New Biography of Jony Ive Sheds Light on Apple's Design 'Genius'

[Ice Dragon]

I am sold on this. Huge Jony Ive fan.

 

[tai.michael]

Its just that this "sky is falling because of iOS 7" mentality that is pervasive in macrumors is not really a universal sentiment.

What happened to when everyone was praising Apple for its innovative skeumorphic design back around 2007? Were people right then or are they right now? The aesthetic gap between iOS6 and iOS7 is the largest in the history of iOS. One art director at a company can make all the difference in the world. And an industrial designer does not make a good software designer.

At least, not with all people who can appreciate how hard it is to design something that works really well.

The fact that everyone from mute children to grandparents were able to pick up the iPhone and understand it immediately is a testament to how great the design was. iOS7 gives everyone a headache. Tell me how that makes it a great design?

 

[Poisonivy326]

Wow, I for some reason believed that the original iPhone used glue which was why I thought glue in the iPad was forgivable.

I just found out that the 5S uses some adhesive glue to hold the battery as opposed to a pull tab in the 5. Dear Lord, why is this happening?

The thing that kills me is that for a customer base that so believes that Apple products are "premium" (and they are, in many ways, in terms of user-friendly experience), there's absolutely nothing "premium" about simply gluing in parts rather than designing screws, pull tabs, magnets, and other devices to hold together electronics. In fact, it's (using the dreaded word) cheap. Glue itself has a planned obsolescence -- adhesives deteriorate in quality over time.

Again, it's not Jony's fault as he's not an engineer, simply a designer. It speaks to Apple's management pecking order that his designs have to be taken so literally that things are simply glued together.

 

[sixrom]

Man must be making bank $$$

Will he continue to rest in the limelight, or go back to work?

 

[e-coli]

I'm sure Ive came up with several designs before *STEVE* approved the one *HE* wanted. So, NO! WE DID NOT GIVE CREDIT TO THE WRONG GUY! sheesh! Ive is GREAT and I love him but let's not go over the top please.

Good Lord, man. Take a Xanax and have a beer already.

----------

You are right. Perhaps I have downplayed his involvement too much. But then again, all it took for Jony and Cook to do was say, "Hey, we don't know too much about software, why don't we keep the current look of iOS6 or hire someone who does know?" Instead, they took it upon themselves to create this iOS7 abomination, and then do an arrogant segment for Business Week with them all laughing on the front cover, titled "What Us Worry?"

Guys, you didn't create the cure for cancer. Real developers and designers know that iOS7 was nothing groundbreaking, instead actually a step back of ten years in graphic design.

10 year step backwards? I guess design is pretty subjective because I find iOS 7 quite striking, even if incomplete. It makes iOS 6 look like a dated kids toy. Just one man's opinion.

 

[Digitalclips]

This book should be designed the way this genius would have designed it:

• Remove his picture and have just a traced bald head icon...no color fill for the icon.
• Use only flat pastels on the cover. Preferably no more than two. Keep it simple.
• Make the book completely round and hide all of the complexity as to where to open the book (inspired by his round iMac mouse. Genius!)
• Use a hidden release mechanism to open the book, so that it doesn't fly open when carried across a room. This should require plying discrete pressure on the center of the book, to open it, but not on the sides, where it could happen accidentally
• Cover the book in a thin sheet of glass, front and back. It should shine.
• Like the slippery iPhone 5c, embrace this touch aesthetic. The book should feel like a polished bar of soap. Can also double as a huge hockey puck, without requiring a frictionless surface.
• Use an advanced polymer on each page to create a glass-like gloss. Each page can also double as a beautiful mirror-like surface, capturing light with requiring much.
• Like most physical objects, pages are too skeuomorphic. They look too much like pages and have annoying affordances such as turning them. The book should have a revolutionary design that makes the printed page un-pagelike, and turning them should be a modern gesture: wave your hand over the book right to left, and the pages slides into place using just the air current generated by the gesture itself.
• Use Helvetica Neue only, esp inside the book. If people don't squint to see the super thin fonts, you're doing something wrong.

This would be a book worthy of the great Sir Jony!

Just get the book to read on your iPad and you will be most of the way there

 

[iisdan]

His hardware design is beautiful, software though... not so much.

