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Apple iOS7

The best overall comments related to iOS7 where made my someone who actually knew and understood WTF he was talking about. So many people have chimmed in on this subject that is has become rediculous. David Cole, product designer at Quora actually understands what Apple is trying to do here…

★ Is the new Apple iOS 7 look an improvement?

I have a different perspective than most of the other answerers here. I don’t think the interesting components of iOS 7 are found in the icons or the color or the type — those are relatively self-contained and thus easy to change and evolve. I think the most interesting changes, and the best changes, run much deeper than that, and yet they’re intrinsically linked to the “look” of it.

The big, obvious change to the look in iOS 7 is the flatness. This change is being characterized as a stripping away of dimensionality. I’ll propose something else is going on here: the move to flat screens actually affords a ramp up in dimensionality. When an individual screen gets flattened together, you can treat it as a single object that you can then manipulate and relate to other screens. This concept is at the heart of the biggest changes to the iOS 7 interaction paradigms.

Multitasking

This screen-as-object paradigm is easiest to understand in the multitasking interface, where each application is laid out in a row. At first glance this looks like the old app-switcher UI with the added bonus of a preview of each app. But notice that when one app triggers the opening of another app, the new app now actually slides in from the left. If you need to switch back, double tapping home zooms back out to show the original app to the right. This creates a new consistency of interaction that was not there previously. Switching apps is now a much more coherent experience that can take advantage of your spatial memory. This mode also defaults to sliding over to the previous app, making the most common use case (switching back to the previous app) a much faster, easier interaction.

Back Gesture

There’s a new gesture in this release, which is pulling a screen to the right in order to move back. The whole screen slides over and reveals the previous screen behind it. This provides, again, a spatial context and, again, it’s only possible if you can treat screens as discrete objects.

One thing “flat” gets you here: performing this gesture causes the back button text to gracefully slide to the right to become the title for the screen. There’s no button style to change, no inconsistency of font sizes to resolve. It just happens, which makes the back button’s relationship to its behavior much more explicit and clear.

Another change I’ve seen criticized is the new lock screen UI, which says “slide to unlock” right next to an up arrow, even though you’re meant to slide the whole screen to the right. The proximity to the up arrow is a small visual error, but the core concept — slide the entire lock screen off to reveal your apps — is much more consistent with these other changes. The old slide-to-unlock switch thingy only made sense within its own context, where this is a much more holistic pattern to apply.

Translucency

The announcement already explained the improvements of using translucency for modal interactions, but I think it’s pretty significant. It’s less about resolving inconsistent linen textures, and more about underscoring the fact that your app is right there waiting for you behind whatever it is you’re doing. One of the biggest triumphs of iOS was the elimination of a complex windowed environment, where normal people frequently lose their sense of place. Over time, there’s been a slow but steady return to that kind of confusion, which was recently very evident in the Chat Heads UI in Facebook Home:


Is this an application or a mode? There’s very little context to help you, and I’ve watched people struggle with this interaction even when it’s contained to just the Facebook iOS app. In iOS 7, the translucent windows that never cover the whole screen are much clearer.

Other Tidbits

A few other random things I’ve noticed and appreciated:

  • The focus on spatial relationships is repeatedly underscored, through fun details like the parallax wallpapers to the new tab design for Safari. Safari’s old tabs ran left-to-right which could easily be confused with the new slide-right-to-go-back gesture. Rearranging them vertically avoids overloading the left-right relationships between the screens, while also making it faster to browse. It’s good to see they’re harmonizing the OS-level interaction changes with the in-app interaction patterns.
  • Launching an application zooms into its icon, and quitting it zooms back out. Opening a folder zooms into the folder, closing it zooms back out. This, again, represents a huge step up for maintaining consistent spatial relationships. This concept, the ZUI (“Zoomable User Interface”), was actually championed by Jef Raskin, who worked on the original Mac OS GUI so it’s nice to feel echoes of that level of ambition.
  • Spotlight no longer gets its own page to the left of the home screen. This is a huge improvement in my mind, as the introduction of that screen broke a very basic promise: the home button should always take you home. Thankfully, this promise has been restored. I think maintaining these simple consistencies actually represents a huge win for the average user.


iOS (and, well, most of Apple’s design work) has always had a fashion element to it. The annual touch-ups that iOS received previously will undoubtedly continue. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about the style of the icons, or the color palette, or anything like that. If they’re bad, they’ll assuredly get fixed over time. Heck, this thing isn’t even out for several more months so it may very well change yet.

The central idea of the look — the flatness of the interfaces — is linked to these deep interaction changes that I’m very confident are improvements.

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Fertile Ground

One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.

I don’t think we’ve ever had such an opportunity en masse on iOS. After what we saw of iOS 7 yesterday, I believe this fall, we’ll get our chance.

The App Store is crowded: almost every common app type is well-served by at least one or two dominant players. They’ve been able to keep their leads by evolving alongside iOS: when the OS would add a new API or icon size, developers could just add them incrementally and be done with it. Established players only became more established.

iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient. Their developers are in a tough position:

  • Most can’t afford to drop support for iOS 6 yet. (Many apps still need to support iOS 5. Some unlucky souls even need to support 4.3.) So they need to design for backwards compatibility, which will be extremely limiting in iOS 7.
  • Most can’t afford to write two separate interfaces. (It’s a terrible idea anyway.)
  • Most have established features or designs that won’t fit well into a good iOS 7 design and will need to be redesigned or removed, which many existing customers (or the developers themselves) will resist.

