The iPhone interface


More on the user experience
I've been criticized for my support of the iPhone before the thing even launches. I was sold as soon as I saw the Apple keynote and I haven't seen much to change my mind yet.

I can't stress this enough. Yes, Apple sells computers and other electronics, but that is only a sideline.

Apple sells the user experience.

Outside of luxury products or major resorts, I know of no other company that manages to make that work. Well, maybe Nordstrom in it's prime.

I am not the only one who feels that way. From Daring Fireball.

Linking to Apple’s three new iPhone commercials yesterday, I observed that no other cell phone is advertised by showing off the user interface. Thinking about it some more, I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen any tech product advertised simply by demonstrating how it works.

It’s a testimony to just how clever the iPhone UI is, and just how bad the UIs are on the competition. I don’t think it’s possible to make a commercial for the Mac that makes any task seem that much cooler than doing the same thing on Windows. This is more like the overwhelming usability advantage from when the Mac was competing against DOS.

These spots are also a testimony to the talents of the makers of the ads themselves; no matter how clever the iPhone is, it’s hard to make 30-second spots that are both easy to follow and yet contain so much information.

And via Daring Fireball (but a different entry) comes this ars technica piece.

But the second thing that attracts developers to the iPhone is more profound, and it explains a lot of the anxiety surrounding iPhone development. The iPhone is not just a new platform, it's an entirely new set of rules for interface design. That is what struck me the most once the actual iPhone demos started. There are no windows, no close/minimize/zoom widgets, no checkboxes, no radio buttons, no scroll bars, no nothing.

Yes, there are features that look and act sort of like the traditional GUI widgets from desktop OSes. For example, there's this vestigial little scrolling thing on the side of some screens (see, I was going to say "windows"), but it appears to simply be a visual indicator of scroll position. The actual scrolling is done by flicking your finger as if the entire screen is a big plank of wood floating on the water. Flick anywhere and whoosh, watch it glide. This is no scroll bar.

Historically, the presence of a stylus has enabled complex phone OSes to stubbornly cling to the conventions of the desktop GUI. The stylus makes checkboxes and radio buttons viable, if still a bit troublesome. And yeah, you can ask the user to drag his little pen along the 2mm-wide "scroll bar" on your smart-phone screen, or tap some tiny arrows. Hell, throw a menu bar on there while you're at it. A stylus is like a mouse, right? The iPhone says no to all that, and in the process leaves behind everything familiar to application developers.

But what does an application behave like in this new world? What makes a pleasant, easy to use iPhone application? Where are the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines? No, seriously. Yeah, sure, we're all such old pros that we can just ignore the Mac HIG and riff, right? After over 20 years of the Mac-like GUI, maybe that's true. But you have to know the rules before you can know when to break them. We're all in the dark on the iPhone.

Apple has something new and different and elegant here.

It's not perfect by any means. My current iPod has 40 gigs, and I would want anything I replaced it with to have more than that, especially if it were going to carry movies and television shows. Built in GPS would be nice. An easy way to carry my current project files so I could move from computer to computer would be nice, especially if it had a high speed WiFi connection.

But the point is, Apple has what most people want their cell phones and PDAs to do now in a way that is amazing easy to use and LOOKS GOOD doing so. By the time the second or third generation product rolls around, people will expect the capabilities of the first iPhone to be the benchmark against all others are measured.

It happened with the Apple ][. It happened with the first Macs. It happened with the first iPods. And now it will happen with the iPhone.

All because every single time Apple has had a wildly successful product, it sold the user experience in a way that no one else had managed to put together.

That can only happen in the free market. And you and I get better products because of it, no matter who we bought them from.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - June 5, 2007 at 09:45 PM  Tag


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