What is Apple up to?
If you are a designer, you have probably read the recent much-discussed article How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name, authored by two legendary pioneers of user-centred design and cognitive ergonomics, Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini.
Like most people, I agree with some points the authors make, and disagree with others. Which is boring. They had me when criticising Apple’s recent departure from empirically validated principles of human-computer interaction in their hunt for visual simplicity. And then they kind of lost me again. For example when arguing that category-defining products like the iPhone and iPad, with novel capabilities and unique constraints, should still be adhering rigorously to design principles defined decades ago for completely different contexts of use (desktop computers, with WIMP interfaces). Yes, people’s cognitive capabilities have remained pretty much the same over the last tens of thousands of years, but behaviour and context has changed radically.
From: Gizmodo
It is actually surprising to see Don Norman criticise Apple for such a bias towards the visual aesthetic layer, given he wrote Emotional Design. A great book where he argues that products need to
work on all 3 levels to be successful - the visceral, behavioural, and reflective level. The visceral level is about the initial impact, about the appearance and attractiveness, and is therefore really the level on which consumers are enticed to buy. Are Norman and Tog criticising Apple for wanting to sell their products?
People asked some interesting questions during last Thursday’s IxDA London meetup aimed at discussing this very article. For example, is Apple’s recent degradation in product usability, discoverability, and learnability a symptom of organisational complacency, or is it in fact an intentional strategy?
My take on it is that Apple is brilliant at marketing. It is in fact a marketing-driven organisation, not a design-driven organisation like they would like us to believe. Design is just a tool in the hands of Apple’s marketing, a means to an end. A means to sell more products. Is that design’s original and true purpose anyway?
Apple has identified that a human desire for simplicity has increased significantly over the last decade. We crave it to counterbalance the complexity all around us. So they cleverly optimised the products for visual simplicity. Because this kind of simplicity is much easier to advertise and sell to consumers. It is much, much easier than selling cognitive and interactive simplicity, which is difficult to judge before one has used the product for some time.
Via its ads, Apple sells us a superior user experience. But recently it has been delivering mainly on a beautiful - yet rather superficial - visual aesthetic. Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Indeed.
And so I wonder, is Apple’s product strategy sustainable in the long run?
Or have we reached peak Apple?
