Searching for the HIG’s Boson
During Steve Job’s WWDC 07 Keynote one of the biggest cheers from the live audience was for the announcement that all windows in Mac OS X Leopard would have the same theme. Muted grey windows may seem quite a strange thing to get excited about. In fact it was just the latest twist in a long running saga about Apple’s User Interface design that started with the introduction of the brushed metal theme in QuickTime Player 4.
The introduction of brushed metal kicked off a long debate about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) a document aimed at developers to ensure consistent user interfaces. Brushed Metal broke a lot of the tenets of the HIG and despite being a set of guidelines the HIG has all too often been taken as a inviolable rule-book. Apple continued to flout the HIG using brushed metal indiscriminately, custom controls in the iLife and Pro applications, Unified and Polished Metal window themes and HUD windows.
Many Windows and ex-Windows users may be surprised by all the fuss as variations in user interface design are common on Windows. Flouting the HIG strikes at the heart of Mac zealots’ belief that their platform is easier to use as the HIG itself claims to “provide Mac OS X users with a consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system”. Browse through any book on design and there will be a chapter on the principle of consistency. The theory goes that if Mac applications are consistent they will be more familiar for users and therefore easier to use.
Mac Community Reaction
Some have pressed Apple to abandon their custom themes and return to the consistency advocated by the HIG. Despite Steve Job’s announcement, the genie is out of the bottle and it seems clear that Apple will continue to innovate and experiment with user interface design.
Others have suggested that Apple should update the HIG to reflect the changing face of UI design. However the ever changing recommendations for the use of Brushed Metal in the HIG show how this is an unsatisfactory approach. Similarly it can be seen that no sensible definition would allow Apple’s use of Coverflow in iTunes to be used in Leopard’s Finder, let alone OmniGroup’s OmniDazzle or GarageSale other than use it where appropriate and if it looks good.
A group of developers have decided not to wait for Apple to update the HIG and have decided to create their own “Indie HIG“. As well as suffering from being a moving target, like Apple’s own HIG, the Indie HIG simply documents current user interface trends. With a wiki format, it lacks the driving force of a visionary in the mould of Jobs, Jonathan Ive or even Mike Matas. It compounds these problems by codifying changing trends as rules.
However the feeling that has most widely taken hold is that proposed by John Gruber at last year’s C4 conference, that the “HIG is dead”. His supporters now believe that developers should just accept that the current state of HIG bending Mac applications should act as the documentation for the current de facto HIG.
Of course there are many that feel that the HIG is far from dead, or that for some it is still necessary. In many ways they are correct. Large sections of the HIG do not relate to the look and feel of individual elements and continue to be used consistently by Apple and other third parties. Spacing and grouping of controls, the colour and font pickers, international and accessibility are all covered in the HIG and are still followed by any good application. However this really glosses over the fact that the appearance, the themes of current Mac applications now vary immensely.
So even after Steve’s Leopard announcement, the debate continues to rage on and there is no consensus on the future of the HIG. Climate change and Grand Unified Theories seem less controversial.
Getting Back to Basics
So if the HIG is indeed dead what of the goal of ease of use through consistency? More fundamentally does consistency between all applications really mean better ease of use?
Put another way does it make much sense for the user interface for an Instant Messaging Client to be completely consistent with a Media Library, Network Monitor or a Professional Video Editor? Common sense suggests not. So why does Apple’s HIG propose this and why do so many in the community feel that it is so important?
The roots go back to the introduction of the Mac, at a time when computers were difficult to use; strange alien devices for many people. The Mac changed all of that, creating a more familiar environment for computer users and consistency was part of making computers; new devices to most; easier to learn to use.
A fundamental part of this ease of use was the Mac’s Desktop metaphor. Data is stored in files which themselves are stored in folders whereas all other operating systems of the time used the phrase directory. Files are disposed of the in the Trash. The Desktop was the cluttered unfiled part of your work environment but where files were easy to get access to. The Notepad and Calculator Desktop Ornaments remained consistent with that metaphor. All this created a familiar environment for office workers who were the original target market for the Mac. In this age of commodity computers and Apple’s lack of presence in the enterprise, it is easy to forget that two decades ago, Apple’s computers were enterprise focused business machines.
