There was not much talk about type leading or grids at WWDC 2010 though the role of design was invoked many times. Neither of these things should be surprising at an event focused on developers of apps for iPad and iPhone, who are largely more focused on the realization of a vision and the writing of code to achieve that rather than the finer points of detail of what makes up the user’s visual and interface experience of apps.
Design is a key component in the app creation process though, and Apple acknowledges this in the human interface guidelines it provides for developers. At WWDC the emphasis on good design as integral to the making of great apps, and the relative scarcity of good UI designers was reflected in the long lines to book for the UI labs, where developers could bring prototypes of apps and get insight and advice from Apple designers on how best to proceed.
Keynote
The undisputed highpoint of the event was the keynote speech by Steve Jobs. There are not many things you’ll find me queuing for at 6:30 in the morning, and by the time I had walked over there were already many good natured men, from their late 20s to 60s standing ahead of me in the early morning San Francisco air. By 8am they had allowed us all to stand and wait inside, and the kegs of coffee (from a familiar brand) and scones etc, were eagerly received. Once we’d been waiting for 30 minutes inside there was a spontaneous gear-change to getting to work. People opened up laptops and iPads and sat and worked, chatted etc. When we were eventually let in to the auditorium there was a rush as people sought seats. The space was huge, with a large VIP section at the front – I only spotted Phil Schiller and the journalist Walt Mossberg in the distance…
The reception for Steve Jobs was particularly warm. He has had a brush with death but is clearly back in the centre of things . There was a palpable sense of support mixed with relief from the crowd as he smiled and started his 2 hour show.
One of the many things I admire about Steve Jobs is that he does a fine presentation. Where slide presentations are all too often either Powerpoints peppered with bullet points and too much text, or over-dramatised marketing extravaganzas, Steve Jobs and his designers manage to craft presentations which have a good balance of informative slides and great vocal presentation. They are also a very good showcase for the Keynote application and its beautiful transitions!
He went through the different aspects of the business, that 15,000 new apps are sent in each week for approval, and that Apple have 150 million credit cards on their stores, and that the app store has handed over $1 billion to developers. There were much well received encouragement to develop more great apps.
And then he got onto the new stuff. Steve had a glint in his eye when he told the audience to “stop me if you’ve seen this all before”… a reference to the fact that an iPhone 4 was found and handed over to Gizmodo a few weeks ago. What they reported about it didn’t even scratch the surface, but the speculation about the phone raised questions which could only possibly be answered at this event. IPhone 4 is a bundle of design and engineering detail. Steve compared it’s elegance and engineering precision to an old Leica camera. He took the time to demonstrate how the new high resolution screen’s 300 ppi is the maximum a human eye can discern, a claim backed up here (which begs the question whether in print 300 dpi is the maximum necessary). The screen really is a triumph for crisp type.
Sessions
The rest of the week comprised of a series of talks by Apple engineers about specific aspects of the new iphone operating system (iOS4) which launched recently. The seesions were all covered by a non disclosure agreement, in order to protect the as yet unreleased OS. There are some very exciting features which used with care will allow designers and developers to create well rounded and deeper reaching experiences for users. On example is Local alerts, which enable your application to tell you about something which it knows is relevant to your context – open up the possibility of more contextualised alert styles.
Kitsch
All of the features, existing and new, need to be expressed in ways which are great to use and to look at. This brings up a big issue that relates to design of iPhone and iPad apps. Print products transferred to the iPad tend to be given a kitsch appearance with a literal translation of real world objects onto the iPad screen. This has been encouraged by Apple, and while I can understand the reasons, I find this approach a bit much. However, if one sticks to a very vanilla user interface there is a danger of an app feeling very dull. So to encourage people to play and explore the ability to evoke the sense of an object is a helpful tool… just don’t take a thing too far.
On the other hand I have seen crazy hopes gotten up by print art directors, about transitioning print style art directed products onto the iPad, I think this is the wrong approach. There is a lot that information designers can offer in this new medium, but there is a need to step away from the idea (certainly at the moment) of carefully crafted screens.
I read someone writing on this recently, and though he bent the stick rather hard against those from print getting into this field, he recalled the involvement of print designers in designing web pages in the early days of the web, with much use of graphic tile, which might have been pleasant to look at but added little for the user and took forever to load.
The job here is to design great user experiences, and by that I mean the user journey, how the user accesses information along the way, a sense that you own the space and can navigate it effortlessly. The User Interface should melt away (in the sense of one not being overly aware of it). And there should be surprises – of the “how delightful” kind – rather than,“oh it’s crashed”, or,”Ahh,no network and suddenly there’s nothing for me to do… “Elegant multi-dimensional solutions”, if I might coin a phrase for pseuds corner…
Michael Bierut wrote a few years ago in Design Observer about the overuse of the term “innovation” (and how design is falling out of favour), and It’s still the case… At a time when marketers are in love with the term ‘innovation’ the slogan by Charles Eames to “Innovate as a last resort” was never more true. I think that letting the content get to the user in a natural way, using familiar methods (not like a newspaper or magazine but like a touch device) is the starting point of good design for this medium.
The apps which are the best do not give one a “WOW” response to their use of amazing new animations or other transitions, but those which make judicious use of animation to assist the user getting the task done.
Elegant solutions
Apple’s great successes this week were many, and the ones which most amaze are almost invisible. Steve pointed to the casing surrounding the glass on the new iPhone, and said “people have said, “What’s this?, it’s very un-Apple to have these lines, these breaks in the steel. “Well it turns out,” he went on, “that these are part of the antenna for the phone”. So yes, after years of providers taking the antennae back into the body of the phone, apple has found a way of getting it back out – therefore I would hope to give better reception for 3G, GPS and bluetooth – and in a beautifully elegant solution, to make the case and the antenna one and the same thing.
The same is true of the rest of the case – the glass. Apparently built to very high specifications – 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic according to iFixit.com – and of course glass is transparent to radio waves so will not hinder the signal. I love the simplicity of the Apple approach to design. Now let us find the simplicity and metaphors which really work with apps!
When Steve introduced the “facetime” video calling feature – which is another great example of leveraging a lot of technical expertise and then wrapping it up in an almost invisible UI for the user – he and Jony Ive (Apple’s head of industrial design) were musing on how they’d watched the Jetsons and other programmes when they were kids, and how they had loved the idea of video communicators…and now here we are, “it just works” they repeated to each other… so here we are in the future and thankfully there is a lot more future ahead of us to work out great ways of presenting content in compelling but perhaps less kitsch packages.
© John-Henry Barac 2010
