On the iOSification of OS X, and why it doesn’t matter
I enjoyed Al Monk’s reaction to Apple’s announcement of OS X Mountain Lion:
For those of a discerning nature, these things might not please your minimal tastes, but they help the vast majority of users understand, and as we’ve already established, this is who Apple want to please, not us on the fringes.
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If Apple could have slapped on linen textures, shadows and 3D buttons on Mac OS 1, they definitely would have done. We need not be afraid.
I follow a lot of designers on Twitter, and I hate having to endure the whinging and complaining that goes on with every revision of OS X or iOS. I always bite my lip and choose never to engage in the conversation because it’s boring, and very unimportant.
Al touches on some great points in his article. Mac OS was not made exclusively for a creative production audience. It’s made for anybody.
And the easiest way to engage a mass audience is through proxy or cliché, which is why – even though we might not like it – skeuomorphism is the correct design approach for Apple to take if it is to engage a massive new audience, many of whom may have never touched a computer (my mother, case in point, who uses her iPad daily without any sort of lesson since day one). As I’d hope creative audiences would appreciate, good design cares for the end user, whereas design for designers is usually unsuccessful.
But we needn’t worry for much longer. The hyper realistic calculator – for instance – is a reference to an object that I’d bet won’t be with us for much long (in fact, I can’t remember the last one I have seen one, other than as a relic in a Dieter Rams exhibition). Once a new generation of users comes on board (which is just a few years hence), the proxies that Apple’s designers are using will no longer be valid. Instead, interfaces and patterns that were born in the touch era (such as Clear’s) will soon become the norm. Leather textures and torn edges will disappear with it as a natural, organic progression.
So bear with Apple for a little longer. They’ll reach a skeumorphic peak soon, and tend towards a new interface design paradigm that most of us probably can’t imagine.
Comments — 7
Nice article Daniel - I often think the same (and constantly challenge whether I’m against skeuomorphism because it’s not designy, or whether there’s a deeper issue here).
I just don’t see the logical progression to digital-native interfaces though. This is a visual culture that will become increasingly ubiquitous over the next few years; where do you see Apple drawing the line and saying ‘lol, only joking - here’s the interface design of the future’?
I just see a slew of half-baked kitschy references to stuff no one’s used since the 90s. It’s the pages-that-don’t-really-turn, the scroll panes in sheets of paper etc that bother me.
The visual tackiness — the Photoshop masturbating? That’s design for designers, not minimalism.
You’ve kind of answered your own question though - they are kitschy references to stuff from the 90s (i.e. our generation): we all understand them, but the next generation won’t. These references won’t make sense to a 1 year old using an iPad who will probably never use or even see a paper calendar. So in that case the proxy doesn’t work any more, and is why the aesthetic will change gradually.
Re Photoshop masturbation: indeed. But only for a small subset of designers who tend to use Dribbble. A good design aesthetic on there tends to be attributed to whomever can make the most realistic leather satchel icon, or create the glossiest sheen they can. It’s not really to my taste or that of pretty much anyone’s I follow on Twitter.
I think you’re missing the point of all this ‘designer whinging’ (a little harsh I think, developers are more than capable of holding their own when it comes to complaining). Your computer should work how you want it to. You should have to invent work arounds because the interface interferes with what you want to get done or your work practise.
There was a time when Apple’s UI was completely customisable and along the line they made the diliberate decision to take that ability away from users.
What designers really want is a more democratic UI. One where individual users are allowed to choose how their UI looks and works. Saying designers just want to make everyone’s computers ‘minimal’ is completely misreading the argument.
Bear in mind that I don’t mention minimalism anywhere in the post - I definitely don’t think we should aspire to that (and I don’t think Clear’s interface succeeds because it is minimal, it’s because it is native).
Sure it would be nice for a UI to be customisable, but implementing that (on an operating system as complex as OS X) would ramp up design and development time dramatically only to serve less than 1% of the user-base: the majority of users won’t care. Apple just need to serve their main audience and be pragmatic, deliver the most effective UI for its audience all the while making sure the underlying system is solid, performant and secure.
Bottom line is designers are very particular, as you know. It’s part of the job. Like developers, we also spend an inordinate amount of time in front of certain interfaces. At present there isn’t an operating system that caters for this. All this (slightly creepy marketing-led) talk of user-bases and development time doesn’t alter this fact.
In the past (say early 90s) Apple did cater for designers and this helped set Apple up as bastions of design. It was strategic. There were also emerging operating systems such as those produced by Silicon Graphics and Be, that helped develop healthy competition between companies vying to be the ‘best designed’ or the most ‘user friendly’.
None of that exists now so we have a closed system with limited choice that’s getting more and more cluttered with ideas that aren’t all good and, as a result, the Apple OS has become extremely noisy.
I don’t see how building in options to allow users to turn visual elements on or off could really impact on development for a company as big as Apple. That’s the excuse, not the fact.
On a side note too… the choice of Apple to try and make their PC (?) OS and portable OSs the same ignores the emerging trend for ‘companion screens’ that complement larger interfaces rather than simply mimic them. There just seems to be a lot of wrong-headedness emerging from Apple HQ.
This will only be solved in a bar room brawl, but a few things:
“slightly creepy marketing-led” - really? A user-base is quite a pedestrian term to describe the thing that Apple is building. It’s a company, that’s their aim.
If you want to check out what a completely customisable interface looks and feels like, download a copy of Linux http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu, and you’ll see what allowing customisation is a bad idea. Size of a company doesn’t relate to ability to do something: they would rather carefully focus their effort on making the core product it’s best, rather than designing and developing for the edge cases where a small number of people might want to customise the OS in a specific way (believe me it’s not simple).
And finally to your point about companion screens. Apple are actually taking a different - correct in my opinion - tack on the convergence vs. companion screen debate: Microsoft are combining Windows desktop and mobile OSes seamlessly, while Apple have maintained it’s better to keep iOS vs OS X separate. Obviously Microsoft’s approach will be as disastrous as everything else they do, so Apple will prevail here too.
I think you’re still missing some of the points I’m trying to make in favour of defending companies simply making financially led decisions which, if recent times are anything to go by, it not really an excuse for anything. Toning down the ‘us vs them’, anti-designer rhetoric would be nice too (unusual for you).
So brawl it is then! You’ll have to catch me first though. :)