I'm actually surprised that there's so little visual consistency there... this stuff usually would be handled by reusable widgets - which, of course, gives you consistency for free.
Still, people bag on Apple's design problems because Apple's stuff often feels almost perfect. I tried out a BB Q10 the other day and I couldn't even figure out how the heck you get to the home screen. I got stuck in the voice-search app and couldn't figure out how to back out. That's one of those "I'd give it a detailed critique but where the heck do I even begin" moments.
My wife just got an iPhone 5C a few days ago, for all the hype that they are so easy to use, she had a hard time figuring things out. For example, how do you download a photo on facebook or other social networks? It's different for every app. On Android, you open the photo, then press the 'menu' button, and 'save photo'. It's the same in all apps. Apple seems to be missing on the developer documentation concerning common UI patterns. In one app, you have to press a small icon which looks like a box with an arrow pointing right (as if that's supposed to symbolize something like downloading?) and in another app, you have to hold down your finger on the photo for a second, and then use the menu to download. There's no consistency at all on this device. She chose 'Russian' as her language, and half the built-in apps are still in English.
To speak to your point about the Q10, the lack of affordances for moving between apps was a deliberate design choice. It creates a small learning curve when you first get the device, which is supposed to be ramped up through a short tutorial after unboxing (I'll admit the effectiveness of this is problematic and there needs to be more effort spent here). The gesture for moving between apps is consistent everywhere so user interface and hardware design can be drastically simplified. It allows for a focus on content and not 'administrative' UI or hardware buttons, and speeds things up drastically.
I think that kind of UX contributes to the divisive nature of BlackBerries; people either love them or hate them. The ones who love them are all well past the initial speed bump of learning the gestures and the ones who hate them pick it up in the store, get in to an app, get stuck and throw it down in frustration; the same people who stumble on to Vim would (and no doubt do every day).
The difference between iOS7 and BB10 is that the lack of consistency and affordances in iOS7 seems to result from inconsistent design choices, while in the Q10 it's a deliberate design choice designed to speed users up.
This is exactly backwards - all of the iOS 7 complaints I've heard so far have been about the UI polish and not the underlying functionality. Polishing a turd would be a beautiful UI in front of a buggy, slow system. Apple didn't ship a polished turd, they shipped a rough, unhewn diamond.
But each major iOS version is slower than the one before, it's just that we got used to it (and loud people on the internet always use recent devices anyway). I think this blog post is a good example of something that is definitely a polished turd. A clean, beautiful UI for a resource hog:
And something else that we have accepted is that Apple's services are what they are. For example, iOS 7 has polished the Photos and Camera apps. But in the big picture, Apple's ecosystem for photos is still a complete mess. There is Photos.app with its own Camera Roll, iPhoto for iOS, Photostreams, Journals, Moments, iPhoto '09 with its own Events, and no sane way to keep everything in sync.
If the stopwatch timer didn't record time properly, I'd see where you're coming from. UI polish isn't going to make fix an error in the timer. But here, all the core functionality works, the clocks show the right time, the stopwatch starts and stops. The main complaint here is about the colour of the buttons, which I agree could do with some polish.
I've just installed the update, and the inconsistency between the countdown timer start button and the stopwatch start button are probably deliberate. I didn't think about it at the time, but starting and stopping a stopwatch should have as precise a timing as possible, adding a fuzz of a "pressed" state for buttons which can respond instantly will reduce accuracy of the stopwatch. But for the countdown timer, accuracy doesn't matter so much, and these buttons work like normal ones, with a pressed state.
So, rather than evidence of bad design, this could be evidence of good design.
I wasn't making a judgement, I was responding to the above comment about the BlackBerry 10. iOS7 is great, and I think this article describes polishing a diamond.
> I'm actually surprised that there's so little visual consistency there...
The Stopwatch and Timer start buttons behave differently.
The timer provides some visual feedback because it starts the timer when you take your finger off the screen, you can touch and hold the button all you want but nothing happens until you release it.
The stopwatch on the other hand starts as soon as you touch the screen. I can see how that would be useful if you're timing a race or something that takes less than a second.
Incidentally, my double click/touch interval seems to be averaging around 0.12 seconds :)
Most actions in iOS are consistently handled on touch up and the timer is correctly consistent with this.
The stopwatch is for accurate timing and choosing to break the iOS convention for this specific use case does not seem surprising or arbitrary to me but a conscious design choice to improve the function of the feature. Guidelines are of course made to be broken (occasionally).
It actually is pretty much all reusable widgets. Buttons in the corner of the screen? We can call them "navigation widgets". Buttons in the middle of the screen? We can call them "action button widgets". Buttons on menu items (like Delete)? We can call them "menu button widgets". They can be reused across your entire OS.
The issue is trying to pare your widgets down to their bare minimum. The minimum you can get away with depends very much on the context of the widget.
In iOS 6 they used the same design for navigation widgets as action button widgets. This made them consistent between the different widgets, but left the navigation widgets slightly heavier than strictly necessary.
In iOS 7 they pared each widget down to the minimum they could in the particular context the widget is used in.
The result is screens that individually look like they're made up of inconsistent widgets, but OS-wide the use of the widgets is consistent. Whether that's enough I guess we'll see as more of the general public use iOS 7.
That reminds me of the first time I picked up an iPhone. I opened the Maps app and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to close it. 30-45 seconds of just staring at the thing. Then I saw the home button.
Yes, that happens a lot for new users. Thing is, once you DO know how to do something, it makes complete sense, and is very memorable - you won't forget it.
Sometimes the issue isn't so much making the interface usable, but instead teaching the user how to use it and in a way they won't forget.
By that logic, vt100 apps used by banks in those green terminals have fabulous UI. Users familiar with the UI are blazing fast on terminal apps. The discoverability is near zero, though.
I was referring to what takes but a second to learn and makes perfect natural sense thereafter (not to be confused with learning painful rote/ugly process). Interface should be obvious in context - but that doesn't mean the user has ever encountered that context before, and initially doesn't understand it enough to know what constitutes "obvious". If you've never encountered gravity before, walking (i.e.: stand, then fall forward, then stop yourself with a foot, repeat) is not something you'd think of doing, but is obvious once you see it done.
Still, people bag on Apple's design problems because Apple's stuff often feels almost perfect. I tried out a BB Q10 the other day and I couldn't even figure out how the heck you get to the home screen. I got stuck in the voice-search app and couldn't figure out how to back out. That's one of those "I'd give it a detailed critique but where the heck do I even begin" moments.