iPhone Black == Brushed Metal?
Yesterday I tweeted: “Sorry, but I still feel black iPhone UIs are the equivalent of brushed metal.” I was aware that people I know personally are writing applications that this would seem to disparage. I also knew that I should follow it up with more explanation than can fit in 140-character chunks.
Brushed Metal
When Apple introduced brushed metal, I was fine with it. I was fine with it for the QuickTime Player (partly because I rarely use it on its own); I was fine with it for iTunes and Calculator.
When other apps started using brushed metal (it was as simple as a checked setting in Interface Builder) and didn’t follow the guideline of “re-creat[ing] a familiar physical device,” I would actually try to find another app. I think many of these developers tried to use brushed metal to make their app stand out, but I agreed with Apple’s HIG that it made many apps look “too heavy” and, while I can’t recall specific examples, I remember it just not behaving as well for visual cues of backgrounded windows.
When brushed metal bled into Safari and iChat, I started hacking their nibs to disable the brushed metal; when it infected the Finder I discovered UNO and disabled it across the board (UNO also had the advantage of enabling the then-nascent “unified toolbar” interface look, which I really liked).
I rather like the idea of a “look” or “mode” which adds contextual information about the app itself, but when people use it with abandon, it loses its contextual purpose. In interior design, there is the concept of an accent wall: A wall (usually) painted a bolder color than the other walls to draw attention and break up the uniformity of the room without domination of the bold color. More than one accent wall in a room, and the room is split-color; all of the walls the accent color, and it’s no longer the accent color–it is the room color. This is what I feel happened with brushed metal.
iPhone Black
If you can remember back that far, think about a stock iPhone devoid of App Store purchases. Phone, Mail, Text, Calendar, Maps, Safari, Settings, and half the tabs in Clock–gray status bar, blue navigation and toolbars. Black is used in the tab bars, and indicates that the icons here behave differently from a toolbar (again, modes). Yes, there are a few “variants”–the Stopwatch and Timer tabs of Clock, Photos, and iPod while playing. These are all fullscreen uses, with the apparent intent to blend the controls into an unobtrusive background.
But notice how even the iPod application uses blue navigation bars when in table/list mode. I don’t believe there is a single Apple application with a black navigation or toolbar displaying a table view. Yet, that is exactly what many third-party applications are doing.
I must confess that when the App Store finally opened, I hadn’t really dived into the SDK very deeply. When I saw the first “black UI” app, I was amused at the work the developer must have done to override the standard color just to make it “sexy black.” Obviously, I didn’t know at the time that black was just another option in Interface Builder. Now I know, and it’s apparent by the large number of applications with the black UI.
WWAD?
As an iPhone user, I appreciate the consistency of interface among the applications. Gratuitous use of a black UI only serves to distance an application from this smooth interface flow–maybe not as bad as a yellow, green or pale blue background, or an application that doesn’t even use standard navigation, tool and tab bars–but distanced nonetheless. Ironically, as more applications use the black UI, any one app using it is no longer differentiated–it’s now just noticeably “not Apple.”
Maybe I’m just not good enough about developing bleeding edge user interface; I consider myself to be more in line with “WWAD?” than “WWPD?” I’m not going to call out any specific apps as looking bad because of this, but I will give one positive comment: I think Twitterrific is one app that has a really good all-black look although I appreciate and prefer the “light background” preference (which I’d still like to see go all the way to standard colors).
I certainly wish Apple’s HIG had more guidance on this topic, but until then whenever I see a black UI app that doesn’t exhibit a need to take the user into a different mental mode, I consider it just as gratuitous as brushed metal.
Another good example of the “dangers” of choice - although Apple do keep the choice to a minimum (hard to believe) by providing applications with a base kind of “look” - they’ve been running the iPhone for a year before officially opening it up so there’s an expectation what an iPhone application should look like (much like there is for a Mac one).
Developers diverging from those looks do so at their own risk as people will think there apps are “un-iPhone like” - much like the infamous TripLog fun.
At least with the reduced set of “usual interfaces” it should remain relatively consistent - Android might end up all over the place like Windows.
The “sexiness” of the black look probably stems from Bloomberg’s app which was one of the first big apps out the door.
I’m going to stop now before I overdose on “quoting” :)
Texas Hold Em’s navigation bar is black, Notes’ is brown.
Voicemail uses a black background rather than the more common gray pinstripes. I can’t see how that black was used to blend UI into the background.
What about Weather, Stocks? Both are great designs, but unnecessarily different than other table view apps.
Camera and Calcuator are certainly different. Understandably, different types of apps, but also unnecessarily different toolbar gray in Camera if you are focusing solely on consistency.
[...] Paul Goracke (via Brent Simmons): [...]
