Sit up straight, I’m about to explain the secret sauce behind exceptional products.
There is a difference between products that perform poorly and products that perform well that is hard to put your finger on. Designers have been struggling to tell you about it for years. But it turns out it’s not the answer that is the problem, it’s the question.
The question is: Is it enjoyable? It’s the difference between functional and great.
Google services have been a long time coming for iOS users. While most people’s immediate response to that is to say “of course, they have android” I think it’s weird for google to neglect 400 million customers of their services just because they want to promote another mobile platform. Android already has a majority market share after all.
The reason touch works is often cited, it’s because it’s “intuitive”. But there is little talk about what makes touch devices more intuitive. We’re supposed to just believe that the finger is better. But discussing with my partner Sara this morning, I think I’ve understood why.
Most journalists now believe Apple will be releasing a TV this year. Speculating over Apple’s plans is close to impossible, but if we look closely at what Apple have been releasing over the last few years I think we can predict what an Apple iTV would be like. There are a lot of problems. All of which would be solved by taking the problems out of the TV set and instead making it a much more connected device.
Meet Clear, the todolist manager that does everything right.
Clear for iPhone from Realmac Software on Vimeo.
Clear has no interface. It just uses swipes pinches and touches in a list the same as you would on an image. While there is no such thing as intuitive, this is as close as I’ve ever seen.
But the best part about clear is it’s use of color and sounds.
Colors are used in the lists to show priority. The more saturated the color, the more important the task. Now the tasks are already in a list, so one could argue that adding colors to it is redundant. But this is not true. Any human scanning a list will see each item as equally important. Most of us tend to try and put the most important thing at the top of the list but every time we look at the list we still browse more than one item.
Making the list colored gives a subtle hint that you don’t need to look at other tasks. This is the one.
It also gives the user a reason to order the list properly. While the app never tell the user they have to, just creating a rule that says the top is higher priority will make users want to use the rule. Think of it like a hidden keyboard shortcut. Once you learn it, if it’s a valuable shortcut, you stick with it.
Audio feedback has been used to great effect in games for decades. Which is why I’ve always found it odd that it’s had such little attention in software tool design. Until now.
Clear has a sound effect for every function.
New item? Pop.
Finished item? Ping!
Delete item? Swoosh
But I really mean sound effect. These aren’t just midi notes annoyingly stacked to make an awful racket. These are effects that sound great by themselves and stack neatly. What do I mean by stack? If you complete several tasks in a row, you don’t just get an annoying amount of pings. You’d hate that. Instead you get a rising scale of pings that together seem to form a rising crescendo. Which incidentally is exactly like the normal sound design to gaining point in video games (remember picking up coins in Mario?)
UPDATE:
The awesome sound design was done by Josh Mobley.
The reason the design of Clear is so impressive is that, while the UI reinforces the users positive emotions of using a todo list, it get’s out of the way to let the users focus on thinking about tasks.
There’s simply nothing else to think about. And you won’t get those soothing sounds of completion if you don’t complete some tasks.
Clear is the best interface for getting things done I’ve seen so far. On any platform. It’s also responsive like few apps on iOS.
It does gamification right by letting the user learn it’s features intuitively and reinforcing the actual use of the product instead of showering them in useless badges.
Sadly however, it also really doesn’t have a use. At least not for a todo-list power user such as myself. Enter a 100 tasks into Clear and you’ll be looking at an infinite list with no overview. There’s no search, there are no smart lists. But these features would not improve the product. In fact, I think including more features could destroy the product.
If you use lists often but don’t have 1000 tasks in them. This app will make you smile on your way.
If you use really long lists, this app will be nice to play with but not useable.
Should you buy it? YES. If only to support good design.
As usual, the Verge has the best video first look:
HTML5 is a name we give the next level of web technology, it’s just simpler to remember. All the web is built using HTML, CSS and Javascript and with HTML5 new and better ways of using these languages are being made available everywhere.
With the launch of their breakthrough device they didn’t intend for developers to be making Apps. Apple instead believed that developers would make web apps using HTML5 and save the web app as an icon of their phone. Surprisingly open by Apple’s standards the strategy soon changed to native apps because web apps simply didn’t feel quick enough.
However, as HTML5 becomes a standard on PCs everywhere web apps are approaching the same sophistication as native applications. The hardest step now is for developers to take the plunge and create these great new interfaces and not get stuck in the old way of thinking and just pushing out another blog.
One of my favorite designers, Dustin Curtis, is leading the way with this new UI element on his site; the Kudos button.
It looks great. It’s fun to use and it’s a really simple way to add some life to a site. It doesn’t work on touch interfaces for obvious reasons. Sadly Dustin hasn’t made the code available yet, but most programmers could probably copy the concept. It’s that easy. We just have to make sure we starting thinking less about static web and more about user interaction.
