[Felix Rieseberg] is one of the principal people responsible for creating Electron[…]. He literally wrote the book on Electron.

Felix Rieseberg, quite obviously, is the answer to the question why Claude is an Electron app.

Having one of Electron’s creators lead the Claude Code project is, of course, significant. But you don’t hire a midwife without expecting a baby. Claude was almost certainly going to be an Electron app no matter who led engineering.

Electron is an industry standard because most big companies are loathe to invest in UI polish. It’s an expense to them, not a way to gain users, so good enough suffices. Claude's primary audience is developers, who pick it based on (1) the models and (2) the app's dev experience. Native UI is a distant consideration, so the app only needs to clear the "good enough" bar.

[Update: Allen Pike nailed this more accurately when he described it as a tradeoff between polished UX and coordinated featurefulness. I wish I'd read his piece earlier, not only because it's an accurate analysis, but also because I wouldn't have unintentionally picked a copycat title.]

Case in point: ChatGPT was off to a good start with their Mac app. Their focus on the consumer market probably motivated them to make it nice. But over the past couple months, bugs have accumulated and been left unfixed. OpenAI's eyes are now on the dev audience prize that Anthropic has a grip on, so their Codex app is evolving rapidly. (It’s an Electron behemoth besting Claude’s 750 MB size to weigh in at a shocking 1.4 GB.)

[Update 2: Just a few days after posting this, the native ChatGPT app has been sent into retirement.]

The result of OpenAI's wayward attention is that I now find the ChatGPT app jankier than Claude and Codex, despite it being native. It pains me to write that. I'm a '90s Apple kid. Native apps are in my blood. But big tech companies have always had an aversion to good taste when it comes to software. Indies have been the ones to lead the way in quality, in fit and finish, in Mac-ness.

When Mac OS X launched, Cocoa gave small teams the power of much larger ones and Mac users ended up with the Delicious Generation. If Cocoa was a shot of caffeine for small teams, AI is a Scarface-sized pile of cocaine.

I know because I’m not a developer and I used it to create a Mac-assed Mac app for myself. (An audio comparison app, like Kaleidoscope but for audio files.) If even I can make something like that, I can't wait to see what actual indie developers make.

Much as I would like Big Tech to stop making Electron clunkers (I'm looking at you too, 1Password), I don't expect a sudden change of heart. Nevertheless, there's suddenly more potential than there's been in years for a resurgence of great Mac apps.

The thing is, saving space is a great goal for a UI! The vast majority of people using traditional computers are on laptops. Pretty much the entire computing world, excepting some professions, has converted to the equivalent of apartment living. Screen real estate is at a premium!

Unfortunately, the ultra minimalist design trend over the last 10 years has ignored this reality. Designers have steadily removed elements that can be used to create coherent, compact designs: borders, shadows, color, shading. All have been kicked to the designer shitlist.

We’re left with just a couple tools to convey hierarchy and structure: lots of negative space, and in some places, large header text.

This trend has eroded usable screen space. And like erosion, it has happened almost imperceptibly, through many small changes over the course of years. But the sum of the changes across the entire ecosystem of Mac apps has been that, simply put, I can fit noticeably less on screen today than 10 years ago.^[1] I used to regularly reference 2-3 windows simultaneously. These days, most apps and web pages require so much space that it’s one-at-a-time.^[2]

When I saw Newsstand, the new RSS app for Mac OS 9, I found it a shocking reminder of how much information used to be conveyed, usably, in a small window.

I’m not suggesting that the primary goal of UI design should be to pack as much on screen as possible. Obviously design is a balancing act – usable hit targets vs. density, visual affordance vs. clutter, etc. But I do think that the pursuit of minimalism has caused us to ignore information density for too long.^[3]

In short, while a redesigned Safari 15 for Mac can’t come quick enough, what I’m really wishing for is a broader shift away from minimalist extremism in UI design.

I think we can take Zuckerberg at face value here. Product-wise it implies a shift in direction and a lot of work. But it doesn't require Facebook to alter its core business.

Whether users communicate publicly or privately with Facebook's products, the company will still have access to vast amounts of data on every user to sell ads against. And it won't necessarily change how un/ethically they use it. This wouldn't have any impact on, for example, using 2FA phone numbers to target ads at users. Or whether Facebook's algorithms promote clickbait conspiracy content because that's what people engage with.

Coincidentally, it sure helps them make the case for integrating Messenger/Instagram/WhatsApp.

There may be some positive changes that come out of this, but for the most part it seems like business as usual.

• Apple tried this approach with the original iPod and failed. Once the iPod was independent of the Mac, both products became exponentially more successful — lower barrier to purchase for the iPod, halo effect for the Mac.
• The iPhone required iTunes at first. After years of development effort, it left that requirement behind.
• I imagine the Apple Watch could someday break free of its dependence on the iPhone. But the technological and UI barriers to moving the Watch from an accessory to a standalone device are significantly larger, so any transition is probably a ways out.

Apple may wield far more power today than they did when they debuted the iPod in 2001, but their business model remains unchanged and very simple: first they try to make best-in-class devices, then they try to sell as many of them as possible.

