PlexNex

eTufte's iPhone Critique

Edward Tufte's short video on the iPhone will help you understand why the iPhone is such an overwhelming success.

(This is an iPhone hacked with Jailbreak, so some of the apps you see are 3rd-party ones. Tufte says, "Don't try this at home.")

"In a world of clunky cell phone interfaces, the elegant iPhone opens with a high-resolution image provided by the viewer."

"No computer administrative debris, at all."

"Content is the interface, information is the interface, not computer administrative debris."

Some of the iPhone apps are cartoony, relying on low Excel- and Powerpoint-resolutions. It would be better to use the iPhones excellent screen resolution (163 dpi) to show finer-grained information that is useful ... 

"To clarify, add detail."

"Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information; they are failures of design."

iPhone is a showcase for information-design thoughtfulness. It is therefore surprising to me why the people continue to seem reluctant to champion the product's successes. I conclude that good information architecture is not all that obvious to us.

"If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information. Instead, fix the design. And that is exactly what the iPhone platform has done."

Tufte places it in perspective with his own form of elegant clarity about what information is and what it is not.

Nokia's Design Genes

Nokia's chief designer, Alistair Curtis, talked with BusinessWeek (back in mid-2006) about the company's design DNA ... about car doors ...

If we took all the engineers into a room and turned all the lights off, and I opened up a Zippo lighter, everybody in that room would know I opened a Zippo lighter. You want it to be an iconic sound.

... and other things related to experience.

I never noticed before that the bottom of the Nokia phones I have owned, like the 1100 above, are deliberately shaped with a Mona Lisa smile. Knowing that makes me consciously happy -- and probably sub-consciously too.

What is the process of designing a phone?

Your driver is to look at the users and try to get insights into how they work and what they want from work. People can't articulate it sometimes. By observing people you see the way that they interact, the way they do things, the strange rituals they have.

How do you make a form factor that's a meaningful part of the experience and not just for the fun of doing a weird form factor? Form factor should be driven by true benefit and need.

How do you stay on top of style trends?

We start off by looking three years out at weak trends. They're not weak as in 'bad' ... They're trends we see by working with textile designers, fashion designers, paint specialists, material specialists.