Edward Tufte on iPhone Visual Design

"To clarify, add detail".

If only more app designers used the style of analysis that Tufte demonstrates in the article to critique their own "chartoon" interfaces.

His key insight is that apps can really benefit by removing user interface clutter (appearance/disappearance through user context, low contrast colours or "intuitive" gestural controls), maximising usable information density (color, texture, images, text, zebra-striping all targeted at conveying information, not simply design) either in breadth of scope or detail for a smaller number of items.

I've been a bit disappointed in the current crop of iPhone designs since I saw this presentation last year. They don't need the Tufte aesthetic or sparklines, all they should be is not cartoony, information-lite, or ugly apps.

I'm interested in recommendations for tight, good design in recent iPhone apps. Are there any good candidates?

The thing with sparklines is that, while curves seem to hold a certain fascination with a lot of people, I just don't see all that much utility in them, certainly not in my iPhone usage. For stock prices I consider curves less than useful, since it's natural but generally foolish to want to extrapolate from them. For temperature, I may want the highs and lows and perhaps a general trend (derivative), but a sparkline offers only a very low-fidelity version of that information.

Tufte makes many good insights, but I always struggle to get over the incredible ego in his presentations. He has a tendency to make sweeping aesthetic judgments based upon what, in my opinion, are simply his personal tastes, which he then passes off as arguments about "information density."

Many of the interfaces he criticizes for being "cartoony" are quite reasonably designed for the typical end-user, and probably more effective at communicating the basic information. People typically use the Weather app to find out what the temperature is outside right now. Adding "detail to clarify" is not helpful when no clarification is needed. It's 62 degrees out. Got it. We're done.

Similarly, I highly doubt many people are using the Stocks app on an iPhone to attempt to analyze thousands of points worth of historical data.

It also bears considering that many of the freebie apps bundled with the iPhone have a design goal of helping to sell iPhones.