Kontra wrote a great post on the real problems Apple needs to address in their software and operating systems. Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic starts with a statement everyone needs to take to heart:

The current meme of Ive coming on a white horse to rescue geeks in distress from Scott Forstallian skeuomorphism is wishfully hilarious.

Exactly. As Gruber pointed out:

The speculation regarding skeuomorphism as a factor in Forstall’s ouster has gotten out of hand. That’s not what this was about. This is about Forstall’s relationship with the other senior executives at the company. Personalities and politics, not rich Corinthian leather.

Anyway, moving on. Kontra goes on to list some of Apple’s current software issues, and concludes:

In the end, what’s wrong with iOS isn’t the dark linen behind the app icons at the bottom of the screen, but the fact that iOS ought to have much better inter-application management and navigation than users fiddling with tiny icons. I’m fairly sure most Apple users would gladly continue to use what are supposed to be skeuomorphically challenged Calendar or Notebook apps for another thousand years if Apple could only solve the far more vexing software problems of AppleID unification when using iTunes and App Store, or the performance and reliability of the same. And yet these are the twin sides of the same systems design problem: the display layer surfacing or hiding the power within or, increasingly, lack thereof.

Read Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic.

Ben Bleikamp is spot on in his post Skeuomorphism is not the problem:

The problem with all bad design, skeuomorphism included, is taste. It’s fun to make fun of skeuomorphism but when I glance at Dribbble I see a lot of it done tastefully. I also see a lot of beautiful flat design. It’s because a particular strategy or aesthetic isn’t really the problem with bad design, it’s a lack of taste.

Good taste is harder to learn, but it’s what prevents things like iCal from happening. iCal’s design isn’t awful because it’s skeuomorphic, it’s awful because it’s skeuomorphic in a tasteless way. A more subtle texture, a less harsh gradient, and more cues from other OSX apps could make iCal less of a laughingstock.

And while we’re at it, let’s also clear up what skeuomorphism is (and isn’t), courtesy of Sacha Greif.

Dmitri Fadeyev makes an argument in favor of continuous scrolling in eBooks (as opposed to traditional pagination) in The Return of the Scroll:

The scroll interface suits the variable nature of the digital content that it holds, but more so, it gives the user more fine-grained control over the reading experience. It feels more natural to scroll the page on a tablet because it creates the illusion of the physical medium, of a page sliding under your fingers. A scrolling interface also stops unwanted page turns if you happen to accidentally touch the screen. I’ve been trying out the new iBooks and while I think it’s too early to tell which mode is better, so far I really like it.

Even though his argument is solid, I still prefer the page metaphor when I’m reading an eBook, and I’m trying to figure out why. The closest I can get to a reason is the idea of “edges” that Craig Mod talks about in How magazines will be changed forever:

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing.

Scrolling is exhausting — it never ends. There is no sense of accomplishment. I once heard someone refer to infinite scrolling on websites as “a game you can never win.”

In contrast, pages allow us to hang on to some sense of beginning and end. They communicate a solid sense of progress. They serve as signposts to help us figure out where to stop reading until the next time. Where scrolling is an endless blob of text, pagination fits into the idea of memory chunking because it’s a more manageable unit to deal with cognitively.

In short, pagination lets you know that you’re getting somewhere, and not just running on a treadmill. Or maybe I’m just old and need to get with the times…

Update: @jbruwer pointed me to @simuari’s concept of flick scrolling as a possible solution. Video below, but also check out the post for more details.

Update 2: I wrote a quick follow-up to address some feedback on this post.

The Flat Design Era by Allan Grinshtein for the LayerVault Blog made the rounds a week or so ago, but I haven’t had a chance to read it until now. It’s a really good discussion about what they call “honest design”:

Designing honestly means recognizing that things you can do with screens and input devices can’t be done with physical objects — more importantly that we shouldn’t try copying them. It takes too much for granted. Can you imagine your pristine iPhone built into the body of an antique telephone handset? Is that beautiful design? […]

It is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.

Craig Mod’s How magazines will be changed forever ties in really nicely with my previous post on embracing limitations in the digital world:

Like Newsweek, almost all magazines will eventually go purely electronic. […] Still, as I watch this shift, I can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia. Not for the paper, but for the boundaries.

I miss the edges — physical and psychological. I miss the start of reading a print magazine, but mostly, I miss the finish. I miss the satisfaction of putting the bundle down, knowing I have gotten through it all. Nothing left. On to the next thing. […]

One of the qualities most natural to the user experience of print is the sense of potential completion, defined by the physical edges. It is a quality that is wholly unnatural to digital formats. The digital reading experience makes one want to connect and expand outward. Print calls for limit and containment.

(link via @RobertSBoone)

Nick Wingfield has a Windows 8 story in the New York times that provides a pretty good summary of everything we’ve heard on the tech blogs over the past few months. This passage from Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button? stood out for me:

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.

“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.

If your software makes users feel stupid, you’re in big trouble. Quotes like Mr. McCarthy’s is a manifestation of the age-old legacy software dilemma that Microsoft faces with Windows: do you scrap the thing and start over, or evolve what’s already there? Microsoft chose to start over, and we’re about to see if the gamble is going to pay off for them.

