THE CHANGING (INTER) FACE OF APPLE
There's a debate raging in the Apple interface design community. And if you're not an interface designer or a specialist in 'usability engineering' (whatever that is!) - chances are you still have an opinion. Perhaps Kai Kraus is to blame, perhaps the success of the i-mac and its consumer hardware design, or perhaps Apple itself, shying away as it seems to be from what made it the most user friendly interface there is - its 20 year old, tried, trusted, (and loved by every mac user) 'Human Interface Guidelines."
Unfortunately with Apple's I-MAC and I-BOOK changing the way computers are looked at-
from grey, ugly boxes best hidden in the reccessive corners of a teen geeks bedroom to
trendy consumer products akin on a sheft next to a sleek stereo design or on the set of
a dodgy US soap, this success seems to have gone to the heads of Apple's software designers as
well.
With the release of QuickTime 4.0 this has proven all the more evident. Instead of a software interface we are faced with a "product" interface, complete with pull out drawers, volume dials and 3d buttons. This might have seemed passable if the design had proven usable but instead it is the design that invites its failure, following as it does, hot on the heals of IBM's failed software range 'Realthings' - with a fax application that looks like a telephone keypad, and a cd utility that looks like a cd player.
The fatal error in designing 'product software' is this: while having a piece of software look like a hand held 3d object may bring an initial 'familiarity' to the design, software is not intended to be held in the hand, it exists on screen. And whereas a consumer product does not have to worry about the space that surrounds it, software does, and the space it exists in is a limited one. Having a twistable dial as a volume control is all very well on a product as it is intended to be used by a thumb or finger. But there is no 'thumb' controls with a mouse! Likewise having a drawer that has to be dragged on screen by the mouse to imitate the pulling out of a drawer is all imitation and incompatable to any usable interface design.
The very size of the player itself invites criticism. The
player interface takes up far too much screen real estate and does not scale down around
a smaller movie. Other applications have to fight for space with such an interface.
Incredibly the designers also made the entire interface in the same limited colour
scheme, making it hard to figure out what is a button and what is styling, like the
Apple logo in the corner. Is it a button, or just decoration? And what do these buttons
do anyway - ther is no text or even balloon help to guide a user. It turns out the shirt
button icon brings down a controls drawer. But the favourites drawer can only be
opened by sliding down the lower edge of the interface. If you just click it - nothing
happens!
This whole area of the interface is where the designers made some of their most fatal mistakes. The favourites drawer can only be opened depending on where the interface is positioned on the screen. So if you have it at the bottom of your screen the 'Drawer' will only open untill it hits the edge of your screen!
This brings us to one of the classic reasons for not using a martix style system for showing what movies you have available, because clearly unlike a scrollable list that contain unlimited number of items - the 'Drawer' with icons limits you to how much screen you have to drag the drawer down! And whereas a file list will give you filename's, creation date, and file size information, the icon gives no such information, and indeed the icon it shows on screen is taken from the first screen of your movie. However, most first screens are black! or contain little information.
The Mac's "easy-to-use" design has long been one of Apple's strongest selling points. Its plagarisation is testament to that. After all, would there ever have been a Windows 1.0, let alone Windows 95/98 without the Mac? And the willingness of Mac software developers from Claris to Adobe to Macromedia etc., to keep a consistency in the users experience has always be its usability's strength. On a Mac you can always rely on simple things like the Command-Q key combination for "Quit" to stay consistent across applications. On Windows, the "Quit" command's location in any given program can vary from Alt-X to Alt-Q or whatever else takes the developers fancy.
Rumours abound that Apple's "Human Interface Group", which originally drew up the 'Human Interface Guidelines' is dwindling in numbers, cut from over 30 people two years ago to fewer than 10. The champions of software usability and interface design are seeing their own company turn on what made it a success.
A new era of product-like interface designs may be around the corner, whether we like it or not, but for those of us who want 'serious' software and not toys, there is only one solution - stock up on your copies of Photoshop, illustrator and Quark before they too get the "product" treatment!
More information:
Apple
Interface Hall of Shame