 

[kobalap]

What happened to when everyone was praising Apple for its innovative skeumorphic design back around 2007? Were people right then or are they right now? The aesthetic gap between iOS6 and iOS7 is the largest in the history of iOS. One art director at a company can make all the difference in the world. And an industrial designer does not make a good software designer.



The fact that everyone from mute children to grandparents were able to pick up the iPhone and understand it immediately is a testament to how great the design was. iOS7 gives everyone a headache. Tell me how that makes it a great design?

It gives everyone headaches? Do you make this stuff up as you go along or do you create your list of non-sense all up front?

Your problem is you're confused.

There is a difference between something being crappy in absolute terms and something being not as good as another thing.

Most of the differences between iOS 6 and 7 as aesthetic in nature. The phone works largely the same as it did before minus a lot of the lipstick that skeumorphism adds. Personally, I preferred iOS 6 but that doesn't make iOS 7 crappy. Crappy is the UI on old Palm Treos (both the native Palm UI and Windows Mobile). Crappy is the computer controlled radio/climate control system on my wife's honda accord. Crappy is the UI on my comcast DVR. There are tons of examples of "crappy".

The real mistake here was that Apple bowed to pressure to fix something that wasn't broken. If anything, this should serve as a lesson.. whenever something works perfectly fine, proponents should be very vocal in their opposition to those (customers) who ask for change just for change's sake.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

If you ever spent a day designing UI, you would know that for all of its faults, iOS7 is absolutely fantastic.

On the contrary. I have, though I don't need to have to see what's gone wrong in iOS7. Though I see from your personally attacking anyone who disagrees with you, you do think it's fantastic, you haven't made an actual case for it being as such. Like a many other people in many threads here, I can easily identify some very I characteristically amateurish decisions made in iOS7, which we made ourselves 15 years ago when we were budding graphic designers who didn't know what we were doing.

Perhaps you can explain how iOS 7 design is fantastic in terms of usability, and not a giant disastrous step backward. Please start with these glaring oddities:

1. Change most, but not all, of your instantly recognizable icons into fragmented text objects people have to read to process, and make all your text a very light blue or better yet, almost invisible pale yellow, 2pt, thinnest font you can find, and float them disjointedly in blinding white space, to maximize the eye strain as they try to read through it.

2. Design your Application icons with a jumble of Flourescent Orange Yellow, and Pink, and just randomize some gradients all over them.

3. Use an assortment of graphical styles in your iconography, from 1px wide line art to solid fill shapes to some 1950s skeumorphic imagery to abstract disassociative non-linear progressivism with transgenic subordinate geometric proportionality from the future. Mix em up. All on one screen, if possible.

4. Don't worry about minimizing taps or efficient workflows. Just dump everything out on to white space in a heap.

5. Only do any or all of this on about half your apps.

Yes. Fantastic.
Glad to be back on iOS6.

 

[kobalap]

On the contrary. I have, though I don't need to have to see what's gone wrong in iOS7. Though I see from your personally attacking anyone who disagrees with you, you do think it's fantastic, you haven't made an actual case for it being as such. Like a many other people in many threads here, I can easily identify some very I characteristically amateurish decisions made in iOS7, which we made ourselves 15 years ago when we were budding graphic designers who didn't know what we were doing.

Perhaps you can explain how iOS 7 design is fantastic in terms of usability, and not a giant disastrous step backward. Please start with these glaring oddities:

1. Change most, but not all, of your instantly recognizable icons into fragmented text objects people have to read to process, and make all your text a very light blue or better yet, almost invisible pale yellow, 2pt, thinnest font you can find, and float them disjointedly in blinding white space, to maximize the eye strain as they try to read through it.

2. Design your Application icons with a jumble of Flourescent Orange Yellow, and Pink, and just randomize some gradients all over them.

3. Use an assortment of graphical styles in your iconography, from 1px wide line art to solid fill shapes to some 1950s skeumorphic imagery to abstract disassociative non-linear progressivism with transgenic subordinate geometric proportionality from the future. Mix em up. All on one screen, if possible.

4. Don't worry about minimizing taps or efficient workflows. Just dump everything out on to white space in a heap.

5. Only do any or all of this on about half your apps.

Yes. Fantastic.
Glad to be back on iOS6.

