Those who have been following the rollout of Apple’s new Liquid Glass theme accuse Alan Dye and his team of designing user interfaces that look good in marketing materials at the expense of usability. That’s a fair criticism, but I don’t think “marketing” is the right way to frame it. In my mind, marketing interfaces are a separate issue. They are designed to push users to do something they wouldn’t otherwise. Liquid Glass hamfistedly just tries to look cool.

Looking cool isn’t a bad priority for an interface and it’s certainly a way better priority than marketing. Interfaces built for marketing necessarily come at the expense of usability because their priorities typically come in conflict with those of users. Streaming services are the best example of this, where promoted shows are given priority over those already in progress. Cool looking user interfaces, on the other hand, aren’t inherently at odds with users. iPhone OS looked cool and was immensely usable, and I would argue even Aqua was still very usable even before the transparency and pinstripes were rightfully toned down.

“Marketing UI” is an unfair term for something like Liquid Glass. Trying to look cool at the expense of usability is bad, but it’s way less egregious than actively interfering with users. A better term, in my mind, is “Hollywood UI”. Hollywood has long given computers made up user interfaces, some of them very cool, others not so much. Regardless of their coolness, Hollywood UIs can look like anything because they are ultimately just another prop or set piece. They don’t actually have to work.

That Liquid Glass looks cool in marketing and elsewhere isn’t really the problem. iPhone OS and Aqua looked good too. The problem is that Alan Dye and his team seem more interested in making interfaces that merely look good rather than those that can survive contact with the real world, probably because designing props is a helluva a lot easier and more fun than designing tools that actually work.