Requiring an iOS device to use HomePod isn’t profitable lock-in for Apple, it’s a barrier to purchase. If the HomePod is successful enough to stick around, I expect it will follow in the footsteps of the iPod and iPhone and eventually eliminate the requirement of owning a companion Apple device.

Some have pointed out that the Apple Music app is on Android, and so the HomePod’s exclusion of Android must be deliberate and evidence of Apple’s strategy tax. But the Music app doesn’t handle initial HomePod setup. And it sounds as though the HomePod doesn’t make calls, send messages, or sync iCloud data by itself. By requiring an iOS device, the HomePod can lean on iOS system frameworks, as well as the Home App, none of which exist on Android. This is a smart way of launching quicker, while still being able to sell to a large potential audience.

As for where Apple Music fits into all of this, Ben Thompson proposed that the service exists in part to push subscribers to buy the HomePod. I think it exists for a far simpler reason: playing music is a core requirement of any consumer device platform, no different than handling email, calendars, photos, and web browsing. People have expected their computers to be music players since iTunes debuted, and the transition to streaming didn’t change anything, least of all Apple’s belief that depending entirely on third parties like Spotify for core functionality creates long term risk.

The growing number of Apple Music subscribers gives Apple an initial audience to sell the HomePod to, but the service would exist with or without the HomePod. And conversely, like John Gruber hypothesized, nothing precludes the HomePod opening up to third party music apps in the future. Apple probably views their job as making the HomePod the best smart speaker for music so they can sell as many as possible. If one day they can sell to Spotify users with Android phones, I think they will.

Time will tell, I suppose.

iPad revenue was only up about 2 percent. That suggests to me, strongly, that this sales bump was driven strongly by the new 9.7-inch iPad that starts at $329.

In response to this, Michael Tsai commented:

I don’t quite understand why people are treating this as a bad thing. It’s good that Apple has made a more affordable iPad that customers seemingly like (unless they just didn’t want to be stuck on iOS 9). And more units sold will be good for the app market.

It is a good thing that Apple makes an affordable iPad that is selling well. I love seeing Apple compete at the low end of the market, something I’ve only truly seen them do a couple of times.^[1]

At the same time, it’s important that the iPad continue to grow at the high end. So much iPad commentary over the past two years of falling sales has been about the fear that the device has already reached its peak potential utility. And if so, that peak has been far lower than what many dreamed of when it first debuted.

The iPad’s average selling price can be seen as an indication of whether the iPad has the potential to continue evolving into a more capable tool. If sales of the Pro line are weak, it’s a sign that Apple hasn’t succeeded in creating useful functionality that takes advantage of improved hardware. And if users don’t need improved hardware, Apple’s business model can’t justify continued iPad software development long term.^[2]

For what it’s worth, iOS 11 seems to me to be the first sign in a long time that Apple can make the iPad significantly more useful for a wider range of people than it has served to date. So while I hope that low end sales continue to grow, I also hope that future quarterly reports show their Pro line growing strongly.

What I found was that on desktop, the button for sharing to Facebook saw some usage. By “some”, I mean that less than 0.1% of people who viewed a page ended up sharing to Facebook.^[1] Depending on your perspective, this is either negligible or enough to justify keeping a share button there.

On mobile, out of millions of pageviews in a given time period, shares to Facebook were in the single digits. I don’t mean single digits percentage-wise, I mean that out of millions of people viewing a page, less than 10 individuals used the in-page share button to post to Facebook. And yet that button was fighting for top real estate alongside many other critical pieces of the page.

When it came to other types of sharing, I found that Facebook was the only service people bothered with. Sharing to all other services via the in-page buttons happened at a rate of essentially 0% on all devices,^[2] making those buttons pointless.

I would never pretend that this one case is representative of the web as a whole. Every site obviously has its own unique set of user behaviors and audience segments that are considered valuable. What I will say is this: I hope every site that has in-page share buttons has analyzed their usage stats to make sure the benefits outweigh the costs in screen real estate, brand advertising, and analytics data given to social media companies.

When it comes to mobile in particular, the site I worked on showed that in-page share buttons were irrelevant. On this I have a stronger opinion as iOS and Android have strong platform-wide design patterns for sharing, whether through share sheets, copy/paste, drag and drop, voice control, or whatever else may come in the future. The data I looked at suggested that these platform controls are what people use, not the social share buttons that junk up webpages the world over.

Sometimes you struggle to find the right angle on a topic. This piece of writing in particular kept bending towards the “rant” rather than the “insightful” end of the spectrum. Luckily, one day before Apple’s expected announcement of their first wearable device, Josh Clark created a far more interesting article than I could have:

[Wearables] should reinforce connections with the people we love and the places we visit, instead of isolating us under a torrent of data. They should draw us into the world instead of drawing our eyes to a screen.

The entire piece is worth a read.

What if the camera you buy has features that the camera app you use doesn't support? What if the camera's drivers are buggy? What if the camera hardware requires two component spaces on the phone frame instead of one? Is everyone meant to play a game of geometry to figure out what set of components fit together to allow the features they want?

