skeuomorphic
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Experimental UI equips you with a virtual tape measure and other skeuomorphs
While companies like Apple are moving away wholesale from faux real-world objects, one designer wants to take the concept to its extreme. Chris Harrison from CMU's Future Interfaces Group thinks modern, "flat" software doesn't profit from our dexterity with real-world tools like cameras, markers or erasers. To prove it, he created TouchTools, which lets you manipulate tools on the screen just as you would in real life. By touching the display with a grabbing motion, for example, a realistic-looking tape measure appears, and if you grab the "tape," you can unsheathe it like the real McCoy. He claims that provides "fast and fluid mode switching" and doesn't force designers to shoehorn awkward toolbars. So far, it's only experimental, but the idea is to eventually make software more natural to use -- 2D interfaces be damned.
Fantastic short film presents a day in the life of an iPhone
If your daily routine involves waking to the beep of your iPhone alarm, this short film called "Skew" is going to hit close to home. Using a massive iPhone mockup and physical objects to mimic the smartphone's on-screen icons, it's a bit of a reverse take on traditional skeuomorphism (hence the "Skew" title). In less than a minute, we're treated to a full day's worth of typical iPhone tasks including catching up on some morning reading and venturing to work with some GPS guidance. Once you've enjoyed the final product above, you can check out how it was made thanks to creator Doug Hindson's making-of video below. [via Designtaxi]
Flat design and mobile advertising
In a guest post for VentureBeat, Patrick Keane writes that the new flat aesthetic in iOS 7 will force mobile advertisers to adjust their approach and will ultimately result in the decline of mobile banner ads. While I certainly hope that the end result envisioned by Keane comes to pass (after all, who enjoys intrusive banner ads?), I'm not quite sure if I agree with some of his reasoning. Proferring a line of thinking that's becoming extremely common these days, Keane suggests that the era of skeuomorphism has outworn its welcome. With the release of digital and mobile technology, skeuomorphism, or design that mimics real world objects, made a lot of sense. But design no longer needs to help us understand technology through this mimicry. We see this in iOS 7′s flat design, or trend of focusing on the function and tossing out things like shadows and texture. Advertisers must, in turn, adapt to the new operating system with more seamlessly integrated, non-interruptive, purpose-driven advertising. I find arguments attempting to paint skeuomorphism with a broad brush fundamentally lacking. Sure, Apple may have overdone it with the GameCenter app in iOS 6 or the hideous Podcasts app that has thankfully been updated in recent months, but skeumorphism can still be an appropriate design choice in a number of situations. That aside, Keane writes that the new and simpler design aesthetic in iOS 7 will force advertisers to change their modus operandi. With iOS 7 opting for a cleaner and less-cluttered UI, Keane writes that banner ads will "stick out like a sore thumb" and will potentially "lead to negative sentiments toward a brand." Not being a fan of mobile banner ads, I certainly hope that Keane's prediction is accurate. Of course, there's a case to be made that mobile banner ads stick out like a sore thumb regardless of what mobile OS they happen to appear on. Put differently, I'm not quite sure that mobile banner ads look more "at home" in iOS 6 than they will in iOS 7. Further, some of the obnoxious ads I come across while using iOS apps lead me to believe that many mobile advertisers aren't terribly concerned with tailoring their ads to nuanced concepts like design aesthetics. I can only hope that I'm wrong and that iOS 7 will, as Keane envisions, force mobile advertisers to become more creative and less intrusive.
The future of Apple UI
Now that Scott Forstall is no longer in charge of iOS and Jony Ive is overseeing both product design and user experience, signs are pointing to a major overhaul of the user interfaces for iOS, OS X and the Apple-created apps that are part of the operating systems. Wired's Christina Bonnington thinks a significant redesign is on the way, although it might not happen in the near future. Bonnington points to several recent events that point the way to revamped Apple user interfaces. First, there's a job listing for senior software engineers for Apple's iLife suite that lists "help us re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work" as a requirement. That's a big task, considering that iLife is a core application included with every Mac. Next, the company is looking for someone to give Siri a more distinct personality. There's a third job listing for a person who can create a new set of APIs and frameworks for iOS. In addition to those job listings, there's Ive in his new position and Craig Federighi's new oversight of both iOS and OS X development teams. All of this appears to point in the direction of a major overhaul that will eschew skeuomorphic UI elements, which Wired's Clive Thompson referred to as "metaphors of the past." This year's WWDC is probably too soon to expect a dramatic change in Apple's approach to user interfaces. Change is not only inevitable for the company, but a necessity.
Leaked HTC Sense 5 screenshots suggest a leaner, cleaner skin
Did yesterday's uncertain glimpse at a new HTC phone leave you wanting? Then grab a tray and find a seat, because the right-hand image above comes from XDA developer mdeejay, who claims to have a working port of the forthcoming Sense 5 skin. On the left, we've stuck up a Sense 4+ lockscreen to highlight how the new UI feels much leaner, cleaner and flatter -- following much the same trend as Android itself. The 3D ring pull is gone, for starters, and the time and weather widgets also have a calmer and less skeuomorphic feel, with what looks like a thinner font (Roboto condensed?). These same widgets carry over to the apps screen, shown after the break (Sense 5 on the right), which in turn shows off fresh icons that persist with the minimalist flavor. Head over to the XDA link below for the full screenshot buffet.
