DesignAday

Hypocriticalmorphism

Interaction Designers and UX professionals have been ganging up on Apple for its skeuomorphic user interfaces. I mean, they’ve really been hammering hard. They make claims such as that decorating UIs with Corinthian leather is lying to the user. The UI designers baby us. They are holding back the progression of sophistication in UI literacy by chaining us to our analog past. James Higgs states on Made By Many:

Simply put: [I detest these new apps] because they are lies. They attempt to comfort us (to patronise us) by trying to show how they relate to physical objects in the real world when there is no need. How are we helped to understand what Find My Friends does by the addition of “leather” trim? And how difficult can it be for someone, even a relative digital newcomer, to understand a list of books? Difficult enough that the only possible way they could understand it is to present them in a “wooden” bookshelf format?

I heard several designers deriding skeuomorphism in their Interaction 12 talks to much applause and supercilious laughter. And yet, two of the keynote speakers, Anthony Dunne and Fabian Hemmert, were treated with great respect for showing us examples of physical objects that had been granted animalistic behaviors, such as mobile phones that breathe and disk drives that avoid coffee spills by standing up. This dichotomy struck me as being rather hypocritical. I’ve been puzzling over it, and I have a hypothesis.

Once upon a time, just prior to the release of Mac OS X, the graphics capabilities of computer operating systems were relatively poor. Sure, games included photorealistic imagery, but your typical application was limited to rather cartoonish representations. Our icons, buttons, and textures were decidedly low-res. OS X changed that. Suddenly, it was possible to include shadows, translucency, and sophisticated gradients. That freedom presented UI designers with a completely new vocabulary to explore, and as history has shown us, we will explore it for better and worse. One of the results of this exploration was a wave of applications, mostly from independent developers and startups that jumped on Apple’s newfound popularity, that were informally referred to as “delicious” applications. This name was derived from the application Delicious Library by Delicious Monster, one of the first new OS X applications to employ a visually stunning UI. They displayed photorealistic books, with the actual book covers, on wooden shelves. This was, in fact, so successful that Apple hired Mike Matas, the co-founder and graphic designer of Delicious Monster. It was not surprising, then, to see similar skeumorphic touches start appearing within Apple’s own software, even to the point of duplicating (stealing?) Delicious Library’s aesthetic in iBooks.

Of course, we designers can only applaud something so popular and successful for so long. We are driven to disdain anything that becomes commonplace in the challenge to find the next, great, original idea. We are so over the once lick-able candy coating of early Mac OS X, ready to embrace the Modernist-inspired Metro UI of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Our physical devices, however, are in a different stage of development. As artists and scientists alike explore the uncanny valley of robotics, we are fascinated with the potential of animation, automation, and even self-awareness in the everyday objects that have thus far been static—unmoving and unresponsive. We are quick to forgive the tackiness of sneezing phones in the name of experimentation.

But I would suggest that skeuomorphism isn’t as bad as many make it out to be. Compare the Notes app on the iPhone with its Metro cousin. There is no mistaking what the app is for on the iPhone. The color of the background, the rules, and the leather bar across the top all scream “notepad!” The only thing to visually distinguish the notes application from any other in Metro is the name. There is a lot to be said for visual identity, familiarity, and personality. No, faux leather trim isn’t going to help me find my friends, and I don’t need wooden shelves to understand that I am looking at a library of books, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life looking at identical, sterile user interfaces, regardless of task and context. Leather is an aesthetic choice, and certainly it will appeal to some and not to others. It’s an awfully popular choice for high-end car interiors, so why not virtual dashboards? Fashion is going to influence interaction design just as it does anything else. Apple has been one of the drivers of fashion in the computer and consumer electronics industries since the introduction of Bondi Blue. We went through brushed metal; now it’s linen and leather. Next year it will be something else.

