One of the fun things I have got to observe over and over again in the enterprise world is the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system. Organizations love to get the cost efficiency of buying pre-made software. Then they get their own programmers (or some short-term consultants) to customize it just so. That is great until a version of the COTS product comes out that has another thing they want but can’t migrate to it due to their customization may/will break. Then they blame the COTS vendor to not making software just for them!
The reality seems to me, if we choose to do something different than what the designers were thinking when they created something, we run a risk. Even if that different is the “customization” the designers allowed. How big of a risk is probably correlated to how much deviation we made. Changing the default desktop background: small deviation, small risk. Setting up my own finder system using third-party tools: bigger deviation, bigger risk.
What I have to tell my enterprise clients that the start of customization on COTS products puts you into a bind of increased immediate productivity (doing things your way) vs. long-term support costs including potentially complete replacement of the existing system. Change will happen. You have to decide your risk-level comfort. Almost all choose to take on tons of risk knowing they will likely be in a different role by then 
Apple did try a similar concept way back in the mid-1990s with the option to show a simplified Finder, which mostly involved culling menu options until it resembled the original Finder in its simplicity. They had a even simpler one as I recall that used a tiled interface.
The issue that crops up, at least in my opinion, is that no one at Apple (or at Microsoft, which also had a “simple menus” option for Word 5) can predict exactly what options should be revealed or suppressed to satisfy a hypothetical market of “simple” users.
I’ve seen applications that gradually reveal more options as the user becomes better acquainted with the software. (Kind of like the forum software that powers TidBITs Talk, which gives a user more privileges as they integrate into the community.)
I think that’s better than updating a package and suddenly hiding most of a user’s email messages. That’s one of the huge missteps Google made when they took it upon themselves to automagically organize the user’s email for them. IRL organizing specialists will tell you that organizing a personal space like a home is most likely to last when the person who uses that space is involved in the process.
From that perspective, Apple did better by making it easy to turn off the customized sort rather than throwing Mail messages into arbitrary folders.
Boy, that was one of my favorite changes in Gmail. And in my experience, for multiple Gmail accounts, I do not find it arbitrary at all. Occasional messages, yes, but it’s a very small percentage.
That’s what made me so hopeful for this feature in last year’s Apple OSes, but Apple’s algorithm is poor compared with Gmail and gives users less control.
But, of course, to each his own.
Good point, and essentially inevitable. In fact we may want different features for different project. As a professional writer, I want different things at different times from my word processor. I want simplicity when I am composing, so I start many projects in Nisus Writer. But when I have to deliver a final version to an editor, I convert to .docx format in Word. Then the editor adds Change Tracking so I can check their work and fix any mistakes. Unfortunately, Change Tracking winds up creating three separate pages on the screen, which can give me eyestrain and a splitting headache.
Anything that hides email can be a disaster. The worse I have ever had was an overactive spam filter that blocked and bounced mail from multiple groups that I worked with. A close second was Google’s hiding hiding invoices and requests for updating of credit cards that made me spend days trying to recover our web site.
Or videogames, as you complete activities and missions.
This nails why I turned off Apple Mail Categories immediately after trying it. I had heard about the feature coming and I thought it sounded great. I assumed it would apply a label or tag to emails so I could easily sort promotional stuff from personal and from important work emails. Instead I got a crazy view that only shows certain kinds of emails (and not well), which is not at all what I want as I’m liable to miss important stuff that way.
If I was designing this feature I’d make it so work emails are red, personal are green, and junk are yellow (or some such scheme). Then I could scan the list and just ignore the ones that aren’t important right then. (Of course, if it labels them wrong, that’s still a way to lose emails.)
BTW, I just installed Sequoia on a new Mac and when I first launched Mail it had Categories turned on by default, but there was an informational dialog box with a button to turn them off, which I immediately did. That’s the way to handle new features!
That’s a good idea - users who eventually find how to turn a new “feature” off (or on) after an OS upgrade gain some reward such as free Apple Music for a month.
Or maybe some shares of stock or something. I’d be rich if there was a benefit to time spent turning off the new ‘features’ and changed settings, hunting down moved settings, digging deep to uncover default-on stuff.
I ‘upgrade’ so little as possible as to avoid this task, which takes a good 30-45 minutes for each of several devices.
There has hardly been a new ‘feature’ in recent years that I have liked or needed. I look through the blog posts of new stuff and usually just shrug and say ‘meh’.
Anyway one UI thing I noticed on the i13mini recently, not sure when it came about, is the little black bulges on the edge of the screen when a physical button is pressed. This felt like a UI change from the Good Ol’ Days-useful, slightly whimsical, not interfering with workflow or creating suspicion my interaction is being analyzed and monetized. Just a little cute something for the joy of User.