My money is on the argument that Joel Spolsky made in April 2000 in Things You Should Never Do, Part I:

When you throw away code1 and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.

Or to bring it closer to design (and users) — as I argued in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience:

The main problem with big redesigns is that, even though objectively the UX might have been improved, users are often left confused about what has happened and are unable to find their way. In most cases, making “steady, relentless, incremental progress” on a website (to borrow a phrase from John Gruber) is much more desirable. With this approach, users are pulled gently into a better experience, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end and forced to sink or swim.

I think we’re going to see a lot of sinking in the coming weeks…

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1. I’m not implying that Microsoft is throwing out ALL THE CODE, but they are pretty adamant that this project is about “reimagining Windows from chips to experience”. ↩

My latest article for Smashing Magazine came out yesterday. The Immersive Web And Design Writing is about the resurgence we’re seeing in longform writing that’s done with much patience and care. I interviewed the publishers of three such examples: Andy McMillan of The Manual, Nick Disabato of Distance, and John Boardley of Codex. After all the editing was done, I came to the following conclusion:

So, maybe what I initially thought was an article about design publications is actually an article about all of us instead. The point is not just that we should have a balanced information diet, but that the real power of that balanced diet lies in the energy it gives us to get started on our own projects. Seek out these nutritious words. You won’t regret it.

I hope you like the article!

Cliff Kuang wrote an interesting article about design at Airbnb called How Airbnb Evolved To Focus On Social Rather Than Searches:

For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational.

Cliff goes further to explain how Airbnb followed the data clues to understand exactly why the heart performed better, and then used those insights to make some very successful design changes. The data is there, we just have to measure, listen, and respond.

(link via @iamFinch)

One of my favorite sites, The Great Discontent, has a great interview with designer Jason Santa Maria:

The default posture of the Internet is that you put work out and hope that someone connects with it, learns from it, and builds upon it. That isn’t unique to the web community, but it’s one of our community’s greatest traits—everyone shares what they do and we all learn from one another.

From the beginning, whenever I was in a position to tutor or mentor someone, I was always up for it. I want to leave a mark in a way that helps other people to be better and if I have knowledge that can do that, I think I have to share it. By doing so, it sets an example for others to do the same. It pays it forward and helps foster a better community.

I’m not generally a fan of interview posts but this site does them really well, and Jason’s story is inspiring.

I spent the past two days running usability tests on websites that sell financial products like life cover, funeral policies, and annuities. The target market is lower-income users who access the Internet at least once a day on a desktop at home or work, or on their phones. They are, for the most part, tech literate, and very used to finding their way around the Internet. I wanted to document some of the more general findings while we’re knee-deep in analysis and everything is still fresh.

What follows is a list of interaction design elements that I believe should never, ever be used on a website. They might seem like small issues, but I’ve seen time and again how small things add up, and eventually end with frustrated users who abandon a site altogether. Also, if you’re tempted to think that your users are different and somehow more sophisticated than the ones we tested, please consider the growing digital usability divide.

So, here it is — an incomplete, top-of-mind list of usability sins your website should never commit, based on data gathered through in-person usability testing:

• Don’t use an asterisk (*) to mark required form fields — especially if there is no explanation of what the asterisk means. Most users do not understand this at all. Instead, state that all fields are required unless indicated otherwise, and then mark optional fields with the word (optional). By the way, Luke agrees with me on this one.
• Don’t open links in new browser tabs. Tabbed browsing is for advanced users. If you open a page in a new tab, most users will get lost, start clicking the back button, and then not understand why they can’t get back to where they started. Remember that they’re not focused on the chrome when they click a link, they’re focused on where they’re clicking. So it’s very easy to miss the fact that a new tab has opened.
• Don’t have an FAQ page. Most users don’t know what FAQ stands for, and besides, it’s bad practice to answer questions outside the context people want to ask them in. Figure out where in the process each question in your FAQ might come up, and provide the answer right there within the flow. Don’t expect people to click to a different page to find the information they need.
• Don’t use PDFs at all (unless you’re explicitly stating that it’s a downloadable research paper or something). Many users have no idea what a PDF is, and can’t even tell when they’ve clicked on one. There’s no reason to have your rates/menus/timetables as a PDF as opposed to standard text. This was a recurring theme, but one user in particular clicked on a PDF, didn’t realize it, and continued interacting with it as if they were still on the website.
• Don’t give table rows highlighting mouse-overs if the rows aren’t clickable. This confuses users. Any mouse-over movement gives users a trigger that they can click on the thing. Don’t think they’ll look at the cursor and distinguish between an arrow and a hand — most don’t look past the hover effect.

This is obviously a fairly random list of UI transgressions, but I feel like we talk about the big issues so often that we tend to skim over the smaller ones that can really add up. If you were observing the usability tests we ran this week, you would have felt the same way I did when you saw person after person struggling with the most standard of UI conventions. Let’s just not do these things, for the love of the web and everyone who uses it.