Cult of the Tongue Interface
Apple Computer Inc pioneered the modern computer interface. It took the ideas originally germinated at Xerox PARC and ran with them, and in doing so changed how we interact with machines. The original Finder was a marvel. The typefaces were a fantastic (something MSFT Windows still fails at). The mouse was elegant, and the designers understood UI design, including that every mouse action should have an equivalent keyboard action. The Mac was the perfect interface for blind people to use, even.
No more. Apple has gone astray. Fast, capable graphics have made it easy to create lifelike and better-than-lifelike imagery. Material sciences and computer advancement have made it easy to make the hardware look and behave almost any way one can imagine.
When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he declared a new fashion of the exterior of computers: Beige was boring, and Black was cool.
Steve brought that ethos back to Apple when Apple acquired NeXT, and instead of black, Steve wanted computers we’d “want to lick”. Colors were suddenly vitally important. You could get a rainbow of workstations. Windows are brushed metal or transparent or hopping around.
Apple’s OS X built atop NeXTstep. The two operating systems were similar, but had some major differences in UI design. The consistency and beauty of each operating system disappeared when Apple merged them, and the resulting mongrel lacks almost all of the beauty that each independently had. OS X is quirky and annoying and unpredictable. The several GUI toolkits’ behaviors are inconsistent and confusing.
But, OS X is pretty. At any given moment, as long as you don’t have to do anything, it’s pleasant to look at. Apple’s environment is evidently designed to be passively viewed. The buttons may look like gumdrops or glistening bubbles of water, but you’re not supposed to do anything with them. The depth of Apple’s new design regime ignores your ten fingers and mousing hand, and extends only to what an idiot child might like to do with its tongue.
The iPhone
The object of much lust earlier this year was Apple’s new foray into the telephony market. Apple’s iPhone has the same designers as its operating system, and as such it is crippled in the same ways. Steve Jobs’ overriding UI directive in its construction was “no buttons”.
What the hell?! Buttons are the most natural interface we have to telephonic communication. Every telephone keypad in the western world looks and behaves the same way. There are twelve buttons, four rows of three, with 1 in the upper left and 0 on the bottom center. Because they lack a hook, mobile phones admittedly add “go/call” and “stop/clear/disconnect” buttons. We’ve understood this for years, and we’ve developed a skill that is incredibly useful: Stateless tactile usage.
Even if you’ve never used a particular phone before, you can dial your grandmother’s number in the dark. You can answer the phone without looking at it. You can hang up without using both hands.
None of that is true with the iPhone.
The iPhone’s foremost purpose is to be looked at. Your eyes must be the first instruments to arrive and the last instruments to leave. Your fingers — the instruments that actually get things done, are secondary. One dials by poking at pictures of buttons on a screen, and you get no feedback of what you’re pressing. If you’re driving, you can’t keep your eyes on the road and call your wife to see if you need milk; the UI if the iPhone demands that you give it your visual attention and use two hands to interact with it.
The iPhone has several programs for which its touch interface is acceptable, but for the majority of the time that someone would use it — as a phone — it’s unabashedly awful. The only way that the iPhone could be redeemed is by putting real 12 + 2 buttons on the unused side, and emitting (localized) dialing tones (like DTMF) when we press buttons.
It’s ironic and amazing that an organization that did so much for good user interface design 20 years ago could have failed so miserably these last 5 years. The only thing Apple has been consistent about is their inconsistency. Apple’s obsession with the visual presentation has crippled its sense of usability, and its products now suck.
29 Aug 2007, 13:26 #