Graphics design and user interface design are not the same thing. Pretty colors and felt on icons does not a good user interface make.

Let me help you give some *real* examples of where iOS 7 might not be as good as iOS 6:
- The music player. I haven't thought about it much but I feel a little confused on how to operate the music controls.
- I can no longer double tap the home button to access my previously running application. Some thing changed in this regard. I don't know if things have gotten less intuitive or if I am just stuck with the old way of doing things.
- The map application itself is no longer grabbing my attention when a significant event is imminent (my exit is coming).

However, being not as good as iOS 6 does not make iOS 7 a disaster. In general, the usability of the phone has not really changed. Some examples:
- The user's mental model for navigating from menu to applications (home screens) is exactly the same between iOS 6 and iOS 7.
- The mental model for navigating to application settings is exactly the same.
- The mental model for how to kill applications/processes is the same although the gesture for how you do it is different.
- The mental model for at least 2 of the core applications (email and phone) are exactly the same.

In these areas, you are talking about the lipstick changing. Some people like red lipstick, some like pink lipstick. The girl underneath is pretty much the same.

In terms of making the OS less click/gesture intensive, the introduction of control center itself has been a big help. It puts a few of the most common tasks within reach through one gesture.

Look, I get it. You guys don't like the new colors and the icons. You're entitled to that opinion. But that is a skinning thing. Tomorrow, they could decide to give you back your felt, your pretty little icons and the rest of "skeumorphism". And they can do so without changing the fundamentals of what makes iOS 7 what it is.

I haven't seen one person put together any real data that shows that iOS 7 is falling below any metric that measures the usability of a device. Whereas I have personally seen first time iPhone owners learning how to use the iOS 7 enabled devices just fine without instructions/help. And to me, even that small bit of anecdotal data is a far better indicator of usability of iOS 7 than the p**sing and moaning about colors and felt on icons that I am reading about in this thread.

 

[tai.michael]

iOS7 looks like the product of novice graphic designers that I have worked with at a development agency.

A couple of points why:

1. Colors - They use incredibly saturated colors. Let me tell you why they did this. In the print world, designers would often use the most saturated colors because this would give the most color and would make them more visible. However, what comes out of a printer is different than what is shown on a monitor.

Take a look at the diagram below. The amount of colors in print (CMYK) is a smaller spectrum than digital (RGB).

What does this mean? I believe when Jony Ive became the Chief UI Designer, he used a print / industrial design approach to iOS. That's why everything is so saturated. Take a look at the differences between iOS6 and 7 below.

These intense colors are way out of place and are unnecessary. He could have dialed back the saturation a few notches, and it still would have been enough to distinguish elements in terms of visual hierarchy.

2. Padding - This one doesn't make any sense at all to me. Fine, they screwed up the colors. But let's make everything close to the edge of the screen? What???

If you notice, a lot of the buttons on the top and bottom bars have very little space between the edge of the screen. Visually, to make things easier for the user, you need to provide a good amount of padding. Our eyes can't distinguish between the buttons, the title, and other elements. Everything's jumbled together.

3. No Drop Shadows - If you notice, the title of apps are almost next to impossible to read now because they got rid of drop shadows.

How am I supposed to read this?

4. Relative Design - The design changes to the color of the background. Sounds cool in theory but ultimately too many variables to cover. They got rid of the bars on the lock screen, fine. But then they went against that principle and added a color bar to the home screen that changes based on the color of the background. Sometimes it looks okay. Sometimes it looks absolutely dreadful. Why do we need to limited to certain backgrounds to make sure the rest of our operating system look okay?

5. Frosted Glass - There is a reason why designers moved away from stuff like this. Because it is tacky. What benefit does this bring to the user experience? Fine, you can somewhat see what's in the background, but it's so blurry that it ends up being completely pointless. And again the whole relative design. If the background is white, then I can't see the program that is in front of me!

6. Icons - Everyone knows these are ugly. It looks like different art directors worked on each one, which I believe is the case since Jony Ive said the marketing team worked on these. The freaking marketing team. Enough said.

Jony, you say you love minimalism. Yet your settings button is nothing but. Let's add as many spikes to the settings icon as possible.

There's a lot of stuff I could on and on about, but I wanted to vent these points.