I don’t think most developers of mature, non-trivial apps are going to have an easy time migrating them well to iOS 7. Even if they overcome the technical barriers, the resulting apps just won’t look and feel right. They won’t fool anyone.

This is great news.

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

This big of an opportunity doesn’t come often — we’re lucky to see one every 3–5 years. Anyone can march right into an established category with a huge advantage if they have the audacity to be exclusively modern.

I’ll be invading one as soon as I can. Here’s hoping I’m right.

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Generosity of Perspective

Very well written…

Louis CK has a joke where he lambasts anyone who complains about the speed of their mobile phone by saying, “Give it a second! It’s going to space. Could you give it a second?” Yesterday, during Apple’s keynote on the redesign of iOS 7, I kept thinking about CK’s joke while trawling through the stream of criticism and snark on Twitter. It’s a bummer to think that it’s acceptable to go from complete ignorance of a product’s existence to a staunchly held opinion on its quality in a only few minutes. And, without even using it! Could you give it a second?

Granted, I couldn’t resist a potshot of my own, but perhaps it is worth exercising some generosity of perspective before I mewl to strangers on the internet. This perspective doesn’t negate the problems, but at least offers some sympathy as to what might have caused them.

A lack of consistency

This morning, I watched the videos of the iOS 7 interface again, and I saw a bunch of rushed designers unable to stabilize an uneven interface. It’s worth remembering that Ive took over Human Interface only 7 months ago, and they redesigned the whole phone in that time. Straight up: seven months is a ridiculous deadline.

Part of being a good designer is having a hatred for inconsistencies, so I take the interface’s unevenness to mean a hurried timeline, rather than an unawareness of the inconsistencies. Working on multiple screens, apps, and userflows means that certain aspects of the whole system will fall out of sync with each other as the later parts’ lessons override previous choices. The last step of most design processes is to take the lessons learned along the way and apply those best practices to the niggling incongruencies that have inevitably sprung up. This last step usually gets cut under tight deadlines, because the work is technically “done,” but just not “right.” Unfortunately, this kind of consistency is usually seen as a design indulgence that can be postponed. “We’ll iterate,” designers are usually told, but everyone knows you lose a bit of the luster of a tight first impression.

Designers are usually the most aware of the problems in their work, and I can imagine a bunch of them in Cupertino reading Twitter during the keynote saying, “I told you we had to fix that before we shipped!” Every time I assume a talented person isn’t painfully aware of the flaws in their work, I am wrong.

iphonez

The problem of everyone and the sexiness of new

Interface designers for the iPhone have an unusual problem: the phone is so successful, the designers’ target audience is practically everyone. How do you even begin to design for that?

I’d probably start with aesthetics, because it’d be the thing I could see, and then hope it would eventually lead me somewhere deeper. As I look at the iconographic choices, color palette, and typography, there’s a tendency to overindulge in very visible ways (such as the bright, almost garish colors and the use of transparency and blurring) and undervalue more subtle ways of establishing graphic tone (such as the use of Helvetica as the primary typeface instead of something with more character and better suited for interfaces). Basically, there’s not much nuance there, but there’s not much room for subtlety when one has to give the impression of stark newness. Maybe this lack of nuance also comes from Ive’s lack of familiarity with interface design? Usually expressive visual choices like these seem good in isolation, then become overbearing when viewed together. Experience gives a person the eyes to imagine their small choices in aggregate.

Luckily, things like icons, colors, and typography are easier to iterate than userflows, information architecture, and features. They’re also the elements that take more time than expected to craft, so I can see all of these refinements being the most likely to be cut from a tight deadline, and the first up to be revisited by the design team before the official release, or quickly thereafter. If that awful Safari icon bugs you, imagine how the designers at Apple must feel.

On the Bright Side

To Apple’s credit, the new version of iOS has a lot of practical changes that will make the experience of using the phone have less friction. Common settings, such as screen brightness and airplane mode, are now easier to access via the Control Center. The Calendar app now acknowledges that it knows what day it is and slides the week and month views accordingly. Safari has had its thick chrome made more svelt, and multitasking is now more fluid and visual by presenting a screengrab of the task. To boot, animations are used well inside of the interface, as apps zoom into full-screen mode, then pull back to present all the running tasks. The interface’s spacial relationships along the z-axis all feel very well baked, and something that should have been there all along.

There are problems with iOS, but with a bit of imagination, I can see those issues being the result of situations I’ve struggled through on previous projects of my own. The aesthetics will be refined in time, as they always are, but it’s worth noting that it’s always easier to take something that’s pushed too far and make it more tame than to do the opposite. I’m not a fan of how iOS looks right now, but I have hope for its future. iOS has one thing that can’t be denied: it lacks nuance, but it has courage.

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Thoughtful critique of iOS 7 from Frank Chimero:

This morning, I watched the videos of the iOS 7 interface again, and I saw a bunch of rushed designers unable to stabilize an uneven interface. It’s worth remembering that Ive took over Human Interface only 7 months ago, and they redesigned the whole phone in that time. Straight up: seven months is a ridiculous deadline. Source

To see full article click here.

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