In conclusion, I encourage you to think about the potential benefits of skeuomorphism just as you consider any other tool in your UI design bag.  Use it effectively when it makes sense to. Don’t give in to hate. That leads to the Dark Side.

Delight

There’s one word that can sum up the difference between Apple’s products and most others on the market: delight. There was an update to the software on the AppleTV last week, which I didn’t think much about when I told it to install. I assumed it contained some bug fixes, perhaps a security patch, or an improvement to iCloud integration. I hadn’t read anything about it and figured it was a minor thing. 

One of my favorite features of the AppleTV is its “screensaver,” which randomly displays photos from the thousands in my iPhoto library. Every time it comes on, it randomly selects one of a number of spectacular display themes. When I’m not watching the television, AppleTV turns it into a huge, high definition, dynamic, digital photo frame.

Some time after I had performed the update, I noticed a screensaver I hadn’t seen before. It was panning across a wall adorned with picture frames of different sizes and styles, each featuring one of my photographs. Some rested on a wooden shelf at the bottom of the screen. Then it panned up the wall, away from the shelf, bring additional rows of frames into view. Eventually it reached the corner of the room, rotated, and continued panning. It was attractive. It was surprising. It was delightful. It was new content of a quality one would expect to pay extra for.

Delight is not the result of focus groups, usability testing, or agile development approaches. Delight is the result of impeccable design.

Fixed Positioning Fixed

I know all the cool kids are designing for mobile first these days, but when I redesigned the website for my church, given my lack of knowledge about the specifics of implementation for Mobile Safari, I felt it more important to get the new site up as quickly as I could and worry about mobile later. I didn’t realize, however, that Mobile Safari didn’t support fixed positioning of elements. I was quite surprised to see the entire page scroll, including the bottom bar, which covered an entire line of text. I put off doing anything about it, mainly because I didn’t have the time to research the issue, but also because I knew from Google Analytics that we hadn’t had much mobile traffic. So, I was quite please to learn that the release of iOS 5 included support for fixed positioning. Now the site works the same on iPhones and iPads as it does on the desktop.

However, I don’t agree with Apple’s treatment of fixed elements when zooming. Upon zooming in on a section of the page, all of the fixed elements redraw themselves at their zoomed-in size relative to the borders of the browser pane. This means they end up covering a large percentage of the content that you zoomed in on to read. My site has been rendered useless in a zoomed-in state. It would work much better if, when zoomed, fixed elements were placed relative to the full page, rather than the viewing area. I may end up having to create a mobile version of the site, something I didn’t want to do.

Goodbye SMS. Hello iMessage.

While Siri is getting all the attention, and it is certainly deserved, iMessage is the secret agent sneaking by under the radar. When it was first announced, I assumed it was going to be a separate app. I figured I would have to make a conscious decision to use iMessage or the SMS app. I was taken aback by its integration. There is a single app that will detect whether or not the person you are texting has iMessage. If so, it will send an iMessage, using either WiFi or your data plan. If not, it will send an SMS message, applying to your texting plan. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to know which phone the other person has, or which version of iOS they are using. iMessage does the right thing. On top of that, it provides feedback, indicating that a message was delivered, and even showing that the recipient is typing a reply.

I decided not to pay for an SMS package with my new plan because of iMessage, so I’m paying per SMS message. iMessage is going to save me a lot of money, and it’s making a huge chunk of the service provider’s profit disappear. No wonder AT&T dropped all of their cheaper SMS packages.

Nest

Tony Fadell left Apple about three years ago. Monday, his new company, Nest, announced their first product, the Nest Learning Thermostat.

“So what are you working on lately?” a friend asks over lunch. “I started a new company. We make thermostats.” They chuckle, take a bite of their salad, “No, seriously. What are you doing?” “I’m serious. Thermostats.” 

