Apple UI-land In Bad Decline?
There has been a lot of talk in the Mac community lately about a
perceived decline in Apple’s user interface standards. John Gruber has
Safari over at Daring Fireball, while one of Safari’s developers,
suffered the consequences of soliciting UI feedback via his own weblog.
I usually try to steer clear of such discussions, because, for me, they only bring back unpleasant memories of joyless usability “gurus” like Jakob Nielsen (not to mention certain ex-Apple employees who simply can’t abide any departure from the classic Mac OS). I’m going to add a few comments to this particular discussion, however— both because I think in this case the nay-sayers have some valid points, and because I would like to offer some dissenting food for thought.
Let’s start by stating the complaint simply. It seems clear from the
applications Apple has released in the last few years that a certain amount of, shall we say, experimentation has been encouraged in the UI department. Rather than adhering to a standard set of interface widgets—the same NSTextFields, NSToolbars, and NSButtons available to all Mac developers—Apple has seen fit to concoct a variety of novel UI elements for each new iApp. To critics, this is sacrilege since it flies in the face of one of the cherished cornerstones of Mac usability: consistency. If developers always use the same widgets and adhere to a set of well-defined rules in designing their interfaces, people, it is reasoned, will be better able to understand new applications and become less initimated by their computers.
What if I was to suggest, however, that consistency is no longer as important a value in UI design as it was in 1984? What if I was to propose, in fact, that, within reason, the evolution of new GUI widgets is not only proper, it is essential (to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove)? And what if I was to tell you that one of today’s smartest interface thinkers agrees with me?
No, I’m not referring to the aforementioned Nielsen or Tognazzini, or even that celebrated information visualizer Edward Tufte. Rather, I’m speaking of Steven Johnson, whose blindingly brilliant book Interface Culture provides an insightful, 21st century alternative to the crusty “Don’t Make Me Think” school of interface thought.
Johnson recently published an excellent opinion piece on (of all places) Slate, in which he argues that Microsoft and Apple are moving in two completely different directions with their interface design. While Microsoft, ironically, is now chasing the holy grail of complete consistency with their “Longhorn” project—one interface to access all of your email, photos, music and video—Apple has adopted what Johnson calls a “Swiss Army knife” approach, in recognition of the fact that different types of media call for different organizational and navigational metaphors. Thus the profusion of new widgets in the iApps.
This is not to deny, of course, that some of Apple’s recent UI designs have been ill-considered. The combination text field/status bar in Safari stands out as a particularly problematic example, and I couldn’t agree more with John Gruber’s criticism of the grayed-out menu items used as headings. Though it never bothered me particularly, I can also recall a number of friends and relatives who have been confused by the “airlock” style “Burn” button in iTunes. All of these things should be fixed, but not merely because they are inconsistent with the canonical OS X widget set—they should be fixed because they either fail to serve their intended purpose or are unnecessarily obscure.
The desktop metaphor has informed the way people have used computers
for almost 20 years now, and I think it’s safe to say that they have it down pat. While users of the Macintosh in 1984 may have prized it for its consistency when compared with older command line apps, users of the Macintosh in 2003 are not likely to be quite so concerned. What’s more, users of Macintosh 2003 (a.k.a. the “digital hub”) are certain to have far more varied uses for their machines than their 1984 counterparts—uses which demand more sophisticated interfaces than the traditional toolkit provides. Obviously there are limits to how far Apple should go: I’m not arguing for complete UI anarchy here. I’m just proposing that Apple is not necessarily out of line when they invent a component like Matt’s “NSSchizophrenicTextField” to solve a problem unique to a certain application. Consistency is valuable, but only as long as it doesn’t stifle innovation.