iOS 7

Yesterday, Apple debuted the new iOS 7 at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Jony Ive’s design, which had been touted as “black and white and flat all over,” turns out to be lushly colorful, subtly dimensional and exquisitely modern. Ive has, indeed, delivered a wow.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, called the new look, “the most significant iOS update since the original iPhone.” The change is both radical and comfortable. Many of the interaction conventions have been preserved from previous versions, but it will make existing iPhones (from iPhone 4 forward) feel like brand new devices.
Many people questioned how Ive, a hardware designer, would fare with software. The answer, and we should not be surprised, is that his approach is more sculptural than purely graphic. The new, flatter icons feel a bit generic, but they are not the focus of the new design. Instead, it is the way the physical properties of the different user interface (UI) layers are deployed that creates the visual interest. The control center preference panel, for instance, now slides up from the bottom of the screen as a translucent plane that revels the color of whatever is beneath, like a piece of frosted glass. Similarly, Ive has created a virtual “shadowbox” by using a parallax effect to make it seem as if there were an eighth of an inch space between the wallpaper image on the home screen, for instance, and the grid of icons hovering above. This effect is particularly striking and effective on the new weather app, where it can appear to be snowing inside your phone!
Ive himself was not present in the flesh, but introduced iOS 7 via one of his motivational videos. With his close-cropped hair and stubble and signature grey v-neck t-shirt, Ive resembles nothing as much as a modern zen monk. Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, “If I have a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony.” It is hard not to see Ive as the spiritual core of Apple. Interestingly, when Tim Cook wrapped up the morning’s session, he thanked Apple’s employees for all of the great work on display and said that is was, “a joy to serve with them,” as if he were a member of  the military or—more pointedly—a church.
Ive cants towards profundity and the universality of human experience with little pearls like, “design is the whole thing,” or the, “enduring beautiy in simplicity,” but there is no arguing with the results. In his team’s process of, “bringing order to complexity,” they have created a new model for the mobile experience. Five years from now we will all probably rail against the Joseph Cornell shadowbox UI model, but for now it seems fresh and new—and not so easy to imitate.
The new design consists of several sub-themes, only one of which really matches the ”black and white and flat all over” description. The relation between these sub-themes is not completely worked out, nor are all the details of all the components. iOS app designer Phill Ryu pointed out in a Vine animation an amusing visual contradiction in the new lock screen. The legend reads “slide to unlock” right above an arrow, leading many users to the frustration of trying to slide up to unlock! Meanwhile, Cap Watkins, design lead at ETSY, refers to iOS 7 as “unpolished by design.”
Personally, I think they ran out of time and did the best they could with the details while trying to build in the “wow” that I think they achieved. And that “black and white and flat all over” part is reserved for the data components like clocks, compass and stocks, and it’s perhaps the most stunningly pure modernism in the whole design program. The details, I’m sure, will get worked out before the official release.
What Jony Ive could not say in his carefully intoned introduction, because it would make this process seem less magical than it is, is that for product design to work, it has to get out of the way of the user believing in it. This was why the Apple Maps launch was such a fiasco. We lost the ability to believe in our iPhones! The iPhone (and Apple’s products in general) have such high customer satisfaction because they allow the user to enter into a subconscious transference through which any defects are smoothed out. As Jaron Lanier articulated so well in his book, You Are Not A Gadget, we often change our own behavior in order to make it conform to what our technology needs of us—not the other way around. I think that for Apple’s primary audience of consumers and secondary audience of developers, the iOS 7 design will achieve that imaginative buy-in.
Please see my forthcoming posts on specific details and defects of the new design and on how iOS developers are reacting to the new APIs and features of the software developers kit (SDK.) Below is that introductory video from yesterday’s keynote.

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