Prepping for my upcoming Techniques and Deliverables of Application and Solution Architecture course, I watched a video by the UX guru Jakob Nielsen talking about UX 2050. The future predictions were interesting, but what was more interesting to me was the information about the empirical work and iteration that went into the design of the humble telephone touch keypad by Bell Labs, way back when. They researched many models of keypad with different layouts, sizes, shapes, etc. They surveyed potential users, but they also empirically tested many models before settling on the final design. Nielsen estimates that the design has been employed 40 trillion times and has saved the world some 1 million person years of time! Would that some of our current web designers would take note!
On a related theme, Apple hired a Masters graduate in physics and computer science to work on the scrolling of lists, their acceleration and “bounce” at the bottom and top for IOS. This was an effort of some three plus months for a very qualified individual. Sounds crazy, but the lists behave beautifully, intuitively and feel natural. Just think how many times somebody, somewhere scrolls a list on an IOS device and you get a sense for how much this design attention has paid off.
Staying with the Apple theme, after watching the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) for 2021 last week, I again came away with the conviction of how much good design contributes and pays off downstream. Consider Unix (also, originally, from Bell Labs), which was taken up in academia and evolved into the Mach kernel paired with the Berkeley Distribution (BSD) OS, which Steve Jobs and Next used as the platform for Next Step, which later evolved into Apple’s System X, now MacOS, but is also the foundation for iOS (on the iPhone), iPadOS (on the iPad) and even watchOS on the Apple Watch and tvOS on the Apple TV.
WWDC showed a variety of examples of how the unified concepts underlying these systems facilitate advanced features, such as seamlessly controlling apps across multiple devices in proximity with a single keyboard and mouse (Universal Control); The Notes App which is available across the family and supports quick note taking, handwritten notes, capture of images, task management, cloud syncing, attachments, maps integration, tagging and more; the Live Text feature allows recognising text in photos and images from various sources, including device cameras, websites and image files. By the way, it is 20 years ago that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and the company bought Next Step to form the basis for the next generation of Apple operating systems.
Bottom line: It’s worth the effort to create great design, which is functional, human centric, efficient, durable and elegant. It pays off handsomely in the long term.