, but they are both very very frustrating apps.

Thanks for pointing out that post.

Posted by: Songz at August 5, 2005 11:57 PM

Some of you guys really get aggressive about this...

I won't defend the Spotlight interface blindly, but I can see that if you are in the "I hate Spotlight" mindset well... you will hate it even more as you discover things that you think that should have been done in other ways.

What's so bad about circle buttons with "i" in them? You would better like to have to move your mouse to a menu and select "get info"?

I had a hard time figuring out the relationship between the picture of Spotlight and the article. Why? Because I couldn't find anything that looked like hyperlinks in that picture...And didn't find any using Spotlight either. For me an text hyperlink is underlined. Funny that he even complains that these are badly designed links because they are not underlined (in Spotlight).

Since when clickable text is to be confused with hyperlinks? Clicking on the text on the right side is much like clicking on column headers to change sorting in the Finder and many other apps. Sure they could have enclosed each line of text in buttons . But with the number of options there, doing this would add too much visual overhead to the look of the interface. You want 17+ standard aqua buttons on top of each other in the right side bar of Spotlight? Ewwww... That, would be bad UI design IMHO.

Posted by: 2.STL-DX.B11 at August 6, 2005 04:16 AM

I agree with Twist. That app looks no better than anything else I've seen on OS X. Frankly, right now I feel that fussing about whether an app's window border should be a few pixels smaller, or how Spotlight's links should be presented, is far less important than actually getting 10.4 to allow people to just use the machine without having to suffer the "under the hood" problems that people seem to be having. Make it work, then make it pretty. Some gorgeously designed part of the OS is no use to me unless the lovingly placed button I click actually brings about a swift response, instead of sending me to the land of the SBBOD. Grrrr - I'm right testy this morning.

Posted by: some guy at August 6, 2005 02:07 PM

To get info on a Spotlight search result you don't need to click the "i" -- try the keyboard right arrow to show info and left arrow to hide info. Use the up/down arrows to move through the list.

Posted by: Skatch at August 7, 2005 05:37 PM

some guy - thanks for the tip. That will save me some frustration.

To the others, why do you present this as an either/or situation. Can't I have a computer be functional _and_ pretty at the same time? Isn't this what the Mac was supposed to be about? What's this nonsense about getting it working first and pretty second. Under-the-hood is just as important as having a usable interface, and I'm asking for both to be good.