First, it was Liquid Glass. Then it was the icons. And then it was the icons again (though it’s a different set of icons). Now, there’s something else about macOS Tahoe’s redesign that annoys the heck out of users: the curves, specifically the curves on the windows.
In Tahoe, Apple decided to make the corner radius on windows more rounded. The thing is, as software developer Norbert Heger points out, doing this affects the interface for resizing a window. When you move the pointer to a corner to expand or contract a window, the curved corner actually creates less of an area for users to instinctively click and drag. In fact, most of the area where you can click to resize now lies outside the instinctive area.
For example, in the animation below, you’ll see that when the pointer moves towards the corner of the window, the ability to resize activates outside of the window. Going outside the window is not an intuitive move.
Foundry
In this next animation, you can see what happens when you approach the corner from inside the window. The resizing activation doesn’t occur until you are very close to the border, which gives the impression that you need to be very precise with where you click, unless you are aware that you can click outside the window.
Foundry
Heger calculates that 75 percent of the window corner lies outside of the activation range. If the corner wasn’t rounded, 62 percent of that area would be inside the clickable range. Effectively, the curved corners have reduced the usability of this basic feature by a not-insignificant amount.
All these UI flaws and bugs have to make you wonder, did the people who came up with Taho’s UI changes have any idea what they were doing? It’s as if the user experience wasn’t considered at all. Well, now that Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design is leaving, perhaps there’s a chance the company will fix what’s broken.
