Turning limitations into opportunities: Apple’s Dynamic Island
How Apple embraced the notch and gave us a feature we didn’t know we wanted
Since the iPhone X was released, Apple’s phones have had a notch. It housed the complex Face ID sensor array and over the years the notch has become smaller and smaller although not small enough to become imperceivable. Its competitors usually have a ‘holepunch’ display, where the camera looks through a small cutout on the screen; this, however, results in the front-facing camera taking a hit in terms of image quality. Some phones go even further and house their front-facing cameras under the display, making the image quality almost non-existent at that point (at least compared to the iPhone). This shows that often companies want to give users what they want (in this case, not a notch or a more subtle notch) but fail to surprise them by turning what’s perceived as a limitation into an exciting opportunity.
The Notch
The notch has been mostly ignored by the iOS user interface and app developers are asked to build around it. The introduction of the iPhone 14 Pro completely changes this ongoing paradigm as it houses a pill-shaped notch called the ‘Dynamic Island’. This is the first iteration in which the notch, instead of being a static element on the screen, becomes an active part of the entire user experience; a part that will offer a whole new array of micro-interactions and useful ways of notifying statuses and ongoing processes.
Dynamic Island
To be really honest it feels like Apple took a little bit of what the LG V10 was trying to do and brought it to 2022. It essentially feels like a screen within a screen because of its persistent nature. The main variation is that the area is, uh, dynamic and changes its physical dimensions and its contents depending on what’s going on the user’s experience (upcoming meetings, reservations, music being played, geolocation and a big etc.). In addition, as the background is colored black and the nature of OLED displays brings pure black tones; the illusion of a screen within a screen is strengthened.
Apple really has turned what essentially was a hardware constraint into a feature, more so they have seamlessly integrated both the hardware and the software into a singular mix of great user experience, something that they have been doing for quite some time now.
Embracing Constraints
I believe that designers are most creative with constraints. These constraints create and enhance a designer’s design process, a framework, a methodology, a system. Without this there will be nothing but chaos — it gives designers a clear focus, a specific goal and allows them to channel their energy on problem-solving; on a solution.
Around the time of the first MacBook Air, Apple was focussed on making the machine as thin and as light as they can. They put themselves in this really constrained position and innovation fostered; namely in order to make a CPU die small enough they contacted the folks over at Intel to make a custom die of the Core family of chips specifically for them. In addition, they let go of the DVD drive which, even though was an extremely controversial decision at the time, would nonetheless offer a new interesting way for users to interact with the medium. Now users could install special software on their machines with a DVD drive that would talk to the MacBook Air and send the data on the DVD over WiFi. These kinds of innovative new interactions would never have been possible without having a major physical constraint that, it should be noted, come from a healthy exercise in out-of-the-box thinking.
Another example of this happened during the development of the Braun SK4 Radio — Phono Player by the legendary Dieter Rams and Gerd A Müller. An all metal prototype was produced which represented a new approach in design where most of the competition was producing them in all-wood or all-plastic enclosures, however in testing of the device it was found that the metal was more sonorous and hence would cause more reverberation, this physical constraint led them into using a four-fold sheet of metal braced between two wooden side panels. This also allowed Rams to add the transparent acrylic cover.
Final Words
Henry Ford very eloquently said that “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses” and that rings true with the development of the Dynamic Island; a breakthrough design that no one anticipated. This is not to say there’s no value in listening to users, but as said, things like the Dynamic Island are the result of taking the best out of limitations and constraints we as designers are often faced with, but it also happened because Apple’s designers used their intuition and fine judgment instead of following outright numbers. It’s possible iPhone users wouldn’t have articulated such a feature when asked what they would have wanted in their new smartphone, and it’s an important business trait to be able to give your users not only what they want, but surprise them with what they don’t expect.
