Apple is not native to the web · 2007-08-07 21:26
Steve Jobs understands design. That’s the perceived wisdom, supported with many canny products (several of which I own and use). Today’s product launches underline this fact – but also that it’s a very old-fashioned view of design, namely industrial design. Apple nail industrial design. Whenever Apple strays towards software and the web recently, there’s a lot of flashy interfaces, and little substance.
Many of the software features implemented are great demo fodder – they provide wows and ooohs. Perfect for the 5 minute sell in the boardroom meeting (I know, I’ve had to do it). However, as experience designers and interaction designers say, the wow is in the how. How does it work, what does it do, what benefits does it provide. And recent Apple software just hasn’t provided that depth of experience that would match a depth of product design and hardware engineering.
As others have mentioned, where are the Apple interaction design superstars? Where is the Ive of software? Is it the ever-lovable stooge Phil Shiller? They’re on version 2 or 3 of a lot of their software, and they must have some good designers, as iLife and iWork are finally almost kinda getting usable and useful. But on the web, Apple still suck. The new galleries are Korea-sized half-megs of Javascript, designed to look and feel like computer software rather than native to the web. The gallery sweep interaction is bonkers.
You’re more likely to see the web beachball than the photos.
3d. Sigh. Once it loads, it’s a very clever effect, but not really useful or usable. And you’ve gotta love terms of service on someone’s photo gallery. There’s loads of crazy new widgets that, well, don’t work how the web works.
And – the iPhone. It’s… nice, no more, no less – but loaded with flashy UI effects, often which fall over with use (the photo gallery slows down with over 100 photos, the address book scroll becomes a pain with a normal number of contacts).
Jobs has an eye for product design. We have hundreds of years of products to refer to, to learn from. Quite a lot of people have a product eye: I guess in some ways you can even be taught it. Jobs seems to have either no taste or no interest in interaction design.
I’ve met very few people with an experience eye – people who get whether something interactive is good or not (you can tell by the way they interact with something, how they’re kicking the tyres and pulling it apart) – and I’d wager that nearly no CEOs can have that eye: these are new experiences, and the only way to learn is to have a lot of experiences. Kids these days have grown up with all this stuff. When will the first interaction design CEO take the reins?
comments
Yeah, the Gallery sweep thing is nuts. It took me a good while to work out what was going on – and then I spent a while sweeping very slowly to see if it was useful. It wasn’t at all. It’s one of the worst interactions I’ve ever seen; it’s confusing and stops you drilling deeper because you hold up trying to understand it.
The gallery page I looked at was 838kb. Terrifying.
— tom armitage 7.08.07 #
1) the first interaction design ceo is alive right now, but just too young at the moment.
2) more important for us – can amazing industrial design companies ever succeed with interaction design in software?
Which bits of OS X make interaction design people happy? The first-boot experience, for sure. Interface consistency in other respects. But there’s an awful lot of demo-friendly stuff.
Gruber’s right — Jobs loves Keynote, and bits of Keynote are built to make OS X look good.
I agree with almost everything you said expect the iPhone comments.
The iPhone UI uses animations and effects to really enhance the interaction and experince of the device and I do not think they are ‘flashy’ or get in the way of real use. Good examples would be the zoom out/in when one starts an application or returns home, also when one takes a photo it swooshes into the bottom corner so you know where it went and how to find it. These subtle effects really help create and reinforce a mental model that is very intuitive to use. Sorry to do it but lets contrast against s60 for a second which is slow and unresponsive and just jumps around with no feedback whatsoever (case in point here would be starting applications, moving between tabs, or progress bars which just hang on 0% for 30 seconds only to jump to 100%) Also there is that horrible horse shoe UI thing (which is what I first thought of when I saw that gallery sweep thing) which esp. on my N95 drives me mad its very slow to start up (which it does all the time because of that god forsaken double slider) and is also completely useless. I dont make any claims the iPhone is perfect but I think to equate the rather strange stuff Apple is doing online like the gallery sweep to the iPhone UI stretches the argument a touch too far.
However my experience of using an iPhone is limited to just 3 days so perhaps I will change my mind when I get to use one for a longer period of time.
— John Anthony Evans 8.08.07 #
Agreed.
I am actually a little scared of Leopard and it’s forthcoming 3D bells & whistles. I just want to get the work done.
Keynote again, it’s far better than Powerpoint but that doesn’t still qualify “good”. I was rather disappointed on the obscurity of things. Far too many clicks to get even the simplest things done.
— Sami Niemelä 8.08.07 #
Certainly the urls generated by iWeb are not the nicest. On twitter I suggested Keynote was a decent app and said I liked iTunes. You countered that iTunes was about 3d gizmos for the last while. I have to say I’m now a fan of coverflow.
Your points still stand, the Mac experience has become more glitz in recent years. Jobs just seems to like the hardware more, he certainly seems more excited in the Keynotes when he is talking product and not software.
Luckily there are some good people at Apple making the Mac a good place to do web development and other companies making good software. Apple is just not a web saavy company yet.
Pages and Numbers seem to solve problems missed by Microsoft, which is too tied into corporate life. So maybe there is good interaction design work going on, but on a less grand scale. iMovie and the new iPhoto ’08 seem good from the demos.
— Gavin Bell 8.08.07 #
The gallery thing feels like it was only demo’d / tested on a fast network, 400k over edge, plus the images doesn’t seem like a good experience on the iPhone. On staple 512k adsl that is not going to feel quick either. However this is not just an Apple issue, huge js files are starting to become the norm.
Visit the emily parker gallery and you just get the beachball, nothing else, which is poor.
— Gavin Bell 8.08.07 #
“Web beachball” is a great phrasal coinage.
— Michal Migurski 8.08.07 #