Over time, unfortunately, “ease of learning to use” has become “ease of use” and “consistency with a metaphor” has become “consistency” for its own sake.
In addition the market for the Mac has changed fundamentally. Computers are no longer strange devices that only the select few have access to. Computers don’t just sit on office desks but permeate our lives, running our TV’s and mobile phones as well as having a prominent position in our homes. For many a file is only known as data stored on a computer. Not least of all because computer documents have replaced physical ones.
In every day life, to simply change the volume on a device we may use a knob, a slider, a thumb dial, a pair of buttons or a rocker switch. Each of our five remote controls at home will have a different appearance for the volume control. There is no uproar demanding that all TV remotes be created equal. So if we can handle varied buttons in real life, we do not need them to be homogenised on our computers. Sometimes we should give our users more credit and understand why so many incorrect passwords are due to the Caps Lock key; a non user centric design rather than stupid users or a lack of consistency.
Unfortunately the Desktop metaphor has become stretched beyond credulity. Ever felt uneasy dragging a floppy disc icon the Trash to eject it? Ever wonder why iChat or iTunes has a File menu? What file? Or wonder why you have to keep saving your work? Well quite possibly the answer is no. Because humans have a much better ability to learn than computers and we have learnt to cope with these quirks of the computer environment. Our children who may never see a real filing cabinet with drop in folders will never question these anomalies as they will be so familiar with computers from a young age. Can you imagine a child of tomorrow asking “Where is the Any Key?” or running the mouse on the monitor screen or using the CD-ROM tray as a cup holder?
The need for consistency between all applications appears to be an outdated notion or one that has simply been misconstrued from being consistent with a particular metaphor.
Everything King Metaphorus Touches Turns to Gold
So the user base has changed and is more adaptable that we give credit for, the exclusive Desktop metaphor no longer makes sense and we’ve lost sight of what we were trying to be consistent with in the first place.
If ease of use is our goal and familiarity is a key part of this equation, then it follows that where possible, applications should relate to a real world experience. Delicious Library for example uses a bookshelf metaphor for the library and a supermarket bar code scanner metaphor that carries through to its icon. With this in mind it is easy to appreciate why Delicious Library has won multiple Apple Design despite completely ignoring the HIG. DL is consistent with a metaphor that is appropriate for its market and uses it to make computers more approachable and fun to use, and hence easier to use. It is not just about looking good; it is about human centric design.
If Apple does indeed rewrite the HIG they should extoll the use of metaphors rather than consistency. If it does not, developers should ask whether their applications consistently make use of an appropriate metaphor, if at all. Critics should review which of The Delicious Generation applications are really just style over substance and which have abandoned the HIG in favour of a more appropriate metaphor.
The HIG is dead. Long live the metaphor.
June 28th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
John Geleynse has said that he has been remiss in updating the HIG in later years, and plans to get back to it.
Also, applications delivered as web sites have totally broken any molds that might have existed about how applications work, with wild inconsistency the rule. So even a mildly inconsistent application interface might seem like heaven compared to the web.
June 28th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I would have to say that it is absolutely ridiculous to put the likes of Mike amatas in the same “visionary league” as Steve Jobs and John Ives. A few designs for a handful of indie apps doesn’t quite compare to revolutionizing the computing metaphor or inventing the iMac. If anything, it demonstrates how the lack of direction has left ridiculous fanboys like you grasping at threads.
June 28th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Too true. It really is the metaphor that communicates not necessarily the color and shape of the buttons in the toolbar.
Also funny how meanings have completely reversed, when you wrote:
>to simply change the volume on a device
I first thought about repartitioning a hard drive. I don’t remember when I turned into such a geek.
June 28th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Interesting article; however, the lack of appropriate punctuation throughout really detracts from comprehension and enjoyment. For the sake of your audience, please find someone to proofread and punctuate your posts before they go out. Thanks.
June 28th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Sorry, I think you lost me when you claimed that popular consumer devices have inconsistent interfaces, and that people are fine with that.
