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Jony Ive Officially Takes 'Chief Design Officer' Title at Apple

ioxa said:
I don't know about Jony leaving the headquarters... I know morphing designs are going to be important in the future, but right now iOS hasn't even hit 3D icons that Linux had with cairodock... We're gonna have a bad time. Just look at windows 10... Barely getting aero back... And nobody told them we wanted 8 to be that flat. Maybe Apple should develop a feedback app for public beta testers and devs like windows 10 has so they don't screw up majorly.
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That is your opinion. About the only complaint you have is they did something different from what already existed and you didn't like it.

The flat interface was a brilliant move bringing those that whom could not connect to the skeuomorphic elements of the iOS 6 and previous designs. Once you get outside of western culture, the UI elements of iOS 6 and before were not intuitive to non-western users since they had no cultural connection to the metaphors presented.

A good example of this is the flat logos describing different sports in the Olympics since the 1970's. Before then, the Olympics were mostly a western cultural event. By the 1970's it truly became international with most second and third world countries participating. These new logos stripped out western metaphors to communicate the sheer utility of the sports.

The "flat" interface of iOS 7 and on brought out the sheer functionality of the iOS to users. Now that non-western market is assimilated, we are seeing some more depth in these interfaces.
 
peterdevries said:
I think you overestimate what Jobs was. I agree that he was a brilliant CEO, but he was so because he saw the potential in a market that was in its infancy and that many hadn't discovered yet. that combined with his unique skills propelled Apple to where it is now.

What you are implying and what many think, is that Jobs had some magical ability that made it possible to repeat the same process over and over. This is not the case. The mobile market is maturing and competitors are becoming stronger. That is the reason why Apple seems to many to be behind in innovation.

It is nice and convenient to put everything on Jobs abilities whereas in reality you need to look at far more factors and the the situation is thus far more complex than that.

Apple would not do anything better or different now if Jobs would still be CEO and alive.
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Or you underestimate SJ. His strive for perfectionism was well-known, like his philosophy that would not allow Apple to become a fashion company.
 
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MagnusVonMagnum said:
It's sad no one at Apple has the cojones to tell Johnny his GUI changes SUCK so they "promoted" him instead and one can only hope that means he won't be in charge of the GUI anymore.... (the sad sad GUI). Why can't they upgrade OSX to have a better Finder like XtraFinder instead of these useless worthless horrible inane downright awful changes they keep making to it? Oh, that's right. It's not a computer company anymore. It's a fashion company that makes watches and phones. :confused:
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So if somebody doesn't like something that means it just sucks, period. Nobody can have different opinion. If yo don't like OS X design then that means it's bad, period. You know what? I thought iOS 6 was hideous. Same with different iterations of OS X from Aqua to pinstripes to brushed metal to 3D dock. But I can appreciate that not everybody agrees and just because I don't like something doesn't make it objectively bad.
 
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Hope this means Sir Ive is one step closer to leaving Apple. Good riddance to the most overrated "designer" in the world. Can anyone at Cupertino tell this bald-headed dolt that true innovation is keeping a device size the same as the previous generation while merely packing in a heavier battery? Oh, and at least 2 GB RAM. Innovation isn't making a device thinner while maintaining a set battery life. Earth to Sir Ive: a phone's thinness and weight has absolute no correlation to ease of one-handed use. Thicker and heavier is true innovation.

Also, function trumps form. Those thick antenna bands and protruding camera are just too unseemly. Jony and team should have eliminated the bands and settled for flush camera design because it looks better.

If Apple wants to escape the inevitable spiral into doom and bankruptcy they need to ax Sir Ive and reinstate Scott Forstall. Mr. Forstall has proven himself to be quite the aesthete with his penchant for facsimile design. The tape deck design in the Podcasts app was more functional and a thing of pixelated beauty. And the fine corinthian leather UI skin was more elegant than anything from the Apple Watch collection. This company is so doomed.
 
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CFreymarc said:
That is your opinion. About the only complaint you have is they did something different from what already existed and you didn't like it.

The flat interface was a brilliant move bringing those that whom could not connect to the skeuomorphic elements of the iOS 6 and previous designs. Once you get outside of western culture, the UI elements of iOS 6 and before were not intuitive to non-western users since they had no cultural connection to the metaphors presented.
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Do you have any documented proof that there were users who could not successfully work with the highly intuitive and easy to read skeumorphic design with 3D buttons, or are we confusing them with all the moaners whose intelligence was seemingly insulted by felt and wood representations and were just cranky and tired of the same old same old and wanted something new? I personally fail to believe that an intuitive design was considered unintuitive and not as good as the current unintuitive design with all kinds of hidden features.

