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Comment by feverishaaron | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that Jony will be overseeing UI. I expect a more minimalistic polish to upcoming interfaces. In other words, this is the beginning of the end for the skeuomorphism trend at Apple.

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Yes, it's widely known that Ive was one of the most strongly opposed to skeuomorphism whereas Forstall was one of its biggest proponents within the company.

You're the second person that mentioned skeuomorphism. Could you please explain what it is and why it's a big todo? Most of my cursory google searches don't provide any particularly insightful definition of what it is. The blogs/rants usually just dive into why it's good or bad.

Skeuomorphism has been interpreted two ways - as decorative elements (leather stitching), and in functionality that attempts to emulate a real world object (page flipping in an e-book).

The former is just a matter of aesthetic preference. Where skeuomorphism gets dangerous is in the latter case.

A perfect example is the horrible address book in OS X. It looks like a book, and therefore the user expects it to function like a book. Yet, it doesn't. It's this area of interaction design that has run afoul at Apple.

You give "page flipping in an e-book" as an example of dangerous skeuomorphism, but then cite Address Book as why it's bad. I'm a bit confused. I get why you don't like Address Book, but do you really think page flipping in an e-reader is bad too? If so, why do you think that?

The dichotomy is what's dangerous. Address Book looks like an book, so I'll try to interact with it like that. When that doesn't work, I get confused, angry, and it's generally a "failure" from a UX point of view.

Neither form of skeuomorphism is inherently bad, but it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot and ruin the UX when you move from decorative to functional.

Yes, I get the complaints about Address Book. But "page flipping in an e-book" is either really poorly written, or was not referring to Address Book to begin with, since Address Book is not an e-book. Hence my question.

Indeed, they were intended to be separate examples.

Because pages in an e-reader are not physical sheets bound together that require flipping over before you can see the page below.

If you can render the next page faster, then why fake a 'page turn' that takes time to animate.

It's the very definition of skeuomorphism.

The speed at which you can present text to the reader is not the end-all, be-all of the reading experience. In fact, the logical conclusion, of having zero transition whatsoever, is actually a pretty terrible experience. Why do you think people use smooth scrolling on their OS? Transitions are very valuable in producing a good user experience, whether it's a simple horizontal slide as the Kindle iOS app uses by default, or a page turn animation as iBooks uses by default. And if your argument is purely about the speed of the animation, there is nothing about a page turn that inherently requires it be slower than a horizontal slide.

Speaking personally, the iBooks page curl is one of my favorite features of any iOS app, period.

I don't know when it has been introduced, or even if it was always there and I didn't notice, but iBooks also supports continuous vertical scrolling and it IS much faster than looking at an animation that shows a page turn or a slide. The default mode, "page turn" doesn't make any sense. When I scroll through an ebook through the continuous scrolling, the text appears INSTANTLY, without a perceptible delay and since it's continuous scrolling, you don't go from a page to another, but you're always "in between". The concept of a "page" 1, "page 2", "page" 3 itself is no more. It's not a physical book, it doesn't need pages.

This is a case where I recognize the absurdity of pages in e-books, and yet I still like to have them. Pages give you a sense of progress through the book, and act as a proxy for time spent. They're not necessary as part of the presentation of information, or even telling a story, but I do like having them there.

Maybe this is one example of skueomorphism done right, at least from my point of view. An anachronism that helps to make the user feel comfortable with the application, even though it isn't strictly necessary.

I think a better animation would be the page 'lifting' and swiping away quickly to reveal the page underneath. You still get the affordance of turning a page, but with a new and improved SwiftTurn digital method, and without the ponderous neccessity of fake flipping a page.

Ala swipe to unlock, or elastic scroll-ending. Use affordances, rather than limiting real world analogies.

It's a matter of personal preference. A seemingly endless expanse of text seems daunting. I like the idea of pages, they break down the text into more manageable pieces.

Scroll mode was introduced in the just-released iBooks 3.0. And I personally think think a never-ending scroll of text is not a good way to read a book. Pagination is very helpful. I realize other people like scroll mode, but that's a personal preference.

Problem with Adress Book is that it doesn't do page flipping, although it looks like a regular book.

Yes, I get why people don't like Address Book. But it's not an e-book or e-reader, so "page flipping in an e-book" is referring to something else (presumably, iBooks).

The point was that iBooks looks and behaves like a book, so it works even if you consider it distasteful; Address Book looks like one but behaves completely differently, leaving the user confused why this "object" doesn't work.

By your latter definition, inertial scrolling with snap-back is skeuomorphic, and that is universally praised (and copied).

