It’s time to make an admission. I’ve been worn down by something. I’ve interacted with something for nigh two years at this point, and despite people insisting I’d get used to it, I haven’t. If anything, it bugs me more than when I first took it out of the box, and it continues to hinder my work.
My work-issued MacBook Air is one of those new(ish) models with a black notch bitten into the screen. This was done so the Apple designers could fit the camera into the lid without requiring a large bezel. It’s a tenuous justification, but it’s all I can think of. The image displayed above is one of Apple’s 16-inch models. Mine is the 13-inch, so the notch and menu items are larger, as we’ll soon see.
For those of us of a certain mental persuasion, the notch remains visually distracting to the point of irritation. The larger bezels on my previous Airs, and even the hump on my ThinkPad E14 don’t elicit such negative feelings. I’m not certain as to why, but my theory is that the notch is an intrusion into my field of vision. It therefore feels more hostile, almost as though the display is damaged. Think back to the mean old days when we had to deal with distracting dead pixels, only this time it’s an omnipresent rectangle of black you can’t ignore.
Look at me, Ruben… your black, rounded rectangle of doom. I’m always here, in your peripheral vision. No, not an external monitor Ruben, I mean peripheral in terms of… you get what I mean. Notice me, senpai. NOTICE ME!
But okay fine, not everyone is bothered by persistent, ugly, distracting visual intrusions in the shape of rounded rectangles you can’t dismiss or have repaired out of your display. Let me give you an example of why this isn’t “just” a visual issue; assuming of course that visual issues alone aren’t worth addressing (which, if it isn’t obvious, I think they are).
Here we have the macOS Finder as it appears on my 13-inch MacBook Air. Click to expand if you need:
macOS doesn’t include the notch in screenshots, so you could be forgiven for thinking this looks normal. I guess it kinda does. But let’s open something with more menu items than the Finder:
Can you see what happened? Note that yawing gap between the Sheet and Data menus. This is where the large notch sits, which forces the menu to “spill” over to the right. This doesn’t just look awkward, it encroaches on the space taken up by the status menu icons. With nowhere else to go, these icons… disappear. Vanish. Cease to exist. Contrast the two screenshots to see how dramatic this is; I lost six menu icons.
This is kind of unprecedented in desktop interface design. Since the earliest days of Windows 95 (and classic MacOS with the command strip), other desktops have “hidden” status icons with an arrow or grab handle you can click to expose those additional icons. These offer:
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A consistent visual cue that icons are hidden
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A way to access these hidden icons in your current context
Modern macOS, beyond looking like a first year graphic student’s F-grade assignment, offers neither affordance. You can either see the menubar icons, or you can’t. This silliness is compounded by the fact this limited space is entirely self-imposed. Couple that with the oddly vast padding between menus, and it results in a screen that can fit fewer menu elements than my SVGA 486. This is Butterfly Keyboard territory here.
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So what’s it like to live with this unwelcome display incursion? Well, if you crank the resolution up, shrink your clock, slavishly hide icons you don’t think you need, and trade in your light laptop for a bigger, heavier one, you might be able to avoid it creeping up on you… maybe. I don’t do these things, and even if I could, it’s not my job to bend over backwards to accommodate bad design imposed on me by a vendor with a bad case of the stomach flu and its resulting liquid (gl)ass. Sorry for that mental image. Point is, I’m stuck with a menu that routinely hides icons I have to care about for me to do my job.
Let’s say I’m in an application with lots of menus, and I need to interact with icons in the menu bar, or see how much battery I have left on my laptop! Little things. Let’s compare the pair:
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Before: I’d glance up to the menu bar and click on something.
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Now: I have to
ALT+TABto the Finder, or another application without as many menu items, just to get those icons back. Then I see the thing I need, or perform the required action. Then I have to tab back to what I was working on.
You ever heard how context switching can be ruinous to productivity? Yeah, about that.
I’m flummoxed, bamboozled, and other $FUN_WORDS how this got past user testing, or how they thought pushing the webcam into this space was worth compromising accessibility to such a degree. I think it’d be entirely reasonable for a less technical person to be confused about where their icons went. Did Wi-Fi stop working? Where’s the clock? Depending on context, a missing icon represents two distinct states: (a) a tool that has quit, and (2) a tool that’s still running, but hidden, and with no way in that context to see it. Appreciate for a second just how ridiculous that is.
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Okay, up until this point I may have somewhat embellished my frustration with this bad UI design. It only happens to me a few dozen times a day, and at worse I wince and wonder if this is what those brilliant designers at Xerox PARC had in mind. It’s not as though I’m flipping a table, and having to get work to issue me a new MacBook Air every week… though how satisfying would that be?
Here’s where I have severe reservations about this design choice, and why it might pose a risk.
In the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP days, Dock icons were like mini applications. They could display information, and present an interface for a specific task or process. Think calendars, clocks, inboxes, activity monitors, and the like. To render Mac OS X more Mac-like, these features were mostly deprecated in favour of icons in the menu bar. I can understand why they did this, even if I’d have preferred they stuck with the old paradigm because Dock icons that can do things was wicked cool.
The problem is, important processes now reside in that menu bar. Including, say, a VPN. Imagine you’re in a situation where you have to use a VPN before performing an action. Just as how there’s no such thing as car crashes because people are never distracted and always behave responsibly (yes Orange Peanut Gallery readers, that was sarcasm!), nobody would ever forget that they haven’t connected to a VPN yet… and definitely without that menu icon visible to remind them. There are dozens of examples where this could slip you up.
Is this a contrived example? Not at all, that sounds more like a leading question. The point is, previous hardware made the state of menu bar icons unambiguous, and these new systems don’t. We call that a regression in IT circles, and it’s a bad thing. It’s something you’re supposed to get better at over time, not worse.
Apple’s recent change of leadership may mean they’ll snap back to the mean when it comes to accessibility and design. We can only hope.