Take

Translucent user interfaces is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Aside from movie visual effect trickery, it started out in Mac OS X's Aqua, followed by Windows Vista's Aero, followed by (then) OS X's Vibrancy, followed by Windows 10's Acrylic. Over time, more and more of the user interface has become translucent similar to foggy/privacy-preserving sheets of glass.

The unstated goal has always been to "look cool". The stated goal has always been to "give more pixels to your content".

The sparse, flat esthetic of iOS 7 and its successors held a tenuous alliance with these transparency effects; being one of few real-world physical effects allowed to be imitated. When waiting for the iOS 7 era to end and the crucible of history to turn once more, the card-like esthetic of some prominent new UI features looked like a hint.

Instead, we got Liquid Glass, which is an ambitious implementation of a visual material and associated effects. They look impressive. They do add both personality and a trademark look. They also, to a first approximation, make the user interfaces worse.

They are not as easy to parse visually - static, predictable positions are eschewed, or maintained under the condition that they do not look static and predictable. They continue the trend of leaving less and less color/ink for definition of the UI itself; text or symbols cast in Liquid Glass have worse legibility and are harder to make out, while user interface elements on top of Liquid Glass are positioned with the primary purpose to make a Liquid Glass UI look like a Liquid Glass UI. Well-known and time tested elements of design are, if not abandoned, then demoted below the desire to have a visually striking, consistent branding user interface.

Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory.

The problem with the philosophy birthing these ideas, and running rampantly through the manifesto motivating Liquid Glass, is that it insists upon itself.

The world is full of breakthroughs that end up moving the state of the art forward, which have flaws, sharp corners that are then weathered by time and experience. The first decade of Aqua is a great example of this, in going from flashy, jarring, gaudy tech demo to something a bit more toned down, but still elegant, effective, playful, beautiful and with a lot of personality.

Aqua had in its roots that it wanted to be user interface, with clearer and bigger fonts, more prominent key buttons, allowances for pro features, solving issues that classic Mac OS had long suffered. Vibrancy and now Liquid Glass do not hold the same desires; rather, they seem to increasingly want there to be less user interface. Scooting fifty buttons out of your way when someone is trying to read an email, fine - there are many times where that is legitimate. But the pixels previously devoted to assembling a dependable user interface are now automatically made to retreat, to shrink-to-fit.

Even this makes sense in a handful of scenarios. Mixed reality, augmented reality, or the Vision Pro's "spatial computing" does introduce a concern of physically layering UI on top of not just itself, but also physical objects.

What doesn't make sense, no matter how gangbusters these future technologies break through, is painting every problem with this solution. Much has been made recently of the evaporation of usability from macOS's recent System Settings, being made to ape the iOS System Settings. The tools used to fit things in a navigable hierarchy on a screen a handful of inches are cast as the only tools able to solve a similar problem for a platform where a much bigger canvas and two vastly different interactions are always available.

Rather than model Apple's mastery of all their devices, Liquid Glass models the propensity of design at Apple to wag the rest of the dog. Rather than model that design is how it works, translucency-obsessed design in general and Liquid Glass in particular models that job one, two and three are to look impressive and hang the person who ultimately has to get something done.

Liquid Glass is an obsessive focus on visual design, special effects and appearance. Going back roughly a decade, the iPhone X brought a new interaction design breakthough too, with a gestural interface that made it possible to zip through apps, go back and forth with fluid gestures that moved at the speed you drove them, and change your mind midway through. It is possible that for some Apple devices, there is another part ready to drop, that will complete this picture and change what Liquid Glass offers currently.

But I don't think so. The iPhone X's new-style gestural interface was everything Liquid Glass is not; rather than giving the illusion of visual transparency, it gave the tools for control. The two are not directly comparable, but considering all the bluster, it is worth considering why that is. Interfaces are tools to be wielded, that should be predictable, understandable, learnable and conquerable. The misapplication of "chrome" to refer to pixels used to present user interface controls and affordances looks more and more like projection; Liquid Glass is a much better simile to actual chrome on cars: glitzy, shiny, visually effectual and thus emotionally valuable if it's what you're into, but not a terribly efficient surface for other things you have to interact with.

(Written after deep thoughts and actual full-time experience with Liquid Glass UIs. Beta versions are not finished versions nor really fair targets of criticism, but significant changes in philosophy are necessary to invalidate most assumptions. It is, mostly, the intention itself that is at fault.)