Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick' 261
dryriver sends this story from The Guardian:
"The introduction of fake zooms, parallax, sliding and other changes in Apple's new iPhone and iPad software has a very real effect on people with vestibular disorders. ... It makes frequent use of zoom and slide animations; the home screen boasts parallax, with icons apparently floating above subtly animating wallpaper. And it's making people sick. Triggers and symptoms vary, but TidePool mobile app developer Jenni Leder's experience is not uncommon. A self-professed power-user, she frequently switches apps; but on iOS 7, this has caused headaches and feelings associated with motion sickness. 'I now have to close my eyes or cover the screen during transitions, which is ridiculous,' she told The Guardian, adding that there's nowhere to hide: 'It's not apps that affect me, but accessing them. Tap a folder and the view zooms in. Tap an app and it's like flying through the icon and landing in that app's micro world — and I'm getting dizzy on the journey there.' Reactions to screen-based systems — especially those utilizing 3D effects — aren't new. Cynthia Ryan, executive director of the Vestibular Disorders Association, says 3D effects can cause 'intense nausea, dizziness and vertigo,' sometimes from general vision problems, but also from visual-vestibular conflict. She added symptoms 'manifest more severely if a viewer already has a disorder of the vestibular system.'"
Re:Can't you turn the effects off? (Score:5, Informative)
http://gigaom.com/2013/09/27/is-ios-7-making-you-seasick-heres-how-to-turn-off-the-parallax-effect/ [gigaom.com]
Re:Can't you turn the effects off? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Disable option? (Score:3, Informative)
Except that doesn't disable animations. All it does it removes the parallax effect as clearly mentioned in the article.
The lack of a solution is the bigger problem. Apple provides a "Reduce Motion" option within the iOS 7 Settings app, but it is poorly labelled; it merely disables the parallax effect, but doesn't stop zooming or sliding.
Amateurs (Score:5, Informative)
This is not new. Apple does not seem to have any competent GUI people anymore, just "designers". And of course, competent testing would have found that problem. I expect in a while we will be hearing that thy did know this but management did not took it seriously. Like the the one time where Apple management thought thy knew more about antenna design that the guys that do it for a living.
Re:Can't you turn the effects off? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On the plus side... (Score:5, Informative)
Probably because of Apple's extremely annoying policy that you cannot downgrade iOS anymore a couple of days after they release a new version. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHSH_Blob [wikipedia.org] for more details. The ability to downgrade to iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 was disabled around 22 September.
Since iOS 7 was only released recently, there are probably still quite a few devices with iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 in the channel, and that person probably got such a device in exchange for his iOS 7 "upgraded" one.
Re:Why all of a sudden? (Score:5, Informative)
In a nutshell, vestibular disorders are weird and the triggers are subtle. Certain movements won't bother most people, but if you smooth them out, adjust the speed, tweak the effect, things get weird.
I went through an episode of labyrinthitis (an inner ear problem) a few years ago, and it was crazy what would and wouldn't trigger problems. For example, I could watch videos of someone running a dog in agility, but first-person video of any kind was nasty and when that tsunami trashed Japan, I nearly hurled trying to watch footage of the waves on Youtube. I could actually run my dog in agility, spinning and sprinting and and dodging and pretty much anything physical while standing up, but being in a moving vehicle or even just bending over... ugh.
Re:Can't you turn the effects off? (Score:5, Informative)
I've noticed that setting "increased contrast" seem to help with the speed of the zooming and sliding.
I've got other beefs with ios7 though, like the too-thin font for the clock on the lock screen, the annoyingly slow fade in/out, and safari constantly hiding/showing controls when I scroll a webpage (down vs up). None of which seems configurable.
Gratuitious animations (Score:5, Informative)
As usual on /., many commenters above failed to either read the article or actually try it themselves.
You can turn off the background paralax effect. But, really, that is quite subtle and not that objectionable. I turned it off, simply because I figured it eats CPU, GPU or both unnecessarily.
The new animations are gratuitious - they don't seem to serve any useful purpose. They are just plain silly-looking. Home-page icons now fly-in from all different angles. Drag a page, and now you are no longer dragging a skewmorphic piece of paper, but a skewmorphic sheet of silly-putty - drag at the right side, and the page warps, your finger "stretches" the right-hand side of the page. This kind of stuff was all the rage on Linux desktops - about 5 years ago. By now, everybody still running Linux has gotten tired of it and turned that nonsense off. The "bounce" now has a "warp" effect as part of it as well - the page deforms when it bounces.
It's like playing a bad ho-hum video game where they amped-up the effects because of lack of compelling content.
No, you can't disable these effects.
I'd imagine that if there is a medical issue with this, it is worse on iPad, because it fills more of your field of view when you are using it.
Well, yes you can. You can downgrade to a device that Apple has deemed incapable of rendering these effects. I think you need, say, an iPhone 4.
Apple seems to have become recently brain-dead when it comes to practical aspects of UI. And I hate to say it, but it must be due to Ivy, because they were quite good about it before. He is really, really good at designing appealing surfaces and finishes and packaging. UIs, not so much.
Another example of the non-functionaly of the new UI - buttons. It seems now that many buttons have absolute NO feedback that you have pressed them. I imagine the concept here is that the button is meant to perform some action, and the action itself is the confirmation that the button was pressed.
(Of course, a button is a skewmorphism, and we don't want skewmorphisms, right? So, I guess I shouldn't say "button" but "that word that's a bit bigger and fatter than the other words, and is off by iteself, that if you touch it something happens"...)
Somebody should have telegraphed that message to the poor developers who were given the impossible task to insure that the "action" happens soon enough for the user to connect their touching something on the screen with the "action" - regardless of the amount of work the action might take, and, oh, regardless of any other background processing that might be going-on in the device. Well, actually, I suppose somebody did, and those developers probably now feel like shit for having failed, even thought they could not have possibly suceeded.
Re: Can't you turn the effects off? (Score:5, Informative)
That only affects parallax in the home screen and very few other types of "motion" in the UI. It does nothing to stop the "zoom" effects that happen when you wake the device start an app, or do anything that was fine in iOS 6 but annoying now even if you don't have this medical condition because it makes you wait a second all over the place for the stupid animation to complete.
Re:Why all of a sudden? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, other operating systems and interfaces have implemented similar effects. But Apple implemented them everywhere possible. Just unlocking the screen causes a zoom-out-to-your-previously-opened-app effect. I can't say that it makes me sick, but it can be disorienting and distracting. It's definitely a case of effects for effects sake.
There isn't much you can do on the system without triggering some 3d effect.
Re:Gratuitious animations (Score:4, Informative)
Just because you don't understand the design philosophy behind iOS 7 doesn't mean the animations don't serve their purpose. The idea behind iOS 7 is to convey depth levels of content, to provide cognitive breadcrumbs about where you're going and where you just came from both in terms of inter-app navigation and within the system UI. Home icons don't "fly in from all different angles", you zoom into and out of the icon you launched or backed out of. Contrast this with previous versions of iOS where you it always zoomed straight into the middle of the screen. You can argue as to the efficacy of the animations in providing visual cues about where in the hierarchical stack of information you are, but they are in no way done without purpose.
Sorry, what? What part of the system or Apple apps animate in this fashion?