Macopinion

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Too Many Icons

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Recently I saw a video of the upcoming Blackberry 9000. You know, the one that looks like an iPhone? This is apparently RIM's answer to Apple's innovation -- a cheap clone that's Zune-worthy in its blatant imitation.

Obviously the thing's hopelessly useless and nothing like an iPhone in functionality, but RIM's just hoping a few people will buy one by accident and that by at least having their own "similar" phone they can assuage the fears of their stockholders that they are trying to compete.

But there was one thing about the device that struck me as fascinating and is a telling example of the design mistakes companies make. Steve Jobs once famously said: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

On some levels, this seems painfully obvious -- and yet companies consistently ignore it. What's hilarious is the way companies can't tell that is what Apple is doing and when they copy Apple, they only copy the visual aspects and forget the the "how it works" part.

For examples, just look at colors. Apple started a trend of colorful computers and electronic devices: now everyone has to offer media players and laptops and digital cameras and phones and even TVs in a variety of colors. But why did Apple add colors? Was it just eye candy and a marketing gimmick?

Steve Jobs' genius was not coming up with the idea of colorful computers, but the realization that computers were becoming so mainstream and such a fundamental part of our lives that they needed to look good and fit in with the decor of our homes and our personalities. In other words, the better a computer (or device) works, the more important and integrated into your life it becomes, and the more value aesthetics have.

Those copycats don't realize this. They throw on color as though it will make up for inadequate functionality. As in "No one is using our digital cameras. Maybe if we had purple and blue ones people would buy them?"

Nowhere is the lack of design more obvious than with cellular phones, the market Apple is in the process of revolutionizing with its iPhone. For a decade the cell phone industry has been throwing in features and creating sleek and colorful shells for their crappy internals and the natural result is that people hate their cell phones. They are overly complicated, don't work half the time, and impossible to use. What good are all those fancy features if it's cumbersome to use them?

Traditional cell phones have Byzantine textual menu systems: everything is several layers deep, buried under similar-sounding menu names. Is it any surprise that people use their phones for calling and nothing else?

The so-called "smart" phones are just as bad or worse: while their interfaces are more elaborate, they add more features, which just compounds the problem. Nowhere is this more obvious than this telling screenshot of the new Blackberry 9000 interface:

Yes folks, this is what the folks at RIM apparently think is a good interface: a giant collection of similar-looking icons from which too choose various options.

Pray tell me: how is this any different from a dozen or two text menu options? Actually, it's worse: though it looks prettier, it's far more open to ambiguity and confusion.

This is what people come up with to compete with Apple: they see Apple's brilliantly designed interfaces and completely ignore actual functionality that make those interfaces so compelling and focus on the pretty pictures and visual aspects instead.

Granted, Apple's not perfect: they make mistakes and miss the mark on occasion, but they generally get the core functionality right. The iPhone hits so many home runs that the occasional foul ball is hardly noticeable. The key is that Apple knows how to focus on the truly important things.

For example, how many other companies on the planet would have shipped the iPhone without support for copy and paste?

The answer is none. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Every other company on the planet would assumed that such functionality was critical. I myself would have thought it was if you'd asked me. I mean, on a computer I use copy and paste constantly. It's vital.

But copy and paste is not an easy problem to solve given a device like the iPhone. Unless you want to involve a stylus or incorporate some really awkward fingering or special text selection "modes," it's a challenging problem to solve. I'm confident Apple will solve it, too. But the problem needs experience and Apple was smart to not include it in iPhone 1.0. And via some clever software that anticipates your needs, you hardly miss copy and paste on the iPhone.

Other companies, however, would have forced the feature. They would have wrangled some sort of kludge into the thing, awkward as all get-out, but they would have had the feature on their checklist. It would have complicated the interface and complicated software development and on one would have actually used the feature anyway!

(Quite possibly the company would have ruined a terrific and obvious gesture like "pinching" for zooming by making touching in two places at once a text selection mechanism, thereby making zooming more complicated by requiring a more difficult gesture for it.)

My point is that Apple knows when to stop. Those other companies keep throwing in features on top of features and then the interface is overwhelmed and you just end up with a million menu items (or pretty icons).

With competition like this, methinks the iPhone's future is extremely bright.

macopinion@designwrite.com