Note
Design updates in iOS 14.5
Hello and welcome back to a new issue of UI Designer Weekly!
This week, we have design updates to learn from in iOS 14.5. My hope is that, in collecting these beautiful, informative, and thought-provoking examples of design, no matter how subtle, you are able to see something new and get some ideas to mix into your own work.
Happy to have you here!
P.S. If you have any feedback or requests, I'd love to hear from you on Twitter!
New Standards
The Magazine Rack, Reorganized
A beautiful new grid with rounded covers and shadows for News+. Generous spacing, clean pairing of the primary magazine title with the secondary issue information below. Each issue looks important and like a beautifully-made piece of literature and photography. This is perhaps an example that shows you can apply shadow and space to elements in your designs that want to stand out as big, bold, exciting things.
Siri, Compacted
Siri on iOS 14.5 presents buttons, including Send, in a compact corner at the bottom of the panel. You may normally expect to find Send at the bottom in a row separate from the text field. If more often than not, Siri interactions can be specialized to the current prompt, like this example of sending a message, then this is a great way to keep Siri's interfaces compact so users can see more of what they were doing before using Siri.
Both Easy to Expand and Hard to Mistake for Hanging Up
An upward chevron used to expand the bottom sheet in Maps. Before this update, you could find a red "End" button here that in my own personal experience, I tapped many times while on the phone with somebody thinking I was hanging up out of muscle memory for tapping a big, red button at the end of a call. If others were doing this too, this is perhaps an elegant solution for moving the destructive action of ending your current route behind just one more tap to prevent mistakes. It also might be true that, well, how often do you need to end a route? Often enough to make it visible at all times? Perhaps not often enough to justify the placement from before, but better suited to being one of the actions tucked away here.
Making it Easy to Play
The shows on their pages for Apple Podcasts hammer home that you can center something to clarify and emphasize its importance to the rest of the layout. Here, you can quickly appreciate the artwork of the show and scan its description, viewership, category, and frequency without looking far and wide or tapping through menus. Imagine if this design were leading-aligned to the language of the user as opposed to centered. Would it be as easy to emphasize the artwork? Would the title and description of the show compete with the title of each episode below?
Reading
Multitasking on Microsoft’s Surface Duo
If you want a good puzzle to think about, spend some time considering how you would design for a two-screen device. How would you make the form factor easy to explore for users? How would you help them do more with the second screen?