To cash in on the hype-of-the-month, how about the iPhone? The whole point behind it was that existing mobile phones have awful, opaque, inconsistent interfaces that customers hate.
How about the notorious blinking clock jokes? Or the related VCR programming jokes?
Or take a look at car reviews in a non-enthusiast publication, like Consumer Reports. It’s been a while since I’ve spent much time reading them, but it used to be quite common for them to complain when a car implemented its controls in a way significantly different from other cars; Ford’s twin-stalk design for the turn signal and windshield wiper controls came in for regular and repeated criticism in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
I would argue that the crowning principles of interface design are simplicity (the more complex, the harder to figure out), clarity, and intuitiveness (how easy they are to figure out from context). Consistency can help with clarity and simplicity if you pick a simple and clear model as your standard to be consistent with. However, consistency’s big win is intuitiveness. If you keep a consistent system, once you learn how to use a given interface element, if you see that element elsewhere, you can intuit that it will do the same thing and operate in the same fashion.
(This, by the by, is also an answer to the argument about ‘why should programs with different functions be consistent with each other.’ Of course they aren’t going to have identical interfaces; that’s a straw man. Consistent HIG means that the *parts they have in common* should have consistent interfaces. If you have scrolling content, you should use scroll bars that look and act the same – to use your example, iChat and Network Utility both use consistent scroll bars in the iChat transcript and the various Network Utility transcripts [Netstat, Ping, Traceroute, Lookup, etc. etc.]
June 29th, 2007 at 2:25 am
It’s worth noting, in light of the anonymous comment above, that Mike Matas has been working at Apple for a long time now.
June 29th, 2007 at 4:38 am
I fully agree that metaphors need only be consistent to the subject they’re referencing, not to each other. Unfortunately, the vast majority of user interaction is idiomatic, simply because most computing tasks have no real-world equivalent.
Even the most basic metaphors have some idiomatic component. On the surface, my computer’s Trash Can is a metaphor for the trash can I have in my house. However, while rummaging through my real-world garbage to find the half-eaten tuna sandwich I threw out last week is generally discouraged, on my computer that’s the entire point. I can cut and paste pictures and news clippings in real life, but I can’t paste 25 copies without a trip to Kinkos.
These subtle differences are impossible to infer from the metaphor itself; they must be learned through experience and applied idiomatically. This is perfectly fine. Human beings are remarkably good at idiomatic thought, so good that most of the time, we take it for granted.
Idiomatic reasoning is deeply rooted in the principle of consistency. The last time I saw a long strip on the side of my screen with a rectangle and two arrows, I dragged it up and down to see different parts of my document. The next time I encounter a scroll bar, I’ll do the same thing. If scroll bars were not generally consistent in appearance and function, I would have a difficult time to
Now, you are absolutely correct that purely *visual* consistency is becoming less important, and Chris Ryland pinpoints the source of the change: the web.
Buttons on the internet look like all sorts of things, while still maintaining some consistent platonic quality of “buttonness”. Having been immunized by the mess of visual cues on the web, most users these days can spot that buttonness, even if the button doesn’t look 100% identical to the ones they encountered yesterday.
This doesn’t mean that *design* consistency is passé, just that appearances don’t need to be absolutely identical in order to maintain high levels of idiom recognition. Even though some Mac applications were Aqua, and some were Brushed Metal, they were designed pretty much the same way. Nobody panicked the first time they saw a brushed metal button and it didn’t look exactly like the aqua buttons they were used to. They clicked on it, it behaved exactly like the buttons they were used to, and they unconsciously filed away another data point for the next time they encounter an odd-shaped button.
The people still whining about visual consistency on the Mac are either treating outdated UI guidelines as though they were holy gospel, or they’re trying to hide their purely aesthetic complaints behind the usability banner to gain public support. To be honest, I don’t have much sympathy for them either way.
June 29th, 2007 at 5:23 am
[...] The Daydream Blog | Searching for the HIG’s Boson (tags: apple mac metaphors-and-other-failures party-like-it’s-1984 hig human interface guidelines) [...]
