iOS 7 means we’re all grown up
We don’t want to be spoonfed usability anymore
Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 7, arrives today, six years after the first iPhone dazzled us into understanding what the internet in your pocket can mean. As Apple stressed, iOS 7 represents the first full rethinking of the user interface since that original iPhone.
We hear a lot about iOS 7’s new flat design, but what’s really happening is bigger than that: iOS 7 is Apple pushing us into growing up as mobile developers and users. Just as web users around 2000 no longer needed handholding on what a link does or the metaphors of offline publishing ported over to our online reading, smartphone users circa 2013 no longer need the skeuomorphism that Steve Jobs championed for the first iPhone or all of the borders and buttons that helped guide us in using our first couple of smartphones.
Those design cues just get in the way now. We don’t want to be spoonfed usability anymore — we just want to access our content as quickly as possible. If we don’t understand what something does, we’ll learn, fast. Cast off the training wheels.
Apple defines iOS 7 design as an enhancement in “clarity, translucency and depth.” Here are concrete examples of these three concepts in action on iOS7 — and how they push us into a grownup stage of smartphone use:
Clarity
Taking a cue from Apple’s new aesthetic, we incorporated flat iconography into BillGuard for iOS7. Here’s an example: on the new ‘add a card’ icon, we removed the card graphic. The old graphic was helpful to a first-time user to understand immediately what it signified, but after they learned that, the card became graphic noise.
So for the sake of graphic clarity, we stripped out the card image. This runs the risk of a first-time user not understanding what this element does, but today’s experienced smartphone user is accustomed to try things out on first use. Once the user understands that ‘+’ signifies ‘add a card’, there’s no graphic noise for them to contend with on future use.
Note that a clarity change like this makes the final design feel closer to a product manager’s mockup — that is, closer to the the app’s core functionality and absent any design elements that can interfere with direct access to content.
Translucency
iOS 7 uses translucent layers to place elements that aren’t currently in use behind elements that are in use. As Dan Rowinski said: “This is where advanced designers are going to have some fun.”
Those designers are drawing examples from Apple’s own new designs for core OS functions. The new Control Center (pictured above) lets a user, with a simple upswipe, call up the most commonly used functions from the old Settings. When you do so, the translucent layer leaves you with a sense of context — that the main screen is still present, and that you can easily return to it with a down swipe.
That UX decision assumes users no longer need to interact with our smartphones like little PCs, with our fingers tapping in place of a mouse. Look for new app designs that follow Apple’s lead on this, eliminating juvenile nav buttons and incorporating motion-based navigation.
Depth
Apple’s new parallax effect adds a sense of depth and movement to on-screen elements as you move your phone around. It’s built on a huge algorithm (drawn from rocket guiding applications), but is simple for app developers like us to activate.
The depth effect in parallax pulls the most relevant content to the front of the user experience. It’s probably the best example of a design function that takes the specific mobile handset experience fully into account, drawing upon two pieces of internal hardware: the accelerometer and the MEMS gyroscope.
We move our devices around in our hands after all, and now the software design reflects that. As young users, we considered a mobile device a small PC that you just happen to carry around. With an advance like parallax, the device — and the software we’ll build upon it — takes our full human experience with this particular form factor and its unique functionality into account.
The mobile app ecosystem, like the PC-based web before it, innovates both incrementally and through broad changes in standards and frameworks. But the latter drives the big growth. An individual app maker can come up with a cool new feature that others imitate, but until the entire platform encourages it, that enhancement won’t be felt broadly, by millions of users.
Apple remains the design leader for the mobile web, and with iOS 7 it’s driving a step improvement in user experience — and assumes we’re all grown up enough to handle it.
Today, along with iOS 7, we’re launching our grown up app —a lighter, faster version of BillGuard.
