Jony Ive is Not a Graphic Designer
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Apple, in the past, has gotten things right because they thought about product correctly at every level. I don't see why we should think they will change this habit.
This is the foundation of design (all kinds) and, what I think, the post is about.
In Job's biography we see that Ive's "design studio has foam cutting and printing machines, and the windows are tinted." (1) - hardware is what he's done, that's what he's won awards for
His aesthetic is unimpeachable w/hardware IMO, but I am so curious to see how his talents translate to software and usability.
What I mean is that he likely (obviously?) has a very good design instincts and aesthetic sense with respect to hardware. But can he lean on and lead a team to something innovative and new when he might not be the hands on designer he's been in the past. I think there's always a question how well "design" translates across various design disciplines.
There are, however, few organizations which strongly value industrial design enough to employ a serious team of them. Young industrial design graduates have a very hard time finding work in the field.
RISD Industrial Design graduates often end up in software UI design, actually.
Graphic Design tends to be much more about story-telling, metaphor, visual qualities, etc. — which are all important in Interface Design as well, just different. Joe Gebbia's double-major in ID and GD makes a lot of sense for a startup designer.
(Bias: RISD Graphic Design student.)
(Bias: IxD student - in a master programme where everyone has a different bachelor)
So long as people click on those pages, everyone with even the most minute point will write to their hearts' content. I'm surprised that this page didn't have a million ads on it
The fact that people have already 1) claimed to know exactly the path that Apple is taking and 2) have already made opinions about said path is what is entirely frustrating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_sales
By the time the iPhone was released in 2007, more than 40 million DS units had been sold worldwide.
I think it was last year the iPhone managed to beat the DS for total combined sales.
DS had a stylus for a reason.
No pressure needed, and fingers do the job nicely, but much less precisely. The UI on the DS is designed around fingers or stylus, and most games stick to that convention(plenty of exceptions, of course).
Making someone the face of the brand and mentioning him a lot seems to me just some marketing trick.
* The keyboard (mainly showing the proper case) * An exposed file system * The ability to set default applications (like default browser)
- Multitasking architecture is broken for many use cases. The biggest one is any sort of messaging application - your app doesn't actually execute any code when a notification comes in, so when your user reacts to the notification and launches your app, your app has to go and re-fetch much of the same data that the notification already carried. This comes across to the user as being slow and finicky.
- Basic UI paradigms are behind what the community is pushing. This isn't a lag behind competing OSes, but rather lagging behind itself. Apple used to be the flag-bearer for the state of the art of iOS UX, but the community has largely taken over to both good and bad results. See: pull to refresh, launch screens, side menus, etc. Apple can, and should, reclaim its position as being at the leading edge of its own platform.
- Lack of a proper inter-app communications channel. Intents on Android is very powerful, something like this is totally lacking in iOS.
- Lack of customizability when it comes to core functions. I cannot associate all mailto: links in the browser to GMail for example. I must use Apple's Mail. Ditto for Maps.
There are a bunch of others, but today is a rather busy day :P
Oh and and inter-app communications channel you're after is it? http://audiob.us
But there is a middle ground. Like already mentioned, if you register for location updates you can do a small amount of processing when your device moves and the OS wakes up a (very small) portion of your app to respond to it. If your app runs for too long here it will simply be killed.
Apple has created a very small number of cases where an app is even allowed to do this, which puts a huge cap on what people can do with it. The IM case is the most egregious: I can get a push notification saying "Bob messaged you: Let's meet up at..."
You tap on the notification, your app opens. It has to load from a cold start. Then it has to go to the server and fetch Bob's message to you, even though your notification obviously already had it. All in all, it's 10-15 seconds before you're actually reading the message, which is unacceptable.
Compare that to throwing out the desktop model. Now you have an image gallery, you select an image. You do not dig through folders of images, instead you look by context. Maybe that context is dates, maybe it is locations, or maybe it is whose faces that were auto detected in the images.
Things like auto-tagging location and faces are features that stem largely from the abandonment of skeumorphism, skeumorphism is a metaphor and as with all metaphors it is designed to make thinking about a new concept easier, but at the same time it is also limiting because all metaphors are limiting and imperfect.
Note that I have a very encompassing view of what UX designers do. The lead UX designer I work with oversees everything from physical hardware design to software, and indeed having integration between the two is very important. (Something Samsung could learn, if I had a dollar for every time my phone got put into Mute mode on the way into my pocket the phone would have long since paid for itself!)
I would hope so, the iPhone _was_ the first iPhone. It was not the first touch screen device, or the first smart phone.
I did read the footnotes, that doesnt mean the statement was invalid, so there author is treating iPhone as a synonym for smart phone, or there was somehow another iPhone before the first iPhone.