At least this discussion is helping me not blame so much of my displeasure with iOS 7 on Jony Ive, as much as it's Jony Ive's leadership, Apple's marketing, the UI team, and the absence of Steve jobs all rolled into one. If indeed there was a group in the world who failed to be able to work successfully with iOS 6 and prior who share the world with a large group of people who feel the opposite way and consider the current UI to be unintuitive and unworkable, then it's a failure on Apple's part to not offer two choices or at least some flexibility instead of swinging from left to right so severely. Pigeonholing options for bold text, increased contrast, and button shapes under accessibility options is flat out amateurish and insulting. I would've kept iOS 6 as long as possible if they would've let me go back, and it's insulting that they would not let users choose. Maybe I was living under a rock, but I never heard as many complaints for skeumorphic iOS 6 as much as I hear many complaints over the current UI iOS 7 / Yosemite and onward. Jony Ive is the guy in charge, and he should be preventing that type of bad design and consumer unhappiness.
 
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C DM said:
That's not really how that works on the forums.
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This is called MacRumors and not MacFacts. We are all whispers and bar talk here. Take what you want. Leave what you want. Have the gut instinct to run with what is right. This is not a debate nor society club. No vetting nor dues here.
 
peterdevries said:
I think you overestimate what Jobs was. I agree that he was a brilliant CEO, but he was so because he saw the potential in a market that was in its infancy and that many hadn't discovered yet. that combined with his unique skills propelled Apple to where it is now.

What you are implying and what many think, is that Jobs had some magical ability that made it possible to repeat the same process over and over. This is not the case. The mobile market is maturing and competitors are becoming stronger. That is the reason why Apple seems to many to be behind in innovation.

It is nice and convenient to put everything on Jobs abilities whereas in reality you need to look at far more factors and the the situation is thus far more complex than that.

Apple would not do anything better or different now if Jobs would still be CEO and alive.
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It's not just innovation that's the problem and yes Apple would be different with Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs was about the product; he was open to debate and challenge. As a result we saw the absolute best products even if there was a lot of internal bicker at apple. Tim Cook on the other hand has surrounded himself with a bunch of yes men and as a result Apple's products are drifting further away from what made Apple g8. There is no way SJ would have releases such a crappy new Music App with an interference that is confusing and unintuitive.

Likewise Jobs was the guy to say no to stupid products. Jobs wouldn't have fallen into the IT wearable bandwagon despite pressure from the board; I mean he didn't do that with netbooks. Instead Apple under TC has wasted 3+ yrs on a mediocre niche product. Which also has the worst UI of any Apple product.

Like I said it's people like you that are the reason most corporations have a bad rep as you condone mediocrity.
 
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CFreymarc said:
Have a few years industry experience and some real money made, then you understand what they refuse to have in colleges.
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Not trying to start a battle, honestly! Especially being just a lowly uninformed principal engineer and entrepreneur who needs to figure out how to make some money in order to be allowed to chime in. :)

I asked because without any explanation to better understand it, reading "The 'flat' interface of iOS 7 and on brought out the sheer functionality of the iOS to users..." just sounds like more of the airy puffed-up attempts at praise and justification like you might read in a CNET review for a UI that's far from being universally liked, by someone who can't believe that it couldn't possibly not be universally liked. :)

I have no experience with Android or Windows phone to know how customizable the interfaces may be, but for Apple design (under JIve) to have ignored several years of complaints about ios7+ UI by many people and not at least offered some flexible settings for the interface is just bad, bad design that I never would have expected from Apple pre-2011. Keeping with the theme of this thread (JIve promotion), I remain unenthused about his continued power ascension and bewildered that such a weighty company like Apple could go from wunderkind to disenchanting so many formally happy customers in just a few years. :)

For entertainment - check out Yosemite ratings in the app store every few days. On any day, you'll see mostly new 1, 2 or 3 star reviews with repeating complaints about the dumbed down design and less easy-to-use interface. This hasn't changed since Yosemite's introduction. Yet the average rating has moved from 2 stars at Y's intro to 3 and now 3+ stars. It's truly fascinating!
 
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Tozovac said:
"Function Over Form" RIP 2013.
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you say that as if it's a good thing.. or, as if it's better than form over function.

form and function.. that's the ticket

i'm not sure what example's you're thinking of which are so great and definitely a form over function design.. share a couple?
 
peterdevries said:
So, I answered your previous post sincerely even though you started that one with an unprovoked insult. Now you do it again. What is the point of this? Do you find that that kind of attitude helps you in life?
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Some people feel the need to insult others to mask their pain or emptiness in life.
 
