Here's to the crazy ones

Bruce Tognazzini, founder of the Apple Human Interface Group and 14-year Apple veteran (1978-1992), is best known as the man behind the publication of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. In 1992, he published a book of his own: Tog on Interface. Most of the examples in the book were taken from his work at Apple. Here's an excerpt from pages 156-157:

Natural objects have different perceivable characteristics, among which people can easily discriminate. Take the bristlecone pine. The oldest living thing on earth, it has been formed and shaped by the wind and scarred by thousands of years of existence. The youngest school kids look at it and know there must be a lot of wind around there. They know the pine may be even older than their father. They also know, to a certainty, that it is a tree. Kristee Kreitman Rosendahl, responsible for not only the graphic design of HyperCard, but also much of its spirit, created a collection of Home icons that shipped with the product. No one has ever shown confusion at seeing various little houses on various cards. Never once has someone turned around and said, "Gee, this little house has three windows and seems to be a Cape Cod. Will that take me to a different Home card than that two-story bunk house back in the other section?" People are designed to handle multiplexed meanings gracefully, without conscious thought. In System 7, we multiplexed the meaning of system extensions, by developing a characteristic "generic" extension look, to which developers can add their own unique look for their specific product. As the "bandwidth" of the interface increases, these kinds of multiplexings will become more and more practical.

This is Tog, godfather of the old-school Apple Human Interface Guidelines, stating emphatically that interface elements do not have to look exactly the same in order for their function to be discerned. In fact, in the final sentence, Tog predicts that increased computing power will lead to more diverse representations. The increased "bandwidth" of user interfaces that Tog wrote about almost 20 years ago has now come to pass, and then some.

Examples of "multiplexed meanings" in Mac OS X are not hard to find. Look at the Dock, which has changed appearance several times during the history of Mac OS X while still remaining immediately identifiable. And, as discussed earlier, nearly every standard GUI control has changed its appearance in Lion. As Tog notes, people are excellent at discarding unimportant details and focusing on the most salient aspects of an item's appearance.

Now, keeping all this in mind, I invite you to gaze upon this screenshot of the version of iCal that ships with Lion.





When this change was first revealed in the second developer preview of Lion, there was much gnashing of teeth. But ask yourself, is the function of every control in the toolbar clear? Or rather, is it any less clear than it would be if iCal used the standard Mac OS X toolbar appearance?

The immediate, visceral negative reaction to the rich Corinthian leather appearance had little to do with usability. What it came down to—what first impressions like these always seem to come down to—is whether or not you think it's ugly. People will take "really cool-looking but slightly harder to use" over "usable but ugly" any day.

But there's something much more important than the change in appearance going on here. Lion's iCal doesn't look different in an arbitrary way; it's been changed with purpose. After the initial stitched-leather shock wore off, Apple watchers everywhere leapt on the new iCal's deeper sin: its skeuomorphic design. From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines. An alternative definition is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material."

Apple has been down this road before, most notably with the QuickTime 4.0 player application which included bright ideas like a "dial" control for adjusting the volume. Dials work great in the real, physical world, and are certainly familiar to most people. But a dial control in the context of a 2D mouse-driven GUI is incongruous and awkward at best, and completely incomprehensible at worst.

The brushed metal appearance of the QuickTime player would later inspire an officially supported Mac OS X window appearance starting in version 10.2, only to be dropped completely five years later in 10.5's grand interface unification. Now, three years after that, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction again—and hard.

In the case of iCal, Apple has aped the appearance of an analogous physical object (a tear-off paper calendar) but retained the behavior of standard Mac OS X controls. This avoids the problems of the QuickTime 4.0 player's dial control, but it's far from a clean win.

The trouble is, the new iCal looks so much like a familiar physical object that it's easy to start expecting it to behave like one as well. For example, iCal tries very hard to sell the tear-off paper calendar illusion, with the stitched binding, the tiny remains of already-removed sheets, and even a page curl animation when advancing through the months. But can you grab the corner of a page with your mouse and tear it off? Nope, you have to use the arrow buttons or a keyboard command, just like in the previous version of iCal. Can you scribble in the margins? Can you cross off days with a pen? Can you riffle through the pages? No, no, and no.

At the same time, iCal is still constrained by some of the limitations of its physical counterpart. A paper calendar must choose a single way to break up the days in the year. Usually, each page contains a month, but there's no reason for a virtual calendar to be limited in the same way. When dealing with events that span months, it's much more convenient to view time as a continuous stream of weeks or days. This is especially true on large desktop monitors, where zooming the iCal window to full screen doesn't show any more days but just makes the days in the current month larger.

The new version of Address Book in Lion is an even more egregious example.

Address Book goes so far in the direction of imitating a physical analog that it starts to impair the identification of standard controls. The window widgets, for example, are so integrated into the design that they're easy to overlook. And as in iCal, the amazing detail of the appearance implies functionality that doesn't exist. Pages can't be turned by dragging, and even if they could, the number of pages on either side of the spine never changes. The window can't be closed like a book, either. That red bookmark can't be pulled up or down or removed. (Clicking it actually turns the page backwards to reveal the list of groups. Did you guess that?) The three-pane view (groups ? people ? detail) is gone, presumably because a book can't show three pages at once. Within each paper "page" sits, essentially, an excerpt from the user interface of the previous version of Address Book. It's a mixed metaphor that sends mixed signals.

These newly redesigned Mac OS X applications are clearly inspired by their iOS counterparts, which bear similar graphical flourishes and skeuomorphic design elements. (Address Book in particular is a dead ringer for the Contacts app on the iPad.) In iOS, the inability to turn pages with the flick of a finger or yank out that tantalizing red bookmark is even more frustrating. In both environments, when the behaviors seemingly promised by the graphical design aren't delivered, all this artwork that was so clearly labored over fades into the background. The application trains us to ignore it. What was once, at best, a momentary amusement is reduced to visual noise.

In 2011, we're far past the point where computer interfaces need to reference their forebearers in the physical world in order to be understandable (though it's possible Apple thinks the familiarity of such designs is still an effective way to reduce intimidation, especially for novice users). At the same time, hardware and software have advanced to the point where there's now ample "bandwidth" (to use Tog's term) to support visual and functional nuances beyond the bare necessities.

Interface designers are faced with the challenge of how best to use the glut of resources now at their disposal. As Lion's iCal and Address Book applications demonstrate, an alternate description of this situation might be "enough rope to hang yourself."