June 29th, 2007 at 5:56 am
>The last time I saw a long strip on the side of my screen with
>a rectangle and two arrows, I dragged it up and down to see
>different parts of my document. The next time I encounter a
>scroll bar, I’ll do the same thing. If scroll bars were not
>generally consistent in appearance and function, I would have >a difficult time to
I regularly get tripped up by clever Flash(TM) designers who decide to redesign the scroll bar. For whatever reason, Flash makes it easy to design scroll bars that are NOT consistent in appearance. I for one find random triangle-like objects floating in vague proximity to possibly truncated text with no vertical throughline unintuitive. Yet these opaque every-Flash-app-makes-you-relearn-navigation approaches seem to proliferate…
June 29th, 2007 at 7:03 am
The HIG guidelines only apply to office work. They are a relic that should be enjoyed in that context. It’s beautiful literature, very thought-provoking, technically and culturally significant. The best thing to learn from it is user-centric design, putting yourself into the soft bunny slippers of a user of your app and making the app speak the user’s language, not vice versa.
The interface guidelines that Logic Pro follows are those from the music and audio studio, not the computer. You control Logic Pro with musical instruments and mixing controllers (banks of programmable knobs and sliders and buttons, transport controls, jog wheel, etc) not a mouse. The interface conventions of music and audio predate the personal computer entirely. I learned audio mixing in the 1970’s before I was 10 years old, it works the same in the current version of Logic Pro.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Re: Travis Butler’s comments
Travis, thanks for your comments. I would argue that smart phones, VCR’s and blinking clocks are examples of poor user interaction design and not a lack of consistency.
The two stalk Ford is a good example for consistency. We used to have two cars at one point, each with two stalks but the controls were reversed. However with cruise control, telephone controls and radio controls being incorporated into the steering wheel show if we are too rigid we can stifle innovation. These changes make a compromise between consistency and proximity for the sake of improved safety. The look of those stalks varying from car to car is not an issue. Their relative layout can be an issue. The iPhoto search box being in the bottom right rather than top right can make you pause in your workflow. However absolute placement for specific controls within a window are not covered by the HIG.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:30 am
There have been several mentions about scroll bars in the comments. Again I would argue that the difference in look of scroll bars between Windows & Mac and between Aqua and iTunes 7 does not detract from their usability.
Creating a new theme for an application to reflect its metaphor is not going to trip users up. iTunes 7 is just ugly, not less usable as the user interaction is unchanged.
However there are issues with custom controls in terms of changing their behaviour (such as brushed metal window dragging) that can cause issues. I think I may post another entry rather than just a comment on that though so I can give it some thought.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Consistency means more than just “looking the same.” It also means that things that look similar should *behave* the same. For example, both Safari and the Finder have a “back” button which looks exactly the same. Consistent, right? No. It *behaves* inconsistently. Try this: Put a Finder window in the background and click its back button. The finder becomes active, but doesn’t go back. Now try the same with Safari: The window becomes active, *and* the back button is triggered. It’s an inconsisten behaviour, and it’s one of the little things that make you uncomfortable because it your computer behaves a little bit different than how you think it should. It also makes you scared. If I click on this window, will something happen?
(This is admittedly a somewhat bad example because Safari and the Finder at least *show* you that one back button is active and the other isn’t, but it’s the first example that occured to me)
This is where consistency is important. Looks don’t really matter too much. It doesn’t matter whether your back button is a green arrow like in some versions of Firefox, or a black button with an arrow like in Safari and the Finder. What matters is that all back buttons behave the same so the user can get used to a behaviour, and trust that his actions always lead to the same reactions from the computer.
July 1st, 2007 at 9:46 pm
In paragraph 3 you mean flouting. To flaunt something is to show it off. To flagrantly ignore something is to flout it.
– Chrie
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:53 am
[...] The Daydream Blog » Blog Archive » Searching for the HIG’s Boson Some nice, insightful commentary on the relevance of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines in 2007. Good stuff, for anyone interested in interface design. (tags: mac os ui interface interaction design usability) [...]
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 pm
[...] from iTunes 7. And so the now infamous Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) controversy continues:Searching for the HIG’s Bosun, at Daydream Blog I’m learning that some of the things that I’ve always stood behind [...]