    Skeuomorphism is when a product imitates design elements
    functionally necessary in the original product design, but that
    becomes ornamental in the new product design

Examples: leather/paper/textile textures, hyper-realistic shading, analog controls/displays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

It's a design technique where the artist creates user interfaces that tries to mimick the real life object as much as possible.

Take for instance some of the apps on iOS. The have book bindings, rings, shadows, etc.

Skeuomorphism is a design approach where digital interfaces retain certain elements from their real-world counterparts. For example, the notes app on iOS looks like a real-world notepad, with its leather binding and yellow lined pages, including a torn paper effect along the top where previous pages have been pulled out of the pad. (Obviously these pages do not exist in the digital world, and therefore this design choice is an attempt to insert "realism" into the UI for the purposes of familiarity == skeuomorphism)

Essentially, trying to mimic real world (as in the physical world) applications and appearances. See Calendar and Contacts on iOS for a perfect example of skeuomorphism to the extreme.

Skeumorphism is when a user interface is stylized to look like real world materials (e.g. the Calendar.app on OSX is made to look like a leather desk calendar). The big argument toward it is that it either looks tacky or ruins usability.

I'm very excited about this. I left the Apple ecosystem over thier poorly-designed skeuomorphic interfaces (iCal and Address Book in Lion being very frustrating). I love the hardware, though, and I'm excited for a return to UX on par with that hardware.

I just hope that they can keep the contrast and the explicit visual of what a component does. Case in point: fire up letterpress on the ipad, get a gamecenter popover with its felt and wood finish, you can clearly identify what is supposed to happen (aside from copy[if you've used gamecenter before]).

Do you really like the gamecenter popover?

To me it's one of the worst designs on the iPad. The buttons are way too tiny, they are arranged differently for every game, and each game seems to compete for the least intuitive layout and labeling.

Yeah why not? The metaphor works/I cant think of a better one. One thing that I like about some of Apple's approach to things is that the user explicitly enters a mode or changes frame of action. There is a mode the user enters when moving around ios icons/making folders, there is a mode when editing content that appeared to be static at one point. The faux leather/fake realism helps make that switch. If the Xbox os looks just like Metro, how does the user know when things are different?

Yes, well, I'm all for having a popup and for having it stand out in terms of design. I just say that the GameCenter-Popups is a very poor design, especially by apple standards.

In other words: The metaphor is fine but the execution is lacking.

No. It's not UI, it's HI (Human Interface) now!

It's best we all get used to it. It'll be repeated again and again from now on :)

Edit: This is what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interface

> Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for _Human Interface_ in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

It's still a non-word, but will be an (oft-used) word soon enough (like that damn skeumorphism thing).

Apple has been using the "Human Interface" terminology since the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini

The academic field behind UI design is HCI (Human Computer Interaction), so HI makes more sense :)

And before HCI it was MMI (Man-Machine)...so the term evolves.

Do you have any references for that? HCI has been in use since the late 70s (I believe it originated at Xerox PARC, since the earliest literature I can find using it is from there), and is now the de-facto standard term for all major conferences/publications. On the other hand, searching "MMI" on the ACM digital library only returns it as an acronym for various more-or-less related things.

Maybe MMI is a mistranslation from other languages? This Danish site [1] uses it, and I know the used French term is "Interaction Homme Machine", which I can easily imagine being translated to Man-Machine Interaction

[1]: http://www.eit.ihk-edu.dk/subjects/mmi/intro.php#0

It's mentioned here for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface. I always got the impression it was a term emerging from the military in the 1940s-50s, when they began to study the ergonomics of cockpits, flight control systems, etc.

When working with engineers from Israel, I still hear the term "MMI" used frequently. They use it the same way I would use "HMI" here in the states.

Apple has used the term HI for a long, long time.

I remember HIG, surely (having read it many times, first for pleasure and now as a developer), but it was always H+I+G, never H+I+something else. But I can be mistaken...

Edit: It doesn't matter if you're an iOS/OS X developer or not. Even if you're a web designer, you should really read Apple's HIGs carefully and thoroughly. They're (by any definition of the word), "great".

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UserEx...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Con...

Well a Director of Human Interfaces would be responsible for defining the Human Interface Guidelines.

Human Interface (as in Human Interface Device) was even used by MS during drafting of the USB standard. Admittedly that's hardware, not software, but Human Interface isn't a new thing.

happy for this move. i was actually starting to envy microsoft's metro design aesthetic and loathe the changes that came in every new os x release.

It will be interesting to see how Apple approaches a minimalistic Jony style. Will it they make similar choices to Microsoft's Metro interface?

Probably not, considering their long history in "candy" UI. OSX's chrome style already strikes a good balance, I think they will keep it that way and just phase out the hyper-realistic apps.

That and I see Ives pushing for consistency.

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