Whenever likeminded creative people try to innovate trends emerge. Ideas give birth to ideas. As ideas keep combining in the heads of creative people everywhere some ideas become more sticky than others. I’ll document some of the trends in user experience design I predict will become the norm in 2012. You can find my first post on the subject here.
Another example from a 2011 app is the amazing full screen representation in Wren.
When I first saw Wren I was amazed. It was focused and minimalist. Therefore I was shocked to see the full-screen button in the top right corner of the app, “Wouldn’t that completely wreck the experience” was my knee-jerk reaction. Then I tried it and another trend was obvious, apps that scale without bloating their feature sets, or White space apps.
The mobile revolution has some interaction and UI designers scratching their heads or pulling their hair trying to fit all the usual information. The current computing paradigm has relied on massive amounts of text and information tags for a long long time. Even programs that have really tried to rid themselves of rarely used functions or unnecessary amounts of help information have sometimes been stuck in contextual help hell due to the modus operandi of desktop interface design.
No more. Mobile has rid us of all these things. And some designers are provocative enough to realize that less really is more and simply scale their apps without adding more information or complexity.
Only time will tell. But the dominance of mobile design today tells us a lot about what people like. I think it is less about the iPhone being a must-have product and a lot more about really smart and beautiful apps that are just complex piles of engineering on other platforms.
Simple is better. And using white space to focus the users attention on a sparingly chosen set of functions beautifully designed makes this clear. I believe these minimal products will in the future continue to trump the feature behemoths of yesteryear.
Due for iPad
iTunes is long overdue an overhaul. The old program has become so bogged down with features one can’t help but wonder when Apple will update it. They might follow their mobile strategy and split into several parts or go for the completely cloud based streaming version a la Spotify.
And they might announce it this Monday at WWDC.
This is why I thought I’d redesign it while it is still a huge challenge.
My design is based on a rethinking of what iTunes manages, namely media. But lot’s of different forms of media. In this design of iTunes every media item is considered to be a media bit no matter if it’s a song, an album, an app or a book.
As you can see this design is radically different from the current version of iTunes. I’ve followed Apples recent reductionist standard in design and tried to eliminate everything unnecessary while retaining the purpose of the program.
There are three main areas of interest in this design:
The start screen shows you the available devices as well as your favorite and most recently used media bits, this way the user instantly has an overview of where they left off last time.
I’ve considered devices to be anything that has media in it. From left to right:
A lot of people use playlists as a way to traverse their media libraries. I have actively made this harder as playlists are a lot more harder to search through as media libraries grow. Instead I’ve focused on search and filtering to allow easy browsing of the library. I have however thought this to be a perfect place for Apples famous horizontal scrollbars should the number of devices increase.
Filters are used to group media bits making it easier to find what you’re looking for in a large library, seach is however crucial since most people tend to grow really large media libraries. Click a filter and all media is displayed as stacks or bits, click one suck stack or bit to see it’s contents and either filter further or search the stack.
The currently playing queue acts as both a queue for media and as the main media player. It’s a simple principle to learn and as all devices work in the same way the user needs never get confused or irritated at features appearing and disappearing depending on context.
Media bits can be freely moved between devices, making sharing and syncing simple and easy to understand.
Each media bit has detailed information available only if the user wants so know more.
The player controls have been moved aside leaving only the large play and pause button on the icon for the currently playing list/device.
I’d love to get some more work done on this project in the future but I think Apple might beat me to it. And I’m excited by the thought of comparing my work with that of Jonathan Ive’s team!
There are a few weak points in this design so far, namely the lack of the iTunes store and the lack of a way to arrange Apps on devices. While I’ve thought about solutions for these and believe that this design can accomodate them I haven’t had the time to sketch it out yet.
Hope you like my work, and if you’re reading this Mr Jobs; yes, I’d love to come work for you. 
When the iPhone opened the app store to third party developers and basically anyone who could afford the $99 SDK we we’re all amazed at the enormous success. Thousands upon thousands of great apps have been launched transforming the mobile marketplace forever as it can now compete with laptops on the go.
So, I ask, why the hell can’t I run my apps on my mac?!
I know that the iPhone OS, while based on OS X technology, isn’t the same operating system. But as a consumer I don’t care. Sure, most apps are just boiled down versions of larger applications for Mac or the web. But some of them are not, games especially are available only on the iPhone in that form.
Well I want to use some of them on my Mac!
And it shouldn’t be that hard, the SDK for developing apps can already emulate apps directly in OS X.
But I want to run them from iTunes or, better yet, directly from my dock. I already own them and they’re already stored on my Mac from constant syncing.
Please Apple, let me run my Apps on my Mac as well.
If you agree with this, retweet as far as you can!