Posts tagged design
“ We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense.”
“ We have fewer things you can click, and they’re bigger.”
Mobile Design So Far
- Apple makes the Table View the default design framework in iOS.
- Loren Brichter implements stacked Table Views in Twitter for iPad, allowing users to see hierarchies and page back and forth between them naturally.
And that’s it.
I firmly believe stacked Table Views, as a framework, will be more important than the more tangible ‘pull to refresh’, which was likely inevitable. They’re designing whole OSes out of stacked Table Views these days.
News.me: Leave the house, download news
This is my favorite use of iOS’s background geofencing yet:
I’ll think we’ve all been there: you get into a subway car, and just as the doors are closing, you realize that you’ve forgotten to take your phone out, pull to refresh, and wait 10 seconds to download the latest news articles to read offline. You curse under your breath and switch back to Angry Birds.
Today we’re pleased to introduce a new feature called Paper Boy. Simply set your home location so that whenever you leave home, News.me downloads your latest news in the background.
The best part about this? It’s such a clever, simple solution I imagine all serious news apps (cough-Instapaper-cough) will implement this feature shortly. Suddenly background downloading is no longer the domain of Newsstand bound apps. Hats off to Rob Haining for this sharp hack.
“ But if you’ve owned—or even played with—an iPad before, Cupertino’s new hotness will leave you cold. It’s an upgrade. It feels like an optional configuration rather than something, shall we say… resolutionary. And that, frankly, is a bummer.”
Anyone who fetishizes hardware will be disappointed with every tablet update. The goal is the disappearance of the hardware, not the notability of it.
“ We don’t do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It’s unfair to ask people who don’t have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.”
Jonathan Ive was interviewed by the Evening Standard.
On competitors’ failures:
Most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. Committees just don’t work, and it’s not about price, schedule or a bizarre marketing goal to appear different - they are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.
And on innovation and spending time on details:
It’s incredibly time consuming, you can spent months and months and months on a tiny detail - but unless you solve that tiny problem, you can’t solve this other, fundamental product.
You often feel there is no sense these can be solved, but you have faith. This is why these innovations are so hard - there are no points of reference.
Every additional interview with Ive further convinces me him and his team share the motivations of Benedictine Monks, who stole away from society to obsess over meticulously hand-written Bibles.
“ The changes and additions in Mountain Lion are in a consistent vein: making things simpler and more obvious, closer to how things should be rather than simply how they always have been.”
We’re crossing a line in operating systems and beyond where technology has advanced sufficiently to mostly mimic natural experiences and users have sufficiently acclimated to technology to make up the difference.
Pinterest is essentially a well designed interface for Amazon wish lists. How do you think Jeff Bezos feels right now and how large of an offer do you think Amazon has made?
The new version of Tweetings uses a lifts Tweetbots’ switch control to toggle between mobilizer and full web. Interesting.
Update: Chartier informs me that not only is Tweetings a rip off of the unfortunately named but wonderfully designed Helvititweet, but this particular feature is ripped off note for note from Tweetbot. Go buy Tweetbot if you haven’t already. While unaware of its mobilizer, I already thought it was the top iOS Twitter app.
Ah, App Store politics.
Game Center Redux
More and more games are connecting to Game Center, but few use the platform for much beyond achievements. I sympathize with both users and developers. Apple hasn’t exactly created an enticing platform for either party. To me, Game Center’s failure stems from it’s basis on old-school game marketing tactics, like challenging friends and community leaderboards. To the average user (whom most likely wasn’t a gamer during the aforementioned Madden marketing age) Game Center is just boring.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Game Center has the potential to solve many iOS usability issues and foster a large, diverse gaming ecosystem by taking a cue from Newsstand and adopting a dedicated folder model. Within the folder icons could be dynamically arranged by date, similar to the Kindle, with the last played game in the pole position. Such a model promotes a healthy ecosystem, quietly moving exhausted games to the floor while promoting embraced, new arrivals.
A Newsstand model would also provide a less cluttered, game-centric entrance to the App Store through a dedicated “Store” button. Newsstand has shown the iOS home screen to be “prime real estate”, capable of driving significant app sales. I’d even entertain the allowing Apple to drop a “Pick of the Week” game in an app icon slot, provided such recommendations were relevant and could be turned off by the user.
Even though a dedicated store entrance would surely drive sales, I doubt big game makers would take the bait. Each label wants to own their users, which quickly gridlocks discussions. EA, clinging to the dream of a successful Origin, never misses a chance to plug their own platform and fails to fix bugs with alternate multiplayer methods (I bet Scrabble becomes unbearable within 3 updates). Zynga and other social gaming companies require deep, fast analytics to offset the risk of their development investments by rapidly iterating their games, tuning a flop until it’s mostly passable. I doubt Apple will allow such visibility, especially if it exposes individual level stats.
Apple was able to overcome similar hurdles with Newsstand by allowing users to opt-into publisher databases. Such a solution would be inadequate for the likes of EA and Zynga, who leverage their user data in more advanced ways. For now I imagine people will continue to craft their own solutions by stashing the Game Center app in a folder, three screens down.