The website http://www.theofficialboard.com/org-chart/apple says Ive has 6 direct reports. I wonder where this site gets its info from and how accurate it is. Does anyone really think Tim Cook will be sitting in design review meetings? These people may be reporting to Cook on paper but I have my doubts how involved he will be in reality. One would assume he's plenty busy being CEO.

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flat five said:
you say that as if it's a good thing.. or, as if it's better than form over function.
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flat five said:
form and function.. that's the ticket

i'm not sure what example's you're thinking of which are so great and definitely a form over function design.. share a couple?
Click to expand...

Hi flat five, thanks for asking. Just to make sure we're on the same page: I complained above that Apple is prioritizing form over function while before they prioritized function over form if not function and form. The difference now is just that form seems way, way prioritized over function because of so much reduced function IMHO along with far less interesting and unique form than before.

Form and function, that is the ticket. IOS 6 & prior had that IMHO. Maybe I could have said "form and function, RIP 2013," but I contend that most buy Apple products for their function first over form. We love(d) Apple because products are (were) so, so amazingly intuitive, fun, and instantly easy to use, especially compared to windows or the Palm Treo that I had moved from into the iPhone. They're not bought to be placed on a table and stared at. I always felt Apple under Steve Jobs were geniuses in function and hit it out of the ballpark compared to the rest of the competition. And on top of that, they all looked really nice!! Function was the meat, and the form was just excellent gravy.

My comment was me whining that Apple so obviously started (or refused to veer from) prioritizing form over function starting under Jony Ive's design leadership with ios7. All the articles I read at the time of ios7's intro indicated that this was the new Apple under JIve's leadership, including one article that mentioned how he pouted about "not being associated" with decisions to include certain skeumorphic elements into ios6 & prior. So when it was his turn to swing the piñata stick, he went way overboard IMHO as if the UI was a design contest in minimalism and personal taste instead of improving the UI functionality first & foremost for which Apple was previously #1 without peer in my book.

But sure, I can provide a few examples of form over function, if that's what you were also asking:

Used to be I could read the clock/stopwatch/timer app on my iPhone 4 without my glasses; even blurred, I could instantly tell that the big red button was for STOP, the big green button was for START, and the large bold black letters on white wheels were easy to read. Now with all the small black font on grey background and small whitish buttons with faintly colored circles that can't be distinguished w/o wearing glasses, the app has vastly reduced functionality IMHO.

Adding mandatory circles near all your contacts for photos takes up valuable space. For those of us who aren't 12 year old girls and who use an iPhone for business, seeing all the two-initial circles next to contacts is useless and aggravating and bad design.

Using 3 circles of the same size instead of 5 bars of varying height to convey signal strength is less helpful - the various bar heights were another great cue for easily sensing signal strength. Now the 5 circles, some filled, some not, always look like 5 circles at first glance and are no longer as easily instantly easy to read.

The small round buttons for the phone dialer are not nearly as useful as the larger square buttons were. When I press a button, I like to see it light up under my finger so I “internally” accept that the button was pressed and can move on. These new tiny round buttons are completely covered up by my finger so when I press one, I sometimes don’t fully know whether my input was accepted unless I look up at the number field, which is an unnecessary additional action and pause and mental “skip” that was not necessary before. All those little extra actions to do things which before took fewer inputs adds up into mental fatigue and just annoyance, at least in my experience.

The new way that safari web pages were shown to be loading changed from a blue fill scrolling across the address box to a faint blue line underneath the address box...before you could sense web page download progress with peripheral vision, now you have to actually look and pay attention to the line to see it move. And why? Just to be different, not better. I'm sure someone imagined that by no longer "distracting" the user, the smaller progress bar is better, yadda yadda yadda. Complete utter garbage. All that it is, is different form with worse function.

iTunes 12. Looks different. Needs way more clicks to view things that were instantly viewable before. 12.0 removed data entry boxes in the "Info" command, making it feel like working on an Excel spreadsheet with no lines to differentiate cells. Utter amateurish rubbish. Enough said there.