How about a different scenario. What if you buy a higher resolution screen, only to find out that your phone's GPU is too slow to support it? What if you buy a faster GPU and it requires a faster interconnect than your cell phone frame uses? Why should anyone even need to know what a GPU is?

There's also the tradeoff of bulk, where making every component removable means losing significant space to external housing and interconnects. Even worse, each component is forced into a predetermined size whether it needs the space or not.

An optimist would say that Google is working on solutions to these challenges. On the other hand, you could look at 30 years of history with PCs and predict a bleaker outcome for Project Ara. In this more likely scenario, customers will need to figure out what components work together, which have stable drivers, where to buy them, and how to configure them.

It should be clear by now that the reality of piecing together technology components never lives up to the promise of a seamless product. Every time the tech industry tries to do this, it finds out that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Exhibit A: Compare any laptop to Apple's MacBooks. Exhibit B: Compare any Android phone to Google's Nexus line. Exhibit C: Compare any Windows tablet to Microsoft's Surface.

Fraser Speirs once wrote:

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

As someone who works to make technology transparent, Project Ara strikes me as a wrongheaded concept. It rewinds the clock on the last decade of progress in the tech industry. Instead of ushering in a new generation of personalized, upgradeable phones, it will be a mess of barely functioning components from different companies, with limited compatibility across generations of hardware.

We should be making tools that people can use effortlessly instead of pretending tech products are toys that people want to spend time tinkering with.

In the study, we tested two designs for a mobile checkout flow. One had most of the flow condensed into one page. The other split the flow into 8 or so separate pages, with each step asking a simple question such as “Are you a new customer? [Yes] [No]”.

Conventional wisdom would have predicted the first design to be more successful. Not only did it require fewer taps to complete the checkout task, but it was faster since there were fewer pageloads involved. However, users overwhelmingly preferred the second multi-step design because they had an easier time completing the task.

Rather than aiming to reduce the clicks needed to complete a task, aim to reduce the user's cognitive load. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for this goal. The only thing you can count on is that number of clicks isn't a valid metric to measure it by.

Weather

• Have you ever tried reading the forecast when conditions are hazy? White text against a gray background sure looks pretty. Hope your eyes are as sharp as a 6-year-old's, instead of half-blurry as you wake from sleep and try to figure out how to dress for the day.
• The weather forecast in Notification Center is now written in conversational language rather than being represented with numbers and iconography. Good thing you weren't trying be quick by using the Notification Center shortcut to check the weather, right? Right?!

Music

• Do you play music wirelessly using AirPlay or Bluetooth? Great! Switching to wireless speakers now requires navigating a couple levels deep inside control center, rather than having a toggle directly in the music app. It's far less discoverable and far more cumbersome to use.
• Do you rotate your phone sideways to browse your music by album cover? No? Is that because you always see the first alphabetical albums no matter where you are in your music collection? Well, iOS 7 has done nothing to fix this, but the design is now flat! Oh, and Music.app likes to switch into this view much more easily than in previous versions of iOS. Lay your phone on a slightly uneven surface, and chances are Album Wall will take over.

Safari

• Did you forget the Reader feature exists? It probably doesn't help that the redesign gave the button the same look and location as a website's favicon. Oh, and it doesn't look like a button.

Reminders

• Switching between lists in Reminders requires a tap or swipe up from a narrow area at the bottom of the screen. Careful you don't invoke Control Center instead! You only have a few millimeters of space to get this action right.

Maps

• I almost feel bad for kicking Maps while it's still down, but not quite. If I look up a street address without specifying my city, don't show me a location in another state. My phone knows exactly where I'm standing. Use this basic piece of contextual info.

Control Center

• Do you use your phone as an alarm clock every day? That shortcut to the Clock app in Control Center sure is handy huh? Wouldn't it be nice if it didn't switch you into the countdown timer tab every time? Apparently you should be timing things more often. Maybe this was an internal shortcut the design team at Apple used to stick to the deadline that made them ship a major interface overhaul in too little time.
• Isn't it great how Apple overloaded the swipe-from-bottom-of-screen gesture on the lock screen? If you try to bring up Control Center you sometimes launch the camera instead. And vice versa.
• Speaking of swiping up from the bottom of the screen, turns out Control Center doesn't always like to pop up. Usually when there's a keyboard on screen. Ever tried invoking it from the Messages app and ended up with a string of gibberish letters in the message field instead?

App Switcher

• The redesign of the app switcher now lets you see just 3 apps at once on an iPhone, instead of 4. And best not to think about how little you can see on the iPad compared to the old design. The bigger problem is that navigating the app switcher requires far too delicate a touch. It used to be possible to fling that set of apps to the side to see the next set. No matter how much momentum you swiped with, the app switcher would always scroll and stop at the next discrete set of apps. Now there is no stop boundary, so a quick swipe will send 20 icons flying by before the scrolling slows to a stop. So you must slowly, delicately swipe, then tap the screen to stop too many apps from sliding by, then do the same. Tedious. Time consuming. Concentration-heavy.

