Edward Tufte Weighs In on Apple's iPhone 170
An anonymous reader writes "Via Daring Fireball, a post from design guru Edward Tufte's site discusses his views on the interface used by the Apple iPhone. The post includes a video presentation by Tufte on the subject of video resolution on the phone. His argument is primarily that while the iPhone does a lot of things very well, Apple hasn't quite realized the platform's full potential by making screen real estate all it could be. "
Re:Design decisions vs. 20/20 hindsight (Score:4, Interesting)
good & detailed constructive criticism (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally as a product developer myself, I would welcome such good detailed constructive criticism for free from a UI guru such as Tufte. Remember that there are all innovation is based on prior innovation, so it is good to have analysis done on existing products in order to improve on future versions.
BTW, on a side note, I hope that someone at Slashdot deletes the offences racist postings above.
Re:Design decisions vs. 20/20 hindsight (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure when you first saw an OS GUI thoughts went through your head on how to improve it. Perhaps YOU should have thought of something more novel than critiquing previous works.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:good & detailed constructive criticism (Score:3, Interesting)
armchair UI ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
Tufte makes a good point about the hidden potential of iPhone's brilliant display. But I feel the answer lies less in resolution, and more in depth. We have been exposed to much web content that is layered (for example, pop-up windows that appear on top of existing screens that fade into the dark) that we can now discern depth on a 2D picture provided it is clear, sharp and bright. There is this 3D real estate that is not exploited in iPhone (and something that it is quite capable of).
As an example, I sometimes find it a tad annoying to keep going to the Home screen on the iPhone when switching between applications (typically when I am viewing a website and quickly need to look at maps). A dock with all Home icons down the side that appears overlaid (and magnifies each icon on fingerscroll, just like on a mac) would eliminate the intermediate step of going to the Home screen. To take it a bit further, the Maps can open in a 75% window on top of the Safari, so we can get back to Safari by one fingerstroke (Tufte's idea would be to open two windows each 50%, because there's resolution). This is, as you can see, nothing new - just something that iPhone doesn't currently have but can quite possibly do.
Re:Screen resolution should be increased for sure (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because an average human eye can tell apart a 600 dpi print from a 1200 dpi print doesn't mean it is more 'usable'. 1200 allows fancier or more elegant fonts (like a subtly waisted Optima) and nice printouts, but I have never met anyone who would have printed all his texts at 5 pt size just because his printer could.
UI design regarding resolution is mainly about legibility. Using sub-pixel anti-aliasing and optimized fonts you can get excellent, and I mean very excellent results below 200 dpi. Anything higher can show more detail in theory, but not more significant information. Nobody would chose a waisted font over a optimized one on a portable device, so why waste money (which could be used for other features) on displays which -could- display them.
Re:Tufte is cool, BUT... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That was fast (Score:2, Interesting)
Overall, I really like it though.
Tufte... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Design decisions vs. 20/20 hindsight (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, it's always easier to critique someone else's work than create something novel yourself.
I'd call both sparklines [wikipedia.org] and the data-ink [infovis-wiki.net] ratio [tbray.org] pretty good and novel innovations.
You can't credit the man with "creating" information design as a discipline, but he's done a great deal to evangelize it, and you certainly have to give him plenty of credit for its currently elevated profile.
Tufte is not just some crank. Intelligent, useful, compelling information display is what he's all about. You don't have to agree with him, but his thoughts are usually worth weighing.
Re:Design decisions vs. 20/20 hindsight (Score:3, Interesting)
My mother shies away from the DVD player we got her... but she can look at nearly any 3d object, such as an animal, and freehand draw a sewing pattern for it. That's not a simple task; it involves mental 3d->2d transformations that any graphics modeler would be jealous of.
Re:Screen resolution should be increased for sure (Score:3, Interesting)
Because it is a selling point even though most people can only barely see the difference over 300 dpi. That was the resolution of the first laser printers, and most people thought they looked as good as typeset. And that was for black and white printers with no way of controlling dot intensity. With a screen that can produce halftones for antialiasing, it is hard to see much improvement above 150 dpi.
He's a bit full of himself (Score:4, Interesting)
I get the distinct feeling that Tufte understands data visualisation, but not interface design. These are different things, and he's letting his expertise in one area make him think he can make pronouncements from on high in other areas and comes out with some real bullshit as a result.
His "to clarify, add detail" rule could be applied to his comment on the photo browser. He says they should be grey not white, and only one pixel wide, but gives no reason why. I'd like some detail to clarify why he says that! It would not fit more images onto the screen, it would add no information content, it's barely even an aesthetic change to the design. It's news to me that arranging images against a plain white background is a bad approach. I've met a lot of smart people that like to "show off" by making detailed comments like this, without any actual substance or empirical evidence to back up what is simply their own preference. Tufte seems to be doing so here.
He criticises the stock app for being "cartoony" and "PowerPoint" like, which seems again a mere preference rather than an objective comment, uses words designed to provoke an emotional reaction rather than an intellectual one. He claims his app has more detail - which of course it should when it only has three stocks, not six. But I don't see how x thousand points of data points in a tiny little graph is of use. First of all, if you fit thousands of data points into a single graph, it's going to need a damn big piece of paper before I'm capable of distinguishing them, combined with a ruler and a set square if I want to get the value for a specific data point. Second, why would I want this level of detail on a phone app? Personally, I find the iPhone's red light / green light view combined with percentage points useful - it jumps out at you when e.g. the market crashes as it did recently. In Tufte's example, it's impossible to tell what recent market changes have taken place, and there is no obvious way to quickly see data for e.g. the last week. The "modest data graphic cartoon" conveys just as much information to the viewer as his "image resolution" with thousands of data points, and is the kind of thing a portable stocker checker would be used for. Tufte is letting his expertise get in the way of understanding the use case - all his catchphrases are there for the converted, but his use of them here just annoys me.
Here's a nice little piece - take a look at his site at http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00036T [edwardtufte.com]. He criticises the iPhone browswer for having 10% of the screen used for buttons, but in his own designs he comments "about 90% of the image is substance". Clearly he's happy with that 10% sacrifice when it's his own work. And if you look at the designs, you'll note that in each case there is a navigation bar of some form at the top or bottom of the page. What a hypocrite.
Finally, he's very keen on getting rid of computer admin debris. The problem is, he treats looking at a web page the same as looking at a picture. But when I'm looking at a picture, I don't want to bookmark it (it's already in my collection), and I don't want to make a webclip of it. I don't need the back button with photos, because I can navigate via the photo collection. But I do need those functions in the browser, and I need them large enough to easily hit with my finger. We're all used to scrolling down webpages, so having a mere 90% of the screen available, and an intuitive flick of a finger to scroll down, is perfect. Commenting that the button bar should at least be transparent strikes me as just one of those condescending little compromises some people like to make when they know they won't convince the other side of "the right answer". It would be bad interface design to have application buttons hovering over hyperlinks, making it distinctly ambiguous what would happen when you touched that bottom 10% of the screen.
In particula