Don Norman:

Take the screen design for Apple’s phones. The designers at Apple apparently believe that text is ugly, so it should either be eliminated entirely or made as invisible as possible. Bruce Tognazzini and I, both former employees of Apple, wrote a long article on Apple’s usability sins, which has been read by hundreds of thousands of people. Once Apple products could be used without ever reading a manual. Today, Apple’s products violate all the fundamental rules of design for understanding and usability, many of which Tognazzini and I had helped develop. As a result, even a manual is not enough: all the arbitrary gestures that control tablets, phones, and computers have to be memorized. Everything has to be memorized.

When Don Norman says he wrote the book on user-friendly design, he’s not kidding. Don is a former Apple VP and his book The Design of Everyday Things is a seminal work.

If you care about design, take the time to read the linked article. This strikes me particularly, because my mom is legally blind and I’ve been unable to find a solution that she can master (voiceover and other accessibility features are just too complex for her to grasp).

I’d love to see a simpler interface as an option, one that lets me eliminate all the clutter and reduce her choices to a few large, customizable buttons (perhaps backed by Shortcuts). And I’d love for that interface to servive reboot, an accessibility kiosk mode.