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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. "
Kudos to Edward Tufte for providing good detailed constructive criticism on the iPhone, including specific examples of improvements. I hope that Apple will pay attention to the FREE ADVICE that Tufte is giving and incorporate it into their next iPhone firmware update. I am sure that the UI advice that Apple pays for is likely not as good.
Personally as a product developer myself, I would welcome such good detailed constructive criticism for free from a UI guru such as Tufte. Remember that there are all innovation is based on prior innovation, so it is good to have analysis done on existing products in order to improve on future versions.
BTW, on a side note, I hope that someone at Slashdot deletes the offences racist postings above.
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.
If you look at his examples, his primary argument is that you can cram more information on the screen because of the iPhone's high resolution. I can't agree with him that this is a good idea.
Part of the reason that people BUY the iPhone is that it's simple and stylish, rather than the existing information heavy devices like Pocket PC phones. In particular, look at his example about the Weather- Apple's widget is small and sleek. It shows you the vital information, and it does it in strong fonts and bold styling. It's clear, and it's easy.
He squishes all of that information into a tiny corner, so that he can add a large repeating satellite view- Sure it's useful in some cases, and it's certainly a neat demonstration of the iPhone's abilities, but it fails when it comes to the task of quickly giving me the important information.
It makes me squint to see the tiny version of the temperature, and shows off, rather than helping.
Sometimes developers fall into the problem of working so often because they can, not wondering if they should.
Note- He dismisses this argument, saying that information density isn't the problem, it's laying it out clearly. I agree with him in general,in that complex information can often be presented simply, but in most of his cases, increasing the density would diminish it's usefulness.
Colin Davis
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?
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.
Besides, it's always easier to critique someone else's work than create something novel yourself.
I'd call both sparklines and the data-ink ratio pretty good and novel innovations.
You can't credit the man with "creating" information design as a discipline, but he's done a great deal to evangelize it, and you certainly have to give him plenty of credit for its currently elevated profile.
Tufte is not just some crank. Intelligent, useful, compelling information display is what he's all about. You don't have to agree with him, but his thoughts are usually worth weighing.