On “How Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name”

Thanks to Richard Banks for point­ing me towards this piece pub­lished on Fast Com­pa­ny’s site by Don Nor­man and Bruce Tog­nazz­i­ni (Tog):

The arti­cle is a hard hit­ting cri­tique of Apple’s cur­rent design phi­los­o­phy. More than this, though, the two long time inter­ac­tion design gurus set out a clear project for design, one that they see Apple hav­ing been instru­men­tal in but now devi­at­ing from. Their gen­er­al argu­ment is, on the face of it, pret­ty con­vinc­ing. Yet dig­ging a lit­tle deep­er it’s one that I have prob­lems with. This post is real­ly an effort to sort things out in my own mind.
I think, out­ward­ly, at least, Nor­man and Tog have a point about Apple doing a dis­ser­vice to design. Cer­tain­ly, in their mar­ket­ing and stores, they are putting a lot of empha­sis on visu­al aes­thet­ic and phys­i­cal form. As Nor­man and Tog say, this con­veys a mes­sage that the busi­ness of design (and how it is being wide­ly pro­mot­ed by Apple) is all about mak­ing things pret­ty. I am fair­ly con­fi­dent though that Apple’s design­ers would make a strong case for putting metic­u­lous effort into inter­ac­tion cues, and visu­al (and tac­tile) feedback—that is, in think­ing care­ful­ly about the ensem­ble of product/interaction design. I’ve read inter­views with Apple’s design­ers say­ing just this and heard Ive talk­ing about the painstak­ing efforts to con­vey inter­ac­tion­al qual­i­ties through ani­ma­tion, touch, tac­til­i­ty, etc. Whether they’ve made good choic­es or not is, I’d say, anoth­er matter.
Again, I also recog­nise that Nor­man and Tog have some very clear and con­vinc­ing argu­ments for the kind of inter­ac­tion design they pros­e­ly­tise. I wor­ry though that they are part of the old guard that sees some of the orig­i­nal ‘solu­tions’ to the prob­lems they them­selves created/defined as the best ones (for exam­ple, what they see to be ).

If we were to take this reference—indeed reverence—to Apple’s past design at face val­ue, we would be led to imag­ine that none of us had prob­lems with using ear­li­er ver­sions of Mac OS. Well, of course we did. I nev­er real­ly got on with Apple’s orig­i­nal bitmap Chica­go font, the open/save dia­logues were noto­ri­ous­ly con­fus­ing, and we’re still left with the lega­cy of a very awk­ward solu­tion for eject­ing media.