Global Problems

• Animations. Slow, interaction-blocking animations. Turning them off is not a good solution. They provide important context. There is no good reason for them to take so long, or to stop you from interacting with your device until they've finished.

And if you're hungry for more, plenty of others have weighed in as well.

Jared Sinclair nailed it in a post a few months ago:

We’ve all seen apps that look like they were designed by talented print designers, apps with beautiful screenshots and tasteful typography that nevertheless fall apart disgracefully as soon as you actually try to use them. These apps don’t fail for lack of talent. They fail because their designers have the wrong process. They’re beginning with aesthetics and squeezing in the interactions wherever they have room to fit. The right process moves in the opposite direction. A good iOS app designer begins with touch, and only afterwards chooses aesthetics that complement and enhance the underlying touchable structure.

Apple can fix this with a well thought out design refresh for iOS 8. Unfortunately, because they have set the design guidelines that hundreds of thousands of apps are based on, any true fix will come at the expense of each of these apps needing significant updates. That's millions of hours of time wasted because Apple set out a visual framework in iOS 7 that is fundamentally flawed from a usability standpoint.

And the thing is, Apple usually excels in creating frameworks that get the basics absolutely right. Which is incredibly important when you are creating a framework for others:

If you’re designing just an app, you can fix many design errors later; if you’re designing an app platform, though, it’s hard to fix system-wide design errors without breaking existing apps.

From a technical and functional point of view, iOS 7 is a great successor to iOS 6. From a design point of view, I consider it a big step backwards.

As Marco says:

It’s easy to design something attractive that’s not very usable, and it’s easy to design something usable that’s unattractive. The challenge is striking a balance, and iOS 7 made too many usability sacrifices to achieve attractiveness.

• On the surface, it commits to reintroducing some of this functionality within the next 6 months.
• Implied is that there is a team working hard on iWork.

Apple rarely talks future plans, and for the most part this serves them well. That said, the level of outrage over the new iWork wasn't surprising. Most people don't know how much effort has been going into iWork, or even if there was ongoing major development now that a new version has been released. Those using iWork on the Mac only had a long gap between major releases, followed by reduced functionality, on which to base their reaction.

The limited announcement in the notice doesn't cross into the questionable territory of vaporware. Instead, it provides reassurance that this is only the start of the new iWork and that there is more to come.^[1] Having watched the same scenario of outrage play out across three product reboots, it strikes me that communicating plans like this immediately would have have prevented a lot of ire and criticism in each case. Let's hope Apple uses this as a model for future product transitions.

The phrase "the same file format for both Mac and iOS" is used on the pages for all three products. It was highlighted in Apple's keynote. It's important.

Without all versions of iWork using the same data format, true interoperability is impossible. In the previous versions of iWork you would lose some formatting & data when moving from Mac to iOS.

When you create multiple apps that use the same data format, it is difficult, if not impossible, to prevent data loss when editing files unless you have feature parity between versions. To make up a fictional example, imagine that Pages on the Mac could include images in a document while the iOS version could not. What happens to the complex text wrapping around an image when you edit the document on the iPad? What happens to page layout, and links, and your table of contents, if large chunks of content are missing? You'd end up with serious formatting errors at best, or data loss at worse.

The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn't because Apple is blind to power users. It's because they're willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator.

Whether this tradeoff is the right call is up for debate. As someone who uses iWork a decent amount, it's frustrating that the first update major new release in over 4 years is a regression in functionality. But if iWork is a key piece of Apple's software platform going forward, it's easy to see that interoperability across versions is an important baseline requirement for them. I just hope that they continue heavy development of the software and iterate quickly.

Caveat: this is all hypothesis based on my experience designing cross-platform software. I could be wrong.

Update: It was pointed out to me that the new iWork for Mac is not the first update to the software in over 4 years. There were many updates to iWork 09 over the years. The first "major new release" is more accurate.

[…] we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content.

I appreciate some of their other insights, but I call bullshit on this specific point. Who, exactly, has grown up? In the past 30 years of traditional desktop GUIs, no one questioned the need for basic visual cues to demonstrate interactivity. When it comes to smartphones specifically, billions of people around the world have never used one. To take an example of a particularly smartphone-happy country, almost half the population in the U.S. has yet to buy one.^[1]

Visual affordance is one of the fundamental keys to usability, and veering away from it is a sure way of creating something that is difficult for non-techies to understand. "We've grown up" is logic I've seen used many times to justify pretty designs that suffer from basic usability flaws.

This isn't meant as a criticism of the visual overhaul in iOS 7.^[2] It's an argument against the notion that usability should be traded for beauty. There is a lot of hubris involved in the assumption that the "we" in "we've grown up" applies to anyone outside of a tiny number of developers and designers. It's a big world out there. Let's continue creating tools that are usable for as many people as possible.

Adobe XD explores the analog future

There are some great ideas in this marriage of a digital pen & ruler with drawing software. I'm glad to see Adobe developing smart new products. Here's to hoping this makes its way out of the lab and into the marketplace.

