Remember to compare *and* contrast.
Technology is essentially invisible. I never see my code running — I just have to make the most of the visualization tools that I layer on top of it. I also can’t see inside my iPhone to notice when it’s not doing what I expect. Maybe this lack of visibility plays a role in the discomfort that some people have with feeling that they don’t understand certain technologies.
We can layer visualization tools on top of most technologies to observe them, and this technique can greatly improve our understanding of what they do. Yes, some people are more gifted at this than others. A lot of this has to do with whether you can anticipate the logic of the system — potentially because you’ve seen something similar in another context.
Another part of the discomfort is due to a sense that there must be a hidden reason for technologies working the way they do. In my perspective, many of those reasons are little more than traditions — not completely arbitrary ones of course, but things we do largely just because they have been done that way for years. Doing things that way lends them the predictability that might help another user understand it well enough to use the technology expertly.
I suspect that a lot of writers go too far in the comparisons they make between different technologies. In particular, there’s a tradition of doubting that anything Apple does is “new”. The number of writers who wonder loudly if Apple will have any “new products” (even “new product categories”) is pretty astronomical. They can’t be blamed for a little nostalgia over the thrill we shared when informed of the tantalizing treats in products like iPhone 4, iPad, and MacBook Air. The novelty was palpable; we could quickly imagine ways that our workflows, our social flows, and our relaxation flows would be upended.
What I think these writers can be blamed for is interpreting a lack of unfamiliarity as an actual lack of innovation.
If you look closely at how Apple’s products are presented, you will be able to notice dozens, even hundreds, of interfaces that change in relevant ways, year after year. Most of us don’t need to study this; I think tech writers probably should. People who try to help their readers choose between Apple’s products and other alternatives, or who help investors gauge the value of Apple’s stocks and bonds, shouldn’t be thrown off by a phenomenon I observe where people will find a few similarities between two products, and begin to believe that they are more similar than different. Not all of these writers are sincere — some choose to write controversial material purely for its own sake. However, a lot of people are trying their best to get it right — and still end up forgetting to contrast things after they compare them.
I noticed a young man today comparing a certain presidential candidate who self-identifies as a socialist to a feared and reviled politician of the past who also considered himself a socialist. Do these politicians have one thing in common? Yes. Do they have ten or twenty things in common? Sure, they actually do. Does that impact our ability to also appreciate the hundreds of differences between their politics that can clearly be observed even by someone who’s never met either one? Um, no.
To give a concrete example, I happen to think that altering the trackpad so that it could be clicked anywhere was an innovation that really pushed interface science forward quite a bit. This approach paved the way for productive gestures as well as ergonomic refinements. I don’t feel that these updates to the trackpad were appreciated as the ground-breaking innovations that they were. Would you agree that the trackpad that you can click anywhere changed the way you work as much as your iPad has? In my opinion, it was that innovative, and that relevant — yet features like this are overlooked and marginalized because they are so easy to compare to existing technologies.
More recently, Apple has brought Force Touch/3D Touch to most of their flagship product lines. These interfaces are impacted by several forms of invisibility: there’s rarely any on-screen indication that they will do something, and there probably aren’t many developers who have yet begun to build for these types of input. Out of sight, out of mind, unfortunately.
Apple is not a simple company to understand — and the culture they are trying to cultivate by putting these interfaces into our hands is subtle. Yet, once we layer some metaphors from the physical world, as well as our own logical/procedural philosophy and traditions, onto the way we understand and anticipate these interfaces, they will be able to nearly double the options we have for controlling our tools. For some applications, this deepening of touch-sensitivity might have an unleashing effect on the order of the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit processing. Think of it like the shift key on your keyboard compared to the shift key on your phone — if you can access both halves of your interface without switching between two menus, you can go faster and feel better. btw, CAPS LOCK RULES AND I HOPE YOU’RE ALL USING IT!
There is another phenomenon which is part of this trend of questioning whether Apple “has anything new” during their product announcements, which is the cultural movement that needs to take place to meet them halfway, allowing their new interfaces a chance to win us over and allowing ourselves a chance to learn their usage. Recall that when iPhone was unveiled, lots of people thought the touchscreen keyboard was basically not going to work at all compared to the physical keyboards of the BlackBerry. Slide-to-unlock was a hit from the start and it was easy to master — but sliding through the different modes in the Camera app seems to have caught on a lot more slowly. Now the Messages app is loaded with interfaces for taking photos and recording audio, deleting individual messages, adding and removing people from conversations, and using FaceTime services, and there’s always a possibility that someone coming to the platform will just feel overwhelmed and reject the whole system for no good reason rather than learn it and empower themselves.
While Apple’s products are typically regarded (both by the media, the public, and the company’s own marketing) as having “simple, clean” interfaces, they often are very rich and full of hidden details that might go for years before they are adopted by the user community. For instance, MacBook Pro had motion-detecting gyroscopes for years before iPhone and iPad made this type of input relatively well-known — and even on those lightweight portables, the inertial input has scarcely been utilized (the expressive power of this paradigm is like another shift key that is also a steering wheel: modifying your touch and voice inputs, for instance, along a spectrum).
The equipment and the software tools, and the imagination and design chops of the UX professionals that create apps, are very capable of using this stuff; it’s the user community that lags in adoption. So, while Apple is being criticized for neglecting to bring new paradigms to the stage, they are sitting on a cache of dozens of computing paradigms whose power has simply gone under-appreciated, and, as in the cases of their security policies and cloud services, have basically gone unnoticed by huge swaths of the Apple customer base until pretty darn late in the game. Apple’s keynote events are so full of new announcements that there is little time to revisit the features that have been announced in years past, so the tools they bring to the table have often sat idle because we were not reminded of them enough.
I’m reminded of my earlier passage about how technology often makes sense to us only if it reminds us of some other technology we’ve used — truly novel ones are more liable to be forgotten or misremembered. Some may be too far ahead of their time. Rather, though, than presume that features under-appreciated for a decade are doomed to never become common, I think that Apple’s interfaces are winning people over, impressing them with their responsiveness and intelligence, training us in their metaphors, traditions and experiments, and helping us believe in the profits that can come to our lives and even our sanity if we take some time to master these tools, or, at least, use them occasionally when appropriate. FaceTime somebody today and then “heart” a few songs on Apple Radio and some topics on iOS News — you never know what might come to you as a result! And re-watch their announcement from July before the upcoming one in March, if you are interested in really understanding what’s up with the state of American business and its quest to make our economy really strong while keeping our culture exceptionally free.
