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Edward Tufte Weighs In on Apple's iPhone
An anonymous reader writes "Via Daring Fireball, a post from design guru Edward Tufte's site discusses his views on the interface used by the Apple iPhone. The post includes a video presentation by Tufte on the subject of video resolution on the phone. His argument is primarily that while the iPhone does a lot of things very well, Apple hasn't quite realized the platform's full potential by making screen real estate all it could be. "
Sure, it's easy to say, with 20/20 hindsight, would could be better or different, but unless he's privy to all the design trade-offs which were invariably made, then I'd say the product is probably as good as it could have been, given the various pressures. Besides, it's always easier to critique someone else's work than create something novel yourself.
Chinese saying -- step too far, fall on face. A little more familiar is the phrase "perfect is the enemy of good". Attempting to release a 1.0 product that has everything absolutely perfect and without compromise is the surest way to never ship.
Perhaps iPhone2 will address some of these issues?
...where the name of the game is cramming as much information as possible into a small amount of space. Paper's dominant limiting factor was space. He says the iPhone's stocks widget could fit more information on-screen than it does. He criticizes the web browser for not using transparent buttons that would let the user see information on the web page through them.
But with dynamic displays, the game is all about minimizing the amount of retrieval time, not space. Users can tell the computer to pull up a graph for a new stock, or scroll the page downward with their finger to view the info under the buttons, or completely off-screen, with minimal effort. The biggest limiting factor is interaction. Let's keep the buttons visible, because they enable far more information than they hide.
If we sacrificed usability for screen real-estate, we'd end up with marginless documents and 4-pixel icons, which incidentally would look like windows mobile.
I enjoy Tufte's I.D. lectures quite a bit, I went to one last year and it was very informative.
I liked the video as well, with a couple of exceptions:
1) In the video, Tufte has to bust out his Sparklines (the infographics that look like lightning bolts that he mentions in the section on stocks.) He claims these have thousands of pieces of information in them but the reality is that they're merely zig-zags. As the inventor of the sparkline, Tufte thinks they're the be-all and end-all of I.D.
2) I found it hilarious when Tufte showed how he would redesign the Weather program to show more information. He said something on the order of, the only bad information design is that which leaves out important information. Sorry, holmes, I don't need to see a time lapse of cloud patterns. The Apple weather design is elegant and succinct, yours is crowded, ugly and excessive.
How is it exactly that, in the same page where he tells us "Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.", he puts most of his information in a fscking video?
Yah, and he's not the only one who's come up with a neat idea that isn't really as widely applicable as he thinks. He's also really not understanding the capabilities of interactive interfaces... rather than throwing all the information on one page, you drill down from the summary into detail.
For example on the stock market page, drag stocks over each other to compare them, dragging a stock all the way to the top of the page would give you more information on that stock and let you drag the screen left or right to get other stocks, flip it sideways to get the graphs, and drag left and right to compare with other graphs.
On the weather page, use the same approach, and flip sideways to get the weather map, drag up and down to see different maps.
A video screen isn't a static device, and you don't need to cram data into a single static view. Data clutter is as bad as administrative clutter.
Your assumption that the time taken to select, load, and display new information is minimal not only is false, but laughably so in the case of anything operating over a cellular network.
When you are trying to browse a web page on a screen that is an order of magnitude smaller than what the author expected, it is absurd for a full 10% of that precious space to be permanently devoted to a mere 4 buttons, only one of which sees frequent use. In the case of the stocks, once the user has selected what they want to know about (be it a single stock or a set of stocks) it makes sense to display as much information as possible about them. After all, the user has already asked for the information. The only reason to leave relevant information out is if it won't fit without sacrificing the readability of the report. Tufte has never failed to understand that point, and he certainly didn't leave it out of TFA.
You are right that paper's primary limitation is space, and that this is not the case with digital displays. This is not because the digital displays are less limited in space (they never are, and in this case, the computer display is downright tiny). The reason is that the resolution of digital displays is so much lower than that of paper that the overall size doesn't really matter anymore.
The whole point of the IPhone is to be dead simple with out clutter.
now people want to clutter it up.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
I am only 30 but I had trouble reading the text in the weather page he mocked-up. Maybe it was the compression in the video, but I much preferred the larger text.
Tuftes mantra: To clarify, add detail. is exactly, what makes most interfaces f... up. Both his new weather and stock information examples are what one will probably see on a Zune clone soon. Tasteless clutter. The apple mantra is: To clarify, hide detail Thats what I like at the interface. I did not have the iphone interface, it is almost obvious.
Although to be fair, if your stock market widget is going to start pulling down 14,000 datapoints and assembling them into a graph, or your weather widget is going to start displaying complex radar images, then it's quite likely that retrieval times are going to be substantively worse. The key word that you're ignoring is "relevant". I doubt many people will find all 14,000 datapoints of relevance when looking up a stock price on their iPhone. They're probably only interested in a general sense of the trend. Kind of like asking how old someone is and getting a reply accurate to the number of days, it's not clear that more information is always more clarity, despite what Mr Tufte says -- at least for me.
Edward Tufte has done a great deal of novel and ground-breaking work, and has done a great deal to share his insights w/ others in the field, starting w/ his seminal _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_.
For my part, ``good enough, isn't'', and I far prefer the Zen parable of the archers --- three archers compete for a prize, all strike the mark, a fish, and are then asked ``At what were you aiming?''
The first answers, ``The fish.'' as does the second, but the third?
``The center of the fish's eye.''
You can't be any better than you try to be and I'd much rather wait for the efforts of a person striving for perfection than accept those of someone willing to be mediocre.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.