Chris W–I’ll try to give you my opinions on all the apps you list, but please keep in mind this is all just my reading of Apple’s tea leaves (except where otherwise noted).
Camera, Calculator and HoldEm all fall under Apple’s definition of “Immersive Applications.” Weather and Stocks are clearly “Utility Applications”–Weather is even the exemplar in the iPhone HIG. In these apps, a navigation and/or tool bar tend to be infrequently used items, so it makes sense to prefer they match the overall look of the app.
I tend to think of Photos as a secondary aspect of Camera, so maybe it got more of a free pass than it deserves. I wouldn’t mind seeing it use the standard blue/gray scheme.
Voicemail…I knew there was something that used an oversized black toolbar but couldn’t find it while writing the article. I guess I can see arguing that it’s more of a “control panel” than “toolbar” and should thus justify a different mental context, but I think it would work just as well in blue.
Notes, Notes, Notes…that just feels too much like picking on someone who’s been picked on way too much already. Regardless of whether you like Marker Felt or not, it’s obvious Apple’s attitude toward Notes falls in the “Immersive Application” category even though it has hierarchical data organization. I don’t think many people would agree that’s the correct decision, but you have to admit they didn’t commit to it only halfway :^) I think most people would also agree that Notes wouldn’t be the Apple application to emulate.
Of course, this all ends up falling into a “know it when I see it” definition without Apple being explicit. I was asked in regard to my original tweet what I preferred and started listing the apps…and was surprised at how uniform Apple was in making Productivity Applications use the blue/gray. I truly thought there was more diversity. Unfortunately, they seem to have used the main outlier (Photos) as the HIG example.
[...] Corporation Unknown: “Ironically, as more applications use the black UI, any one app using it is no longer differentiated — it’s now just noticeably ‘not Apple.’” [...]
Gratuitous perhaps, but I don’t mind applications that keep the look and fell of the iPhone UI while going in different color directions. The black is clearly overdone, but I think that it is not necessary for every application to look exactly like the grey/blue Apple standard, and the best way to achieve that is to continue with the same sized toolbars, with white backgrounds, but use different colors.
Certainly taste will play a role, and it can be done poorly, but I like the choice to stick with the same look and feel while only change colors as a point of differentiation better than the efforts some devs have made to completely attempt an alternate look and feel.
I viewed brushed metal as a signal that an application was database or external resource-based rather than “real world.” Address Book, Safari and Mail were obviously brushed metal apps to me. Apple seemed to be moving toward this for a while (I came up with this theory before Mail became metal, and predicted it would go metal). Logically, System Preferences and most of Utilities should have been metal, too. But then rather than clarify the rule, they dropped brushed metal.
I can’t say I was disappointed: I didn’t like brushed metal much. But there was a pattern to it, it just seemed Apple didn’t understand what the pattern really was.
In my experience, if you try to determine a specific set of rules for every UI convention, you’ll find yourself lost down the rabbit hole. I think this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for UI in the classic engineering approach: there isn’t always a series of logical decisions to arrive at the destination.
Your example of interior design is a great way to illustrate this. The idea of “mood lighting” doesn’t always lead you to the most practical results in terms of visibility, but it does succeed in creating an experience. In a lot of cases, that’s what the developer is looking to do and that’s what the user reacts to.
Chris W’s comment above mentions that that Weather and Stocks are “unnecessarily” different (and you address these as immersive), but I think it’s a mistake to assume consumers want everything to be as uniform and structured as possible. In fact, that can lead to a very monotonous experience. It’s a delicate balancing act between chaos and stagnation.
I agree with you that developers often use UI conventions in contexts that don’t fit well, but that’s nothing new and will continue to be the case whenever they don’t have the the funds for or availability of a dedicated designer.
At WWDC, I was in many 1:1s with designers, and every single one pushed me to get more daring with the designs. They told my friend the HIG is for people that don’t know how to design.
This was all strange to hear from Apple, and a little hard to swallow. But there you go — Apple is actively pushing to reduce consistency, and to increase, as they told me “cinematic software experiences”.
[...] An interesting discussion is going on about the “iPhone Black” UI over at Paul Goracke’s Corporation Unknown blog. The post itself is really about how the current trend to ‘all-black’ iPhone apps is a lot like [...]
[...] be hearing that news from this blog first, but I do want to acknowledge and take advantage of it. My last post felt a bit vague, even to me, about my definition of “iPhone black” and that was partly [...]
I read a lot ok my iPhone and I find my eyes feel less strain/ pressure from black background and white text (like in the bloomberg and twitterific app) then in say mail and netnewswire.
Other than that I normally second the consistency argument (until a better one comes along…:-) )