The other day, I had a moment that reminded me why I love UI design.

I was editing some metadata in Apple Music on my Mac: things like fixing the artist and composer, and the punctuation, like replacing straight quotes with curly quotes, and triple periods with proper ellipses. I appreciate those details.

In short, Apple Music is unusably glitchy. I was fighting a new bug almost every five seconds. Apple should be ashamed of this level of carelessness.

So I switched to Meta, which is a third-party metadata editor that I’d previously picked out and bought, but still hadn’t explored completely.

Meta is “Mac-like”. It uses mostly system UI elements, and it follows Mac design conventions. I immediately started working more efficiently in Meta than I could in Apple Music.

But then, Meta gave me two a-ha moments that made my day.

Five hundred years ago, the Korean writing system was specifically designed to be easy to learn. Similar sounds are written with similar characters, and related with consistent patterns. Some characters are actually pictures of the way your mouth pronounces them. Seriously, check out this video:

Xidnaf – World’s Easiest Writing System: Origin of Hangul

Many years later, the Korean keyboard layout seems to have been designed according to the same philosophy.

Consonant–vowel split

First, the left hand takes all the consonants and the right hand takes all the vowels. You can’t do this with English, but you can with Korean, because it happens to have a similar number of consonants and vowels: 14 of each, not including combinations.