More impor­tant­ly, there is a sense of the authors mis­judg­ing the chang­ing ways we have come to think about com­put­ing and use com­put­ers. In fact, I think many peo­ple don’t think they’re using com­put­ers anymore—at least in how we under­stood them in the 80s/90s as pro­duc­tiv­i­ty machines. Our phones and tablets are much more enter­tain­ment devices (devices of con­sump­tion), not so far from a gam­ing expe­ri­ence in which many will know things like dis­cov­er­abil­i­ty, feed­back, map­ping, and the abil­i­ty to undo are just not cast in the same mould. Of course, the kinds of design cri­te­ria Nor­man and Tog talk about are impor­tant and I, for one, sore­ly miss them when I try to use Word, Excel, etc. on a iPad. But in the world of iOS, where the forms of use are so very dif­fer­ent, I think the issues man­i­fest them­selves dif­fer­ent­ly and demand a dif­fer­ent kind of atten­tion (one that Nor­man and Tog choose not to see or per­haps not to understand).
What par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­ests me about this is that I think we need to recog­nise that what good usabil­i­ty is and, to some extent, what good design is are things we in a sense ‘man­u­fac­ture’ through the tech­nolo­gies we pro­duce and design. Tog and Nor­man under­stand good design guide­lines as sta­t­ic, some­thing some­how unchang­ing, irre­spec­tive of every­thing else that is chang­ing. By talk­ing about “basic psy­cho­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples” they indi­cate an obdu­ra­cy to what good design might be, but fail to recog­nise that this is deeply bound to the con­tin­u­ous­ly chang­ing mate­r­i­al prac­tices we are enabling through ‘com­put­ing’. They write: “prin­ci­ples reflect the needs, desires, and abil­i­ties of human beings, not the machines they use.”
The trou­ble is our needs, desires and abil­i­ties are inex­orably entan­gled with mat­ter, mat­ter like machines. The qual­i­ties of being human can’t in some way exist out­side of these entan­gle­ments. Of course, there is much to be gained by look­ing back to design­ers like Dieter Rams, but I think what we’re doing when we do this his­tori­cis­ing is rework­ing old con­cepts into con­tem­po­rary moments, under­tak­ing a trans­la­tion work to make these mean­ing­ful for the assem­blies of things and peo­ple we are deal­ing with today. So, to me, the guide­lines Nor­man and Tog speak of make most sense for the machines that they played a role in engi­neer­ing and build­ing. A prin­ci­ple of con­sis­ten­cy has a very par­tic­u­lar mean­ing for the ear­ly Mac OS that, I feel, does­n’t trans­late in any straight­for­ward way to con­tem­po­rary oper­at­ing sys­tems and ecolo­gies of apps, etc. What Tog and Nor­man miss, I think, is that we are always giv­ing shape to new and dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties of good design through the things we cre­ate. As com­put­ing has diverged from the Mac­in­tosh (and PC), we have cre­at­ed log­ics and ratio­nales that present fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent kinds of inter­ac­tion where it doesn’t always make sense to rigid­ly apply past principles.
Even though Tog and Nor­man plead for us not to, yes, let’s take the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the iPad amongst—for lack of a bet­ter cat­e­go­ry description—retirees (or ‘grand­par­ents’ if you like). I know I’m not alone in being struck by how peo­ple from my par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion can get so inti­mate­ly attached to their iPads. I think we have to ask what’s going on here and not brush aside what is vis­i­bly a gen­uine inti­ma­cy by sim­ply crit­i­cis­ing some spe­cif­ic user inter­face fea­tures based on the design of “tra­di­tion­al com­put­ers”. And this is meant as more than the hack­neyed “could my moth­er use it” kind of point. Real­ly, what’s going on here? Of course, there are prob­a­bly plen­ty of rea­sons for the iPad’s appeal (and I don’t mean to over­look a lot of the real­ly dif­fi­cult and frus­trat­ing aspects of using them), but I think we’re wit­ness­ing a dif­fer­ent set of expec­ta­tions around com­put­ing and the rela­tion­ships we form with machines. This seems to be some­thing Nor­man and Tog don’t want to acknowl­edge (despite Nor­man’s efforts to under­stand ). 
As I see it, the iOS aims to reveal (and make dis­cov­er­able) a dif­fer­ent set of qual­i­ties that appeal in dif­fer­ent sorts of ways and that fit with­in a log­ic of portable and touch enabled devices in the way the Mac OS does­n’t (and should­n’t). In the orig­i­nal design of the Mac, choic­es also need­ed to made about what was imme­di­ate­ly dis­cov­er­able and what would be buried under the menu archi­tec­ture and in obscure dia­logues (remem­ber the Choos­er?), and this pre­sent­ed a par­tic­u­lar kind of log­ic-of-use. With the iOS, I think (inten­tion­al­ly or not) a dif­fer­ent kind of expe­ri­ence is sur­faced by the deci­sions to reveal and hide inter­ac­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties, and the log­ic-of-use here is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent; I feel like the iPad, etc. is much more about the feel for con­tent (and to some extent, cre­ation). So per­haps it’s this that makes the devices so appeal­ing and that many of us, includ­ing my par­ents, get so attached to.


Final­ly, I should say that I am a long time Mac user but I feel wed­ded to Macs (and the Apple ‘ecosys­tem’), for now at least, because that’s what I’ve bought into and am used to using. I’m real­ly not sure whether Apple’s inter­ac­tion design is espe­cial­ly bet­ter than any­one else’s and I think there are lots of things that con­fuse and frus­trate me about their var­i­ous oper­at­ing sys­tems. This post isn’t one defend­ing Apple’s design, but more a response to what I see as Don Nor­man’s and Bruce Tog­nazz­ini’s views on design.