It raises another question, when does chrome become just a distraction, rather than easing the user into using the product?
"What works good is better than what looks good, because what works good lasts." — Ray Eames
When I was working in a big corp design studio, my boss was a former pre-Jobs Apple guy and it didn't sound like things were very different back then either.
Let's root our conversation in reality and not in some hypothetical black and white world.
His vehemence made Tim pause. "Why?" he asked, a bit stiffly.
"It just does."
"In what sense?" said Tim, getting his feet back under him. "Give me a clue."
"Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic," said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.
"You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional." The last word delivered like a stab. Doug Field and Scott Waters would have felt the wound; they admired Apple's design sense. Dean's intuition not to bring Doug had been right. "There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of," Jobs continued, "things that would make you shit in your pants."
-- Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger" (the Segway)
“The very fact that we’re talking about who’s going to design the icons, who’s going to design the applications and the operating system is a little bit of a concern. Because that’s not innovative,” she explains. ”What I’m interested in is not so much what they’re going to do about skeuomorphism, and those awful leather book pieces and daily planners, but a couple things that Apple didn’t hit the ground running. Like for today, Wii and Microsoft own gestural.”
“Apple kinda missed television and missed social,” she continues. “I’d be concerned that they’d miss natural user interfaces because they’re busy getting rid of skeuomorphism.”
EDIT: This is the quote from Wired that I called asinine. I don't agree with it. Wired link: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/what-jony-ive-needs-to-d...
I'm not saying this is actually true, just how I think the quote is meant to be interpreted.
edit: I will say, I haven't had a chance to read the OP yet so I could be off base here.
I agree, it's shallow to think that under Ive all we'll see is a reskin. A visual update along the lines of OSX's evolving window styles might be part of it, and perhaps the first step, but I would guess that by iOS8 we'll see big new ideas that make the OS even more intuitive.
iOS has developed a lot of cruft as new features and preferences were grafted onto the original release. Settings are a hierarchical mess and many of the default apps have inconsistent mental models that need to be reevaluated.
By advancing the touch-based UI, iOS brought a more analog (or hardware-like) type of interaction to software. I don't think that fact has been explored deeply enough, and I expect Jony Ive will bring those insights to the revamp.
Although iOS also has advances to make in inter-app communication and other areas, I expect Ive to be particularly interested in challenging the high-level HCI problems that are appearing as mobile OSs become more complex. He'll be a force for the much needed intuitiveness that has been eroded from iOS.
He also disregards that touchscreen smartphones have been around since the 1990's and there were plenty of people outside the US who used such devices. If he mentioned that it could be used with just your finger, accurately, then he maybe right.
"But the biggest factor that changed the game were the concessions $Launch_carriers made to Apple." O2 made some pretty massive concessions in the UK too. Android came along and screwed that pooch well and truly! Don't get me wrong, there has been a lot of good that has come from Android, but handing the control back to carriers is harming consumers long term. Data limits are criminally low, and the reasoning behind them is based on fallacy.
In contrast, mouse-pointer movements are perceptually instant, and have been for many years.
Removing skeumorphism (and its heavy graphics) would help with this, as would the faster graphics, cpus and memory bandwidth in later iOS devices (there's surely a contribution to lag from the touch screen itself, but I don't know what it is).
So I hope this is what he's working towards. If it is, it will be something that everyone will love, without knowing beforehand that they needed it.
There's some research done on reducing the latency. For example Microsoft's work: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=160...
That's worthwhile research to measure how much improvement makes a difference (i.e. until it becomes imperceptible), but unfortunately I get the impression they are only measuring it, not solving it. I gather their test setup is faked, just to enable measurement, because of the careful way he expresses it (I expect it doesn't actually use touch). I hate to reference a youtube comment for support, but the top one says it's IR + projector http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 And other links to that "Applied Sciences" Group don't mention any on-going research on it (or even the guy in the video)... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/asc/default.aspx Searching ms research didn't up any other mention of the two researchers involved (Albert Ng and Paul Dietz) - Albert's now at Stanford, and Paul seems to have many projects.
100ms to 1ms is a long way...
He's leading the changes, so he'd put some people to make his vision of iOS etc come true, why would he design the icons himself? Surely he has more important things to do.
I might be wrong though - I already was once!
That said, I didn't change the article because the distinction is not as well-known, and I liked the headline ;)
Great article, BTW, very interesting thought experiment.
Obviously, I'd prefer they mean the same thing ;)
Now how about motion designers (visual specialty)? Or 3D model designers (visual but usually industrial or game designers in this role)? Or interaction designers (UX but not visual related)? Or visual production artists (not really design, but often done by visual designers)? Or visual designers who specialize in pixels vs. visual designers who specialize in vectors?
The field is very diverse.