Given the description on their site, the Nest is a beautifully conceived and executed product. It programs itself, learning what your desired temperatures are at different times of the day, week, and season. It also helps you conserve energy. What’s more, it isn’t an eye-sore. If Apple made a thermostat, this is what it would be like. In a way, you could say that Apple did make a thermostat. More and more, we’ll be seeing Apple’s influence in other products as more companies get it. Steve’s legacy will be much larger than phones and tablets. 

Siri Corrections

I wanted to correct something I mentioned in Monday’s post about Siri. As I pointed out, Siri utilizes information in Address Book—information that until now was of very limited use. Address Book allows you to add relationship fields to a card. For example, I can add a “Spouse” field to my card and enter my wife’s name. This creates a loose connection between our cards. The only use for this that I am aware of was the printing of mailing labels. At one time, and I don’t know when the capability was removed, Address Book had a setting or option that would combine spouses into a single mailing label, rather than listing them separately. I can’t find any way to do that now. Siri puts these familial connections to use, allowing you to “Send email to my mom,” or “Let my wife know I’ll be late.” However, it currently only concerns itself with these fields on your own card. I can’t, for example, ”Send a message to my brother’s wife,” or even “Send a message to Todd’s wife.”

Similarly, Siri isn’t yet intelligent enough to use any address. It was able to recognize a person’s name and use their home address for a location-based reminder, but it won’t recognize a business in the same way. I was finally able to get it to recognize by church by adding the address to my own card as a custom address field labeled “Church.” This, I’m sure, is just a temporary solution. It’s not often that Apple releases a product as a public Beta, but with some experimentation, I can see why Siri is labeled as such.

I love you, Siri.

My iPhone 4S was waiting on my front porch when I arrived home Friday evening. Replacing my 3GS, it’s a significant upgrade. Performance is drastically improved, of course, and the retina display is gorgeous. I really do like the industrial design, and while I don’t typically use my phone for much photography or video, the improved camera will be nice to have on the occasion that I do. That’s all great, but what really excites me is Siri.

I remember playing around with speech recognition back in Mac OS 8 and 9. I actually tried using it for awhile, but it was never as cool or useful as I thought it should be. My first cell phone, a Motorola flip phone, allowed me to voice dial, which I really liked. My Nissan Cube also let’s me voice dial, but I haven’t made the effort to enter any numbers aside from my wife’s. And, of course, the iPhone added some voice commands, including dialing, at some point, and I’ve used that regularly as well.

Siri is a quantum leap forward. More than just voice commands, Siri will recognize natural language. It is conversational. It’s right out of Star Trek. It’s tightly integrated, so it understands relationships and locations. If I tell it to send a message to my wife, it knows to send it to Susan Moffett. Of course, the key to this seeming intelligence is to have such relationships recorded in your address book—information that, until this point—had only been useful for printing mailing labels. I tried setting a reminder for the next time I arrived at my church, but I could’t get it to use my church as a location. It didn’t understand. I later realized that the problem was due to the fact that I wasn’t using the exact name I had entered in my address book. Maybe eventually it will attempt to find locations by searching Google Maps, but for now, I’m going to have to add or change address book entries to improve Siri’s intelligence.

This is almost magical. After playing around with it for awhile, I said to it, “I love you, Siri.” My phone responded, “I bet you say that to all of your Apple products.”

…on a device he invented.

“The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” - Barack Obama

Indeed.

Make Your Own Ding

In his Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs told us that “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Last Thursday, the day after I heard the news that he had passed away, I was in a funk. I don’t believe I have ever felt that way about the death of somebody I have never met. I’m not one to get very emotional about celebrities. I’ve read many other responses that have expressed the same sentiment. So what is it about the man that made such an emotional impact on me?

