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Where do you draw the line when it comes to distracting details in UI? Is the level of detail in current Apple products perfect? Should they move towards more
by richcollins 15y ago
Where do you draw the line when it comes to distracting details in UI? Is the level of detail in current Apple products perfect? Should they move towards more skeuomorphic designs or more typographical designs?
- egypturnash 15y agoHonestly I am not a fan of the skeuomorphic stuff - that way lies the hundreds of ugly-ass mp3 player skins that look like some little physical device sitting on your desktop - but the Apple stuff has been relatively inoffensive. The version of iCal that I ditched is the one on the iPad, because it requires me to poke at tiny buttons on the bottom of the screen to go to next/previous month/day/week instead of just doing a nice easy swipe like every other iPad app trains me to do. (Or even like I can do in iCal on my Mac, if I'm interacting via the trackpad instead of my Wacom tablet!) I think it's worth noting that the latest version of iBooks on the iPad has an option to drop the semi-skeuomorphic* borders. It's a thing they tried. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cute borders vanish sometime. I'm also not a fan of PURELY TYPOGRAPHIC ui designs, as those require a TON of whitespace to work. There's a medium to be struck. Usually Apple does pretty well, I think; OSX as it stands now (Lion) is really, really good at quietly conveying information without screaming it. Maybe I just have a different idea of what's pleasingly minimal than the author of the piece at hand. I dunno. * I say semi-skeuomorphic because they don't change depending on how far you are in the book - if it did then it would actually be a pretty damn slick way of subtly delivering the same information as a scrollbar.
- richcollins 15y agoTypographical interfaces work well on mobile unless you're not a fan of navigation hierarchies