The old way of closing apps wasn’t perfect. I always thought they could improve it by showing all the active apps icons on the full screen so you could easily pluck or fling certain ones closed. This is done excellently in ios8 for Safari on my iPad, where you scrunch your fingers together and you can easily see a dozen open windows on the screen at once, making it super easy to navigate and close certain windows. This is how viewing all open apps & closing them should have been. Now, at least on the iPad with ios8, the “close apps” function nearly fills the screen with one app and you have to clumsily swipe to find the one you want to close, or you have to swipe swipe swipe to close all apps. Way too many additional swipes. At least before you could tap your finger in one area to close all apps.

Form over function: JIve designs keep getting thinner and thinner, again as if it was a design contest, instead of prioritizing and improving function within the same or similar form...or at least not sacrificing function all in the name of form. I would have LOVED an iPad air 2 that was as thick as an iPad 4 but with 50% more battery life. Plus - these things are portable devices that get handled for hours a day and are susceptible to falls. The thinner these get, the easier they get to break unintentionally. What’s next, paper thin iPads followed by rip gate?

Form over function: From a distance, all apps look the same now. No personality. All simple white or black screen, so as to not “confuse the user” and give him or her a “uniform experience…” Hey Apple, THERE’S A REASON why we have our bedrooms appear differently than our living rooms and kitchens…plus, differentiated app appearances make it easier to quickly tell what app we’re in. Idiots…

In a very general sense: Apple hit it out of the ballpark around 2006 when the iPhone came out. it was a new form of phone & interface and it just worked so great. Then the function/IOS evolved with fine improvements each time. There are only a certain number of ways to do things, and Apple’s smart people under S Jobs pretty much nailed it. Then comes 2013 and a complete utter redesign of the entire UI and way of doing things. Is there really any chance that perhaps ALL the prior ways of doing things weren’t done as well as they could be, necessitating a complete UI redesign?? No. All that was attempted and accomplished IMHO was complete redesign in looks to appease certain Apple design gurus and customers who felt they needed a new experience. Form was put first here, and function was shoe-horned into the new form. Changes were for appearance sake instead of function.

Last 2 examples: Game Center app. Love or hate the old game center app icon (I loved it), it was almost guaranteed that users knew what the icon stood for at first glance. Checkerboard with certain game pieces in each square. ios7 icon: no cues, just some airy modernistic minimalist bubbles. Form over function, idiots.

ibook: the fake wood shelves were so hated that they were hilariously & amateurishly replaced with gradients instead of giving even a second of thought and consideration…if Apple just placed the magazine/book covers on the screen as they show apps on the main iPhone screens so they could fit more books/magazines on the screen at once than before, that would have at least shown some attempt at improving function. instead, the wooden shelves appearance is obliterated and thoughtlessly placed with a new form keeping with the new JIve gradient dumbed-down aesthetic. Form over function garbage!

A few articles discussed users "no longer needing" the skeumorphic prompts now that they know how iOS works. Yeah, there never again will be someone who's handed a phone for the first time, no matter what their age, and who wouldn't benefit from some smart visual prompting. When I read that from an Apple employee in an interview, I almost laughed out loud. So why haven't we moved from removing H and C on our water faucets since we should all just know that hot's on the left? Why haven't we changed stop lights to all white lights in the US since we know that the top light is stop? Why haven't we removed "push" and "pull" signs from doors because we should just "try" and learn what the door's function is? Nuts. Jony Ive & Apple design team post 2013 = not good.

OK I’m done. Now I hate my phone more than I did yesterday. :) But it’s still better than the other options, barely, so I soldier on until JIve steps away and Apple reintroduces better function like before.
 
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peterdevries said:
What I find strange is that there is a CIO and he reports into the CFO. That indicates to me that this is probably not all that accurate.
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Who would the CIO report to? Ben Thompson said on Twitter when he was at Apple everyone except Steve Jobs reported through the CFO based on the company's corporate directory.

After re-reading Cook's employee memo where he says "Jony will remain responsible for all of our design, focusing entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives" I get the feeling "new ideas and future initiatives" will be taking up a lot of his time. IF those car rumors are true that's a full time commitment. Mac, iPhone and iPad are mature products from a design standpoint so he can easily give those up and focus on new stuff. Kind of like Bob Mansfield taking a role just working on 'special projects.' Also notice per Apple's website that the VP in charge of Apple's A-series chip design reports directly to Tim Cook and not Mansfield (or Dan Riccio). I highly doubt Cook is intimately involved in chip design, same with UI and hardware design. There must be other reasons these people are reporting directly to him.
 
Given the photos of these men, maybe it's time for Apple to come out with their much anticipated
iShaver. And also a limited edition of the iTee shirt.

We used to laugh at IBMs uniform of white shirt, tie and wing tips. Apple's uniform look is no less funny.
 
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