Apple iOS7
The best overall comments related to iOS7 where made my someone who actually knew and understood WTF he was talking about. So many people have chimmed in on this subject that is has become rediculous. David Cole, product designer at Quora actually understands what Apple is trying to do here…
★ Is the new Apple iOS 7 look an improvement?
I have a different perspective than most of the other answerers here. I don’t think the interesting components of iOS 7 are found in the icons or the color or the type — those are relatively self-contained and thus easy to change and evolve. I think the most interesting changes, and the best changes, run much deeper than that, and yet they’re intrinsically linked to the “look” of it.
The big, obvious change to the look in iOS 7 is the flatness. This change is being characterized as a stripping away of dimensionality. I’ll propose something else is going on here: the move to flat screens actually affords a ramp up in dimensionality. When an individual screen gets flattened together, you can treat it as a single object that you can then manipulate and relate to other screens. This concept is at the heart of the biggest changes to the iOS 7 interaction paradigms.
Multitasking
This screen-as-object paradigm is easiest to understand in the multitasking interface, where each application is laid out in a row. At first glance this looks like the old app-switcher UI with the added bonus of a preview of each app. But notice that when one app triggers the opening of another app, the new app now actually slides in from the left. If you need to switch back, double tapping home zooms back out to show the original app to the right. This creates a new consistency of interaction that was not there previously. Switching apps is now a much more coherent experience that can take advantage of your spatial memory. This mode also defaults to sliding over to the previous app, making the most common use case (switching back to the previous app) a much faster, easier interaction.
Back Gesture
There’s a new gesture in this release, which is pulling a screen to the right in order to move back. The whole screen slides over and reveals the previous screen behind it. This provides, again, a spatial context and, again, it’s only possible if you can treat screens as discrete objects.
One thing “flat” gets you here: performing this gesture causes the back button text to gracefully slide to the right to become the title for the screen. There’s no button style to change, no inconsistency of font sizes to resolve. It just happens, which makes the back button’s relationship to its behavior much more explicit and clear.
Another change I’ve seen criticized is the new lock screen UI, which says “slide to unlock” right next to an up arrow, even though you’re meant to slide the whole screen to the right. The proximity to the up arrow is a small visual error, but the core concept — slide the entire lock screen off to reveal your apps — is much more consistent with these other changes. The old slide-to-unlock switch thingy only made sense within its own context, where this is a much more holistic pattern to apply.
Translucency
The announcement already explained the improvements of using translucency for modal interactions, but I think it’s pretty significant. It’s less about resolving inconsistent linen textures, and more about underscoring the fact that your app is right there waiting for you behind whatever it is you’re doing. One of the biggest triumphs of iOS was the elimination of a complex windowed environment, where normal people frequently lose their sense of place. Over time, there’s been a slow but steady return to that kind of confusion, which was recently very evident in the Chat Heads UI in Facebook Home:
Is this an application or a mode? There’s very little context to help you, and I’ve watched people struggle with this interaction even when it’s contained to just the Facebook iOS app. In iOS 7, the translucent windows that never cover the whole screen are much clearer.
Other Tidbits
A few other random things I’ve noticed and appreciated:
- The focus on spatial relationships is repeatedly underscored, through fun details like the parallax wallpapers to the new tab design for Safari. Safari’s old tabs ran left-to-right which could easily be confused with the new slide-right-to-go-back gesture. Rearranging them vertically avoids overloading the left-right relationships between the screens, while also making it faster to browse. It’s good to see they’re harmonizing the OS-level interaction changes with the in-app interaction patterns.
- Launching an application zooms into its icon, and quitting it zooms back out. Opening a folder zooms into the folder, closing it zooms back out. This, again, represents a huge step up for maintaining consistent spatial relationships. This concept, the ZUI (“Zoomable User Interface”), was actually championed by Jef Raskin, who worked on the original Mac OS GUI so it’s nice to feel echoes of that level of ambition.
- Spotlight no longer gets its own page to the left of the home screen. This is a huge improvement in my mind, as the introduction of that screen broke a very basic promise: the home button should always take you home. Thankfully, this promise has been restored. I think maintaining these simple consistencies actually represents a huge win for the average user.
iOS (and, well, most of Apple’s design work) has always had a fashion element to it. The annual touch-ups that iOS received previously will undoubtedly continue. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about the style of the icons, or the color palette, or anything like that. If they’re bad, they’ll assuredly get fixed over time. Heck, this thing isn’t even out for several more months so it may very well change yet.
The central idea of the look — the flatness of the interfaces — is linked to these deep interaction changes that I’m very confident are improvements.