Skeuomorphic iPad app design
Love it or hate it, the skeuomorphic school of iPad app design is here to stay. Even though skeuomorphism proponent Scott Forstall is no longer with Apple, we don't expect to see the fad of replicating the look of analog devices in digital apps to pass anytime soon. Chris Spooner at Line 25 has come up with a gallery of apps that embrace skeuomorphism. Of the 30 designs shown in Spooner's gallery, many are for synthesizers, drum machines and mixers. One that was particularly effective, in my opinion, was BizTome (US$0.99) from FireSnake Labs, which features a "leather-bound" notebook with aged and water-damaged pages. What's your favorite in the gallery? Let us know in the comments.
Why Siri is like skeuomorphic UIs: the magic is just skin deep
By now you've probably heard of the widely reported case of Siri's alleged pro-life stance. Walking the dogs this morning, I thought through what I hoped would be an interesting blog post about what I feel this means about Apple and our relationship to technology. I see an interesting link here between Siri and the heavy-on-the-texture UIs of Apple apps like iCal and Find My Friends. Even before the response from Apple was published, it seemed more likely to me that this wasn't so much a case of Apple pushing a political agenda as it was a limitation of Siri making it look that way. Indeed, if anything Apple seems to have a a liberal, rather than conservative, political agenda -- for example, it donated $100,000 to the campaign to keep gay marriage legal in California in 2010. But, really, all this is incidental to what I was thinking of writing. Then Adam Engst wrote a great post at TidBITS that stole my thunder by pre-empting most of what I had to say! The gist of his argument is as follows: that the problem with Siri is that, although it looks very much like sorcery at first glance (and although Apple carefully presents it that way in its advertising), it really isn't. It's just another computer program like all the rest -- and like all the rest it comes with limitations and drawbacks and bugs and issues. It doesn't help that the chattery nature of Siri -- the jokey responses, the easter eggs, the sly film references -- create a substantial facade that it really is a facsimile of a real person. But that's all it is: a facade. Sometimes that facade cracks. For example, we've seen problems because of cloud failures -- or, indeed, if you have no data signal on your phone to communicate with the Siri data centre then it simply stops working. In the case of the searches for abortion-related matters, the problem appears to simply be a lack of information in the backing databases that Siri draws upon, like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. I'm sure that this is only one of many such gaps in Siri's knowledge, albeit a highly politically charged one. For example, Siri's address lookups are resolutely US only, despite it being supported in many other countries (such as my native UK) and Yelp having a perfectly reasonable database for it to use. Where I'd like to go further than Engst does is by drawing comparisons between Siri and Apple's recent trend towards so-called "skeuomorphic" UIs. This is the extensive use of real-world textures and imagery to underpin an app's functionality. Think of iCal on Lion, Calendar on the iPad, Game Center on iOS, or Find My Friends on the iPhone -- with leather bits, and little torn edges, and faux piles of poker chips, and stacks of pages in the corner of the screen. I have a vehement aesthetic objection to the look-and-feel of most of these apps; I find them pointless, distracting and, frankly, a bit twee. This is merely my own tastes, though. Thinking more objectively I also have a practical objection. I believe that skeuomorphic UIs create false models of interaction. For example, in iBooks there is a stack of pages on the corner of the screen; a swipe across that stack turns the page. Seems logical enough, right? But the same stack of pages in Calendar for iPad on iOS 4 was not swipeable. It looked the same -- and clearly a real-world stack of pages can be turned -- but Apple seemingly just missed this feature out. You might think that it's no big deal for Apple to implement that, and indeed the feature turned up in iOS 5 -- but I would humbly suggest that this is a hole with no bottom. The same stack-of-pages decoration still isn't swipeable in Contacts, for example. Look at iCal for Lion -- look at those little torn edges across the top of the page, where the virtual remains of last months page are seemingly left behind. Why can't I tear them off with my mouse and clean them up? That's exactly what I'd do with a real calendar that looked like that. And even if Apple somehow made a UI that has almost every interaction a reasonable human being might expect of it -- a tall order, but let's suppose -- it's still only going to feel like a sheet of glass. As Bret Victor's fantastic essay on interaction design brillianty demonstrates, "pictures under glass" are never going to be anything more. If you can't smell the leather, or feel the grain, why make it look like leather in the first place? Getting back to my original point, I see a link here. Skeuomorphic UIs resemble physical objects, but they cannot hope to emulate the myriad ways we have to emulate physical objects -- so they are always doomed to disappoint on some level if we let ourselves be fooled. Siri presents itself as a real person, a sort of "auditory skeuomorphism" if you will. But short of passing a Turing test one day that, too, is doomed to always disappoint. Sure, it looks like magic -- but so did the Wizard of Oz until Toto pulled back the curtain. Never forget that there's wires and gears back there making it work, or you'll be surprised when the abstractions leak. Footnote: let's look again at Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris's statement to the New York Times. She said "[t]hese are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks." I think it is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, I'm rather cynical about Siri's "beta" nature; I agree with Macworld senior contributor Glenn Fleishman, who wrote, "If you're advertising Siri as a feature, it's not beta." On iPhone 4S launch day, I spent ten minutes in an Apple Store enduring a low impact sales pitch from a Genius and he didn't mention the "beta" word once. Nor does it appear in Apple's TV spot. But then again, Gmail was in beta for six years; I'm not even sure I know what beta is supposed to mean any more, and I write software for a living. Still, though, it seems to be that Apple are suggesting that as long as Siri has "places where we can do better" it'll be in beta. Well, hmmm. As I mentioned above, I'm not sure how -- short of some sort of Skynet-level breakthrough in AI tech -- Siri will ever be finished. With a field as complex as natural language processing, there's simply too much that can go wrong -- too many ways for humans to innocently throw a spanner in the works with their rich and wonderful languages. I do wonder if perhaps that statement to the Times was just a teensy bit rushed so Apple could nip the story in the bud. Not that I'd blame it for that, but it struck me as an interesting point nevertheless.
