when you build a piece of technology you get to put a lot of work into it – software and hardware – to make it natural and obvious and easy to use for a human being. Then you have priced the human being at the top of the chain. If you simply put in every feature in the world and every ability and let the human being modify their normalness to learn how to use it, you place the technology higher, as the master, and the human being more as a slave.

...THIS is what differentiates iOS from Android. Apple's competitors design around features with little to no out-of-the-box human use cases supported. Apple, however, does it the other way around.

It's no surprise that the iPad and iPhone are the vectors for better apps. Apple has very well-thought-out human interface guidelines for iOS, and it enforces those principles in its app review -- developers are strongly discouraged from creating new approaches for what Apple has already figured out how to do well. There's some discipline that developers can't easily escape, as they can for in-house projects or when writing apps for "whatever you want to do is fine" OSes such as Windows, Linux, and Android.

This is seriously the most well thought-out article on Infoworld...EVER.

Developers of mobile, desktop and web apps should all read this....NOW.

I wrote, and strongly believe, that iOS does a better job of exposing relevant capabilities when you need them, so you can work more quickly. That's called intuitive interface design.

But the fandroids don't want an easy-to-use OS, and they prefer Android because it requires mastery of arcane usage secrets such as "long presses," a tap-and-hold method that works sort of like a computer's contextual menu. For example, long-tapping on the home screen to get a menu lets you add folders, and then long-tapping the folder's menu bar brings up the editor for the folder name. (Contextual menus are great as time-savers for power users, but when used as the only access means to capabilities, they hide functionality from users -- and that's bad.) These fandroid readers also kept saying that going through a sequence of three or four menu options was no big deal, and they thought my criticism of Android for working that way was simply wrongheaded. That's how an operating system should work, they strongly argued.

Look, there's a place for arcane interfaces -- it does make master users feel superior, and it can be fun to figure out all the hidden tricks, just as it is to find the secret powers, commands, shortcuts, and so on in a computer game. And I can see how Google's young, engineering-oriented, smarter-than-the-average-bear employees would feel the same and thus design an OS for them. I bet they play a lot of computer games, too.

But for the rest of us, a smartphone is a tool, one that is often used in quick breaks or on the go. Not having to figure out the secret sauce is a better paradigm in that context -- or so I believe, and my review reflects that. If you don't agree, then by all means get an Android device; my opinion doesn't determine your purchase options.

This guy's right on the money. Merely creating a touch UI doesn't immediately grant you ease of use on par with iOS. Effective and efficient UI design is something that you have to wrestle with and sometimes struggle with to get right. In the end, it's worth it because you want your users to not just try your app, but to use it over and over and over again. If just one element is too difficult to use, you will lose customers and an opportunity for word-of-mouth marketing.

So my proposition is this: :hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important.

As to whether this is a good or bad thing I’m not sure.

When used elegantly it removes visual noise and improves the feel and functionality of the page; only revealing more detailed information when contextually relevant. Twitter does this: reply, retweet, favourite and delete all appear when you hover over an individual tweet. 37signals products also do this to hide drag controls as well as edit and delete links.

However, onmouseover and :hover have often been used as an excuse to temporarily hide complexity in the navigation, often as a compromise. The designer and/or UI team preach simplicity in both structure and visuals but the man holding the money demands an incredible hierarchy of constantly expanding suckerfish-style menus⁶ addressing every page in the site. We’ve all done the navigation-menu-hover-and-exacting-slide only to have the sought for menu item disappear as the pointer gets near.

What we do know is Apple is well aware of this. If you look at their own sites you’ll see that they’ve known this was coming for a long time. Look at the trailers site⁷. Each trailer page has a widget that requires a click (or tap) to open where a previous solution to hiding content might have been to hide until hover. You can also see their approach in the liberal use of lightboxes across their product pages.

I know a lot of web developers/designers are not going to like this.

Tough.

From now on, we need to design not just for mice, but also for sausage-like fingers that can't register a hover or mouseover event.

Cheerful software, above all, honors the truth about humanity:

Humans are not rational beings.

A human is a walking sack of squishy meat and liquids, awash in chemicals

This is a concept that I've found myself subscribing to more and more lately. The point is developers and even a lot of designers are so focused on what can be measured quantitatively and prescribed in a recipe-like set of standards, they forget that they're supposed to be designing their interfaces for humans, not spec-sheets and overly-analytical requirements documents. Trying to rationalize the inherently irrational will not only frustrate ourselves, but the humans that are our users.

Follow the link above for the full message.

After I shared the link with some peers, I got a terse response, "Form follows function."  However, the near religious following of that mantra is why we have so many highly "functional" websites with no soul.  They're just data and link dumps that fail to make any positive emotional connection with the user.

United States

After looking at USA’s Drupal powered Whitehouse website, their actual government website is a huge letdown, it uses dated HTML and awful header graphics.

Haven seen the gallery of government web sites from around the world (link above), I must agree. The offerings from the United States are pretty poor. My impression from working in this sewer of intellectualism and integrity called Washington, DC for 13 years is that I seriously doubt ANY of the government web shops are out there looking at what other governments are doing well in designing their sites.

Take for example Poland's site:

Compare that to USA.gov (or any of the other federal web sites out there) and ask yourself, which is inviting me to explore and learn more? USA.gov to me seems a lot like using the Dell web site to buy a laptop (Dell....*shudder*). Too many choices. At least they don't have that side-scrolling list anymore, but even so, it's still makes choosing the one that you want and is right for you daunting.

Poland's design for http://www.poland.gov.pl doesn't overwhelm you with choices. Granted, I can't read the language, but the secondary pages seem equally well organized. There's even a very well done integration of video near the top of the page.

In short, sites like USA.gov and damn well pretty much the rest of the federal government (US) have a design philosophy that is very much mechanical and bureaucratic. Sites like the Polish example above follow a philosophy that is very much human and aims to provide a positive user experience.