This animation was added to Android a couple of years ago but I haven't seen it mentioned. It's the perfect type of whimsical: it's over in a split second, the timing ensures it never blocks you from interacting with the UI, and the only purpose it serves is fun.^[1]

For work that requires moving amongst several apps, this quickly becomes cumbersome. Here's an idea I've been exploring that involves a single continuous gesture:

This concept isn't without its issues, some of which I discussed in my previous post. Nevertheless, I'd love to hear what others think.

Personally, I believe the iOS keyboard is great for writing, because it’s just a normal keyboard, but iOS text selection is in serious need of an update, because it feels outdated.

This struck a chord with me, and it got me thinking about how people confuse the problem with multitasking on the iPad.

Criticism about the iPad's multitasking often focuses on having only one app on screen at a time or the inability to run apps in the background.^[1] I think the real problem is that switching apps is cumbersome. Solve this, and most practical complaints about multitasking would disappear.

It's easy to find examples of tasks which are more arduous on an iPad than on a traditional desktop computer. Consider booking a flight. It often involves coordination and research across email, calendar, a web browser, and a travel app like Kayak or Hipmunk.

Is this easier on a traditional computer because you can have multiple windows open? On an average sized screen there's not enough space to show even 2 complete windows at once, so it's not that you can use multiple apps at the same time particularly well.^[2] And yet using a laptop can enable a fluidity that you can't replicate on an iPad.

The problem becomes clearer when you think about switching between apps. Currently the iPad has four methods of doing so:

1. Go to home screen and tap on app
2. Double tap home button to reveal app switcher and tap on app
3. Swipe up to reveal app switcher and tap on app
4. Swipe sideways to move back/forwards through app history

#1-3 involve at least two actions every time you switch apps. #4 is great for moving back to your last used app,^[3] but doesn't scale if you are using 3 or more apps, like in the flight booking example. You have to move through your app history one at a time, and the order of your apps changes with each switch.

In contrast, look at how easy it is to switch apps using a traditional GUI:

1. Click on an app in the OS X dock/Windows taskbar
2. Click any exposed part of a background window
3. Cmd+tab/alt+tab to an app

#1-2 have a huge speed advantage over the iPad equivalents as they involve one click and the targets are always visible on screen. Also, Fitt's Law is in play with the dock/taskbar. #3 is somewhat like swiping sideways on the iPad, except you can see the order of all apps in an overlay instead of blindly moving from one to the next. As a result of these methods, working among multiple apps can be very efficient.

Based on the above, I think improving multi-app tasks on the iPad hinges on finding a solution to app switching that solves for two criteria:

1. You must be able to switch to a specific app immediately (i.e. navigating through your app history one at a time is not an acceptable solution).
2. Switching to an app must involve only one tap or gesture.

I have a couple potential solutions. The first is to allow you to lock the app switcher on screen (the one that appears when you double-tap the home button). When locked, it would move to the top of the screen so as not to get in the way of the keyboard, and apps would shrink to accommodate it. This way hit targets for recent apps would be available on screen at all times in order to switch quickly. The problem with this approach is that it requires you to predict when you're going to frequently move between apps so that you can preemptively lock the app switcher on screen.

The second possibility is to use a continuous gesture to bring up an app switcher and select an app. For example, a two finger swipe from the side of the screen would display a temporary overlay, and you would select a different app by continuing to swipe across. Lifting your fingers off the screen would switch to the app you had selected in the overlay.^[4] Using two fingers would be less awkward than the four finger gestures that are currently used, and using one continuous motion would provide a speed advantage. The disadvantage to this approach is that, as with most gestures, it isn't discoverable.

The above proposals aren't ideal, but as with finding the solution to any problem, half the challenge is making sure you've identified the correct issue. I think it would be interesting to shift the discussion on multitasking to how to make multi-app tasks better.

Let's be clear here: 1s and 0s are authentically digital. The absence of gradients and a focus on typography are not. The backlash against gloss and shadows is a trending preference. Dressing it up in language that suggests that minimalism is objectively better than skeuomorphism is as nonsensical as stating that functionalist architecture is better than neoclassical, or that jazz music is better than rock.

There are, of course, objective criteria by which to compare software designs. Is one interface more efficient to use than another? Is one easier to learn than another?^[1] You can argue these points and perform testing to discover which aspects are better or worse. But let's stop framing personal taste as if it is an objective criteria by which to measure design.

Gruber concludes his discussion by stating, "If you want to see the future of software UI design, look to the history of print design." I think this is an interesting point to consider. I also wonder if software design is more akin to architecture – will we look back in 20 years time and mourn the loss of artisan craft that used to go into digital design, in much the same way that we lament that there will never be another skyscraper with the extravagant detail of the Woolworth Building?

Above all, however, I wonder if there is a fundamental problem in criticizing skeuomorphic software design, then suggesting that the way forward is in mimicking another type of media. As with all inventions before it, software design will eventually find its own voice, and it will no doubt be wholly unique from other art forms. It's perfectly fine to prefer minimalism over another style of design, as long as we recognize that what we are discussing is opinion, and opinion can never be true.