I’ve been using a Macintosh as my tool of trade nigh on twenty years. More than most, the field of Graphic Design was fundamentally changed by the Macintosh, due in no small part to a calligraphy class Steve took after dropping out of college. I was in my formative undergrad years during the tail end of the turmoil it caused. I never had to do paste-ups, but I used guache, Vac-U-Mount, and a Photostat enough to have some appreciation for the technological revolution that had occurred. I sit in front of a Mac all day. I’m as fluent in the Mac OS as I am in American English. It has made my daily job more enjoyable and more productive than it possibly could have been otherwise. The thought of having to spend that kind of time with Windows makes me feel sick, and there was one year in particular that I was threatened with that nightmare. I would have left my job if the issue had been forced.

In addition to my work life, it has improved my personal life. Even when I’m home, I spend much of my time sitting at my Mac Pro, color-correcting photos, editing video, working on my church’s website, prepping for my class, playing games, and writing entries for DesignAday. I use the iWork and iLife suites daily while listening to music from the iTunes store. When I’m in my living room or kitchen, there’s the AppleTV, playing podcasts or family photos and music. Everywhere else, I have my iPhone. It’s with me everywhere I go. I found the Palm Pilot extremely useful. I despised my Treo. I love my iPhone. Apple’s products, both hardware and software, have been a very important part of my life, but considering all of it, I don’t think that is at the root of my melancholy.

Steve’s return to Apple occurred while I was a graduate student at CMU. Those were the most influential two years of my life. I was already a Macintosh user, but I wasn’t yet steeped in the history of Apple. I still vividly recall the day in 1998 that the original iMac was announced. I was sitting at my desk in the “Roundroom” of Margaret Morrison, the building in which the School of Design resides. When the Bondi Blue computer finished loading in my browser, I just said “Wow!” The exclamation was repeated when my classmates came around to see what I was looking at. That was just the beginning of a long love affair with Apple’s innovative product design.

Steve Jobs became a beacon for me, proof that good design could triumph in the battle with time-to-market and ease of implementation. Every time somebody repeated the mantra that “perfection is the enemy of good enough,” I could point to Apple as an example of a successful company that didn’t settle. They helped to turn our profession from something that our moms didn’t understand, to one that is recognized by the consumer conscious. It became a skill set that every major technology company had to have. Apple products were cited as examples of great design everywhere such discussions were raised. Steve was the enabler—the CEO that got it—that understood the power of design and made it a priority. Time after time, he proved that attention to detail, quality of materials, and a focus on the user experience were important to the goals of the business. He was a hero to every designer that was trying to make their customers and employers understand the importance of good design.

The real tragedy is that he should have had another fourteen productive years. Fourteen years—that’s how long it took to pull Apple back from the brink; produce the iMac, iBook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air; roll out OS X, iTunes, and the Apple Store, and all of the other smaller, yet still important products that went along with them. What magic would he have worked given that much time again? I feel that I have been robbed of something amazing I’ll never know, much the same as I’ve missed the brilliance of Jim Henson, another genius taken before his time.

But what if Steve was right? What if death was just doing it’s job, clearing out the old to make way for the new? I’d argue he wasn’t old enough, but let’s just say death knows what it’s doing. Is it at all possible that Steve’s shadow was holding the rest of us back? You would have a hard time convincing me of it, but it’s really a moot point. Steve is gone, and that means somebody else has to take the ball and run. I read a tweet last week exhorting us to go into work and turn the place upside down in Steve’s honor. I appreciate the author’s inspiration, but it’s completely unrealistic. If you haven’t been pushing with Steve’s passion and ferociousness before, are you really going to completely change now? Even if you could, who would support your actions?

No, trying to become like Steve at the snap of your fingers isn’t likely to work. In fact, trying to become like Steve isn’t likely to work at all. But what we can do is work hard to reach the pinnacle where we can become the enablers. Maybe that is a position of leadership in your current company. Maybe it is in a company that you will start yourself. It may not be associated with a company at all. Take inspiration from Steve Jobs, from Apple, and from others like them. Be passionate about your work. Stand for what you believe in. Do what you can to make a difference in the lives of others. Pass on what you have learned. Make your own ding in the universe. I can think of no better way to honor a man that has been such an inspiration to so many.