Exactly. I refuse to accept our discussion is a debate. If anything, it is a dialog or rhetorical exchange.
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Jony Ive Officially Takes 'Chief Design Officer' Title at Apple
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Exactly. I refuse to accept our discussion is a debate. If anything, it is a dialog or rhetorical exchange.
Are you suggesting that Ive did not have an obligation and duty to oversee, criticize, course-correct and sign off on his underling's work?
Etan
I wonder what would happen if Ive and Kristen Stewart had a baby. Can you just imagine the joy in the delivery room?
'Smart neighbourhood' would be a better description, unless it's the nouveau rich with no taste.
It is an issue for me, too.
What's annoying is that you can't turn it off. The iPad has a dedicated button for Undo, so it doesn't need Shake to Undo. Not to mention, it's daft to have it in the first place, as the iPad is much too big to use it efficiently.
Just one more area where Apple have neglected the iPad and treated it like a giant iPhone.
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.
Thank you for taking the time to write your excellent post.
I agree with it all. And I loved the wooden bookshelves in iBook lol.
My big gripe is the tiny text in the App Store, the Mac App Store, the iBook Store and the iTunes Store. Why are those descriptions and reviews so tiny? If there's one thing I'd like to see, it's the option to have much larger text for those stores.
Agreed an option would be good. As is the case for many other things.
Because his iPhone is just so damn thick.
Well he doesn't always look depressed.
Attachments
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.
Your reading it backwards.. Those 6 people actually report to IVE. IVE only reports to COOK.
Lets face the truth guys. Jony Ive is a worse designer without Steve Jobs. If Steve would be still around there is NO WAY this would be presented on the stage.
When it comes down to it, apple is making billion off those same products that you think the design suck. Million of other s love it! And regardless you still bought the phone and apple products knowing the design suck, Point is whatever apple put out people will buy
I'd be careful with that.
People buy things because of a reputation. The reputation Apple built under Jobs was "incredible products that just work and blow everyone out of the water". Thanks to Ive/Cook partnership, this is evolving into "OK products that are really frustrating and have lots of errors, but on the plus side everything looks like Android". I am one of those who hope that Ive's "promotion" is a step towards either retirement or work like designing chairs, tables and buildings. And I'm old enough to remember Apple being completely lost and confused and selling barely anything. Before Jobs's return, people wouldn't touch a Mac with a stick.
At the same time, I think we are overestimating Ive's influence on things. I don't think he personally approved every ugly icon and every white window with super-thin text. This man designed some truly incredible things, to only mention the iMac and iPod. The image MacFather posted? There's a possibility Ive saw it a week before iPhone premiered, because he was too busy working on a table that lifts when you press a button.
To see what happens to a company that takes its customers for granted, look at sales of Samsung Galaxy S3, S4, S5 and S6. S3: 55 million. S4: 40 million. S5: 12 million. S6: I read reports 10 million were shipped, out of which 6 million sold. Apple isn't untouchable, with or without Ive. Yes, iPhone 6 sold lots. But will 6s and 7 do the same? Time will tell.
At the end we don't really know what Ive's promotion or "promotion" actually means – for Apple and for people who use their products.
Thank you for your well-reasoned and well-informed opinion as a professional industrial designer. Please remind us of the many design patents and international design awards you have won.
By all means, enlighten us as to how the Apple Watch's UI should appear today, without the UI changes introduced in iOS 7. Explain to us how its 272 X 340 pixel display could accommodate lickable, glossy, 3D buttons, wood grain, and green felt - all while maintaining readability and usable touch target sizes.
Then regale us with your vision of how developers could manage all of those bitmapped, photorealistic screen elements and textures across the ever increasing range of screen sizes, shapes, resolutions, and aspect ratios in Apple's product lines while maintaining a coherent design ethos and continuing performance improvements.
After all, why settle for this
when you can have this?
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Right, because there is no racism in America, everyone has exactly the same opportunity regardless of race and social standing at birth, and every white guy in power deserves his status.
A black person born in 1946 Alabama with G.W. Bush's intellect could have also become president, right?
Your modest, reserved and objective opinion is appreciated.
Take into consideration following the same path you have proposed to the OP. "Enlighten us" about the professional background of your views in this respect, like you expect of others who dare sharing their humble opinion here.
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Actually, he looks depressed in this photo, too—like it's painful for him to come up with even the hint of a smile.
You are completely correct. When looked at objectively, this trend towards flat, featureless and quite frankly, characterless UIs is completely ridiculous. Some people like anything that's new, which this trend qualifies as. It does not however qualify as good design.
All of this stuff is awesome. I wonder what it would take for it to catch on. I assume an essential function would definitely be one think for it to.