Update: Marc Edwards weighed in on this topic, as did Max Rudberg. Both are great perspectives.

Here's what happened after I contacted Airbnb to tell them about my situation. First, someone from customer service responded to my message telling me that they were sorry to hear about what happened, but that it was my responsibility to know the law and they couldn't do anything to help. I wasn't surprised by this response, but it obviously did not put a smile on my face. So what happened next piqued my curiosity as a user experience designer.

A day or so later I received an automated email cheerily asking me to rate their customer service:

Hello Nigel Warren,

We'd love to hear what you think of our customer service. Please take a moment to answer one simple question by clicking either link below:

How would you rate the support you received?

Good, I'm satisfied

Bad, I'm unsatisfied

To recap: facing potential fines of over $40,000. Thousands in lawyer's fees. Dealing with an unhappy landlord and building board. Months of stress. Any human could guess what kind of reaction this email would invoke. The customer service rep who dealt with me should have had some way of manually overriding this automated followup.

This seems obvious, but it's hard to plan for all the potential edge cases when making the internal tools that companies use. Doubly so because they rarely go through as much design and testing as consumer-facing products.

The kicker to this story is what happened after a few more days had passed. I was contacted again by Airbnb, this time from someone on a different team who left me a voicemail and sent the following email:

Hi Nigel,

I hope this message finds you well. My name is [redacted] and I'm a part of the Host Consultation Team here at Airbnb. We've noticed you've been a great host on the site, and we still have a huge demand for accommodations in the New York area. Are you still interested in hosting?

Please feel free to reach out if you are interested in renting your property again with Airbnb. My direct line is [redacted] - I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Cheers,

[redacted]

I should point out that by this time, the New York Times had published my story^[1] and Airbnb customer service had then reached out to me directly to apologize. The timing of this last email couldn't have been more comic had Mike Daisey invented it for a one-man show. My girlfriend received the same message, so clearly Airbnb reps were working from an automatically compiled list of hosts in New York.

The lesson here isn't that customer service is hard – that's a well known fact. The lesson is that automated CRM systems need a manual override switch. It's impossible to design for every possible edge case in an unpredictable world, so there needs to be a flag that says "the normal rules don't apply here – shut this machine off" for when things get extreme.

It seems inconsistent that ordering by time goes in one direction in Safari and in the other direction system-wide, especially when similar swipe gestures can be used for both. Maybe these two models need to be reconciled.

Unfortunately the iPad has a subtle problem with one of its system-wide animations. When using the app switcher (revealed by double tapping the home button) to toggle between apps, the app you were just using moves backwards and to the left, suggesting that it is now residing to the left of the app you switched to.

This conflicts with the four-finger shortcut to swipe between apps. If you use the app switcher to switch to an app, then use a four-finger swipe to get back to the first app, the animation suggests that you should push the screen to the right to reveal the original app sitting to the left. However, the opposite is true.

Even after months of using the iPad I still get caught out by this issue. The subtle spatial cue in the app swapping animation causes me to push the screen the wrong way almost every time.

It seems an easy fix would be to change the direction of the app swapping animation triggered when using the app switching bar. I don't think this would conflict with other parts of the OS, but if anyone can think of any issues I'd be interested to hear.

Update: There may be another issue at play here as well.

[...] Referencing colors by "blueGreen_4" is more efficient than "fourth blue from the right in the system palette I set you up last week".

This reminded me that many UX designers, visual designers, and developers I've worked with are unaware of the color palettes tab in the system color picker. Using it can save a lot of time if you work solo and a lot of headaches if you work in a team.

Most people are familiar with the default view of the color picker. There is a color wheel. Beneath it is an area for saving color swatches for re-use.

However, as Thibaut mentions, trying to pick out "the fourth blue from the right" in the swatches area at the bottom is difficult and tedious. One of the color picker's useful tricks is the ability to create palettes with named colors. These days, I spend most of my time here:

Not only can you create your own palette and name the colors, you can quickly switch between different palettes:

Even better, you can send these palettes to other people. Create a new palette and you'll find it saved in ~/Library/Colors/. Send all the palettes you've created to your team and you'll never have to count those tiny swatches at the bottom of the color picker again.

Anyone needing detailed instructions on how to work with this part of the color picker should reference Robin Wood's instructions.

It's been fun watching the evolution of maps on mobile devices since then. The current Apple maps accuracy debacle is interesting,^[1] but it has caused other important changes in the maps app to be overlooked.

Search Suggestions

When I was testing Google Maps on that Razr, my initial excitement died down pretty quickly. As soon as I tried to do anything other than find my current location I hit a brick wall. I remember standing on a street corner, spending no less than 10 minutes entering an address on that tiny numeric keypad. There was no question that I was holding some extremely cool technology in my hands, but I had to admit that in practical terms it was useless.

Touchscreen devices have taken us a long way from those days. But searching maps always involves the worst-case scenario for text input. Autocorrect has to be disabled, which makes typing a location extremely fiddly. Combine this with some of the common scenarios for using a maps app: while you're walking down the street; while you're talking to someone trying to find the address of that restaurant you want to go to; while you're in the car driving. In short, you're forced to fly without autopilot when you're at your most distracted.

Apple now has added search suggestions to maps. Type a few letters, tap on one of the items in the suggestions list. This alone makes it vastly easier and faster to find things. 'Nuff said.

Vector Map Tiles

One of the many benefits of using vector map tiles instead of the old bitmap tiles is that much less data has to be sent to your phone. Again, common usage scenarios involve being out and about on the cell phone network rather than on a fast Wi-Fi connection. In my usage, the new maps load much faster and I can pan and zoom without constantly staring at the empty grid pattern.^[2]

Tap for Info

Lastly, it's now possible to tap on a business or point of interest for more information. This has been a feature of Google Maps on the desktop web for so long that it was a regular and unwelcome surprise not to be able to do the same on the iPhone. There are times when it's quicker to zoom in on a known location and tap for info instead of typing an address. Each time the old maps app didn't behave this way was a slight frustration.

Details

There's a common theme running through all these improvements: speed. Maps have to be accurate, yes, and by most accounts Apple has their work cut out for them in that area. But as I found out when I was testing Google Maps back in the bad old days of flip phones, speed can make or break a mapping app just as effectively as bad data, and any improvement in that area is welcome.

After all the negative publicity, I was surprised to find myself liking the new maps app much better than the old Google Maps-based one. These improvements don't make for good linkbait headlines. You can't demo them like you can with Flyover in order to sell phones.^[3] And they certainly aren't groundbreaking never-been-done-before features – indeed, they've been present in Google Maps on the desktop and Android for some time. But that doesn't make them any less of an improvement for all iPhone users. Unlike Flyover, you benefit from these refinements every time you use the app. As always in design, the details matter.

There are still more improvements that could be made. Yelp integration is good, but making you switch to the slow-loading Yelp app to find out key information like opening hours is a sub-par experience.^[4] And yeah, there's that whole accuracy thing that maybe someone should look at. Details, right?

Update: Lukas Mathis makes a good point (via email):

The main usability difference I noticed is that, with Apple's new app, I can't easily zoom. There's a threshold for rotation; if you don't pinch your fingers reasonably straight, the map starts to rotate. Happens to me about once every three or four times, and it's driving me bonkers…

####Just Like Any Other Tablet

Many look at the iPad as a wi-fi enabled 10” 1024×768 flatscreen with no USB port, SD card slot, or camera. They look at the iPhone OS and wonder why you’d use something with far less functionality than the hundreds of other tablets that have been on the market since the early 2000’s.

What they’re missing is the potential for the iPad to be the start of something new. Coming in the form of an evolved iPhone, something familiar to most of us, it doesn’t seem all that new or different.

But imagine, for a second, using the iPhone as your main computer. The reason you never have to dig through folders to find what you were working on, deal with software conflicts, or spend time cleaning up the iPhone after removing a piece of software is because the iPhone approaches computing from a different angle than the computers we’re used to dealing with every day. By expanding the iPhone from a small pocket tool to a larger device, Apple is trying to apply the iPhone’s model of computing to the tasks we currently use laptops for.

####Yes, It’s Underwhelming

At the iPad’s unveiling I could sense the disappointment in the discussions within my company and across much of the internet. When the iPhone was first introduced, it blew away notions of how a phone worked and what kind of experience a low-powered mobile device was capable of.

People were hoping for a similar sense of disbelief with the iPad. They wanted it to save the publishing industry, they wanted new input methods, they wanted “out of control” multi-touch interactions, and most importantly they wanted it to do things they hadn’t even dreamed of doing yet. In short, they wanted to feel like Apple had developed the future and was showing it to them. That’s what the iPhone introduction felt like.

Instead, what people got was something they’d already seen. And so it was easy to pick out the flaws. No open app distribution model? No camera? No multitasking?

But when you’re looking at the prototype of a new computing platform, those complaints are irrelevant. All of them will be added in time. What cannot be changed are the fundamentals of the software design.

The iPhone got these fundamentals dead right from day one, and the iPad is now inheriting them. Fundamentals like a touch-based interaction model. Fundamentals like an easy to understand way to acquire and run applications. Fundamentals like the complete change of focus from navigating a confusing hierarchical file system to a simpler task-based interaction model.

As Andy Ihnatko says,

“It struck me that Apple was making a clear statement with the iPad: ‘We were right about the iPhone.’ They had a clear and ambitious concept about an entirely new computing platform and an entirely new way that humans would interact with hardware. They were so right about it that when the time came to build a tablet device, changing the UI seemed vulgar at best. […] If the iPhone had never existed, the iPad would still have made sense as a touch-based computer.”

####A New Interface

The very things that make the iPad so great are also its biggest weaknesses. By developing a new interaction paradigm — touch-based rather than mouse-based — Apple has rendered all existing desktop software incompatible with the platform. To truly take a step forward, this is necessary.

Starting from zero is a daunting proposition. It is the reason Microsoft has never been able to garner mainstream acceptance from the tablets it promotes, despite grand proclamations about the coming tablet revolution back in 2001. In Microsoft’s universe, compatibility is king, hence the constant attempts to put Windows on a touchscreen. The taskbar, windows, dropdown menus, contextual menus, rollovers, and the rest of today’s pervasive interface elements make for an awkward tablet experience, but one with the advantage of an entire universe of software already built for it. Starting from zero, as Apple is doing, takes guts. The risks are exponentially higher, as are the rewards.

Apple is bootstrapping the process by launching the iPad with enhanced versions of the same applications that have been successful on the iPhone. Watching movies, listening to music, browsing the web, checking email, and more are all designed to be seamless and elegant experiences. With these basics, the iPad is capable of meeting the casual needs of some people. In addition, it features compatibility with the existing library of iPhone apps, although this is of questionable value for many. Even with these boxes checked, it won’t come close to replacing a laptop for most people.

####I Still Don’t Want One

For years, the tech industry has chased the dream of the device that fills the space between the mobile device and the computer. The difficulty with this space is that there isn’t obvious demand to fill. Devices have to muscle in and make their own space. The iPad may be one of the best to try, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not something many people need, myself included. My colleague Ben McNeil summed it up when he said, “This device doesn’t seem to blend everything I need but rather gives me one more gadget I own.”

And like a child needing a parent’s steadying hand on the saddle when learning to ride a bike, the iPad needs to be tethered to a real computer for tasks like backing up, downloading photos, and syncing music. Until my files live online, rather than on a hard drive tied to one computer, the iPad won’t seamlessly integrate into my digital life without a lot of awkward shuffling and copying to make things available to the iPad on an as-needed basis. I don’t need to pay for the added complexity of working this device into my life, and my iPhone already does a good job of surfing the web on the sofa.

####And Yet

Given the option, the prospect of carrying an iPad around is already so much more enticing than using my laptop. I yearn for the portability, the battery life, and most of all, the efficient and focused interface that my iPhone has given me a taste of.

I want the productivity and joy of using something that sheds the 20+ years of baggage my computer has inherited. The design decisions made in the 1970s that seem unprepared for the scale of my online life today, such that I am constantly having to organize and clean and manage my system.

As Fraser Speirs states,

“The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”

I want something that lets me get The Real Work done.

####A Whole New World of Apps Application development on the iPad has the ability to sustain bigger apps than what we’ve seen on the iPhone. The 99 cent app market on the iPhone has exploded because the device lends itself to quick, cheap entertainment. Lots of people will spend a buck for a couple of minutes’ excitement while waiting at the bus stop or standing in line. The iPad won’t be used in those situations, so the demand for those cheap thrill apps won’t be as strong.

Instead, people will start demanding more functional apps. Apple sent a clear signal by showcasing a highly functional and polished office suite in the form of iWork for the iPad. By doing this, they were in effect asking others to follow their lead by developing desktop-class applications. This call is already being answered. The Omni Group, the leading Mac development house responsible for OmniGraffle and OmniPlan, among others, has announced an immediate pause on developing their next generation of desktop software while they port their complete portfolio of applications to the iPad.

Apple also has the advantage of being in a better position than anyone else to cultivate a healthy 3rd party ecosystem of applications. It may be counterintuitive considering the discontent over their tight control of app distribution. But Apple has developed something even more valuable than open application distribution: a cohesive platform. This advantage may diminish in the future, but when launching a new platform it is incredibly important. Software developers will be hesitant to invest significant money developing applications if they are not sure what hardware, and by extension how many users will be able to run them. Android is starting to feel the effects of varying versions of the OS spread across a myriad of hardware configurations. Apple, meanwhile, has shown with the iPhone that it can drive a platform forward while minimizing the expense of dealing with device incompatibility.

####What Happens Now

I won’t bother with a prediction about the iPad’s success or failure because they’re a dime a dozen in the wake of its launch. This post isn’t about whether Apple will tumble from its current summit or climb the next peak. This is about understanding why the iPad is more than just another tablet.

For the iPad to succeed, it doesn’t need to be a home run now, it simply needs to stick around and gain a modest number of users who are willing to pay for apps. If that happens, in 5 years time we’ll start to see a healthy ecosystem of applications that begin to turn the iPad into a viable general computer replacement. And in 10 years time we’ll see a new generation of users that have adopted iPads, or whatever Android- or WebOS-based tablets are around at that point, as their main computer. We’ll see existing expert users spending a large portion of their time doing work on tablets.

Of course, even then most of the computing landscape will still revolve around the traditional computers that are deeply entrenched today. But it will also be clear that they are part of a waning era. In 20 years’ time they will have relinquished the spotlight to take the place of the mainframes of yore: running back end services and thousands of custom business applications for years to come, while people use touchscreen devices for their everyday online lives.

And at that point, we’ll look back and realize that this drastic shift from Old World to New World computing, as Steven Frank terms it, began with something that at the time seemed like a boringly predictable, some would even say say lacking, evolution of an iPhone.