Back in the pre-web days, desktop UI designers would follow established interface guidelines for the applications they created. That’s why each time you installed a new Windows or Mac application the menus would be in familiar places and UI elements were organized in ways you were accustomed to. This made it possible to quickly learn new software. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft went to great lengths (and still do) to establish interaction models and design continuity across their product lines precisely for this reason.
The Dark Days of Early Web Usability
The web changed all this. For the first time user interfaces were being designed not by interaction experts but by graphic designers. These were people for whom usability was a foreign concept. Creativity was the primary goal. For the web projects I was involved in throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the lead designer in many cases had until recently been laying out print brochures and advertisements. While this had the long term benefit of introducing some UX innovations and aesthetic beauty to software design, it mostly made for poor web usability.
Tools like Adobe Flash only made things worse – much worse – and usability experts like Jakob Nielsen made whole careers out of criticizing the usability atrocities being committed daily on the web.
Eventually web usability improved, with new disciplines like “Information Architecture” focusing on user interaction, and filling the much needed gap between feature specifications and visual design. And of course most of today’s web builders were in grade school during the frontier days. Their entire educational and professional experience has been rooted in digital media and the web.
While web usability has improved dramatically over the years, web applications are still in many cases more difficult to use than desktop apps. Part of that is due to the open nature of the web and a lack of well defined (and followed) UX guidelines. Sure, there have been countless books and blogs written about web usability and there are established best practices, but the web is still seen as a creative frontier where every site and service feels the need to establish a revolutionary new interaction model.
Consider Google’s suite of web apps (Gmail, Docs, Analytics, Reader, etc.). Each product has a completely unique user interface and way of working, requiring a steep learning curve each time you venture into a new app. You would think that an engineering driven company with limitless resources would see the practical benefits in establishing a consistent visual language and interaction model across their products – but they don’t.
Enter the “App Economy”
Love it or hate it, Apple’s regulated acceptance policy for App Store submissions has – in general (there are always exceptions) – resulted in software with better usability than that found on the web. This is due in large part to Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines, which have become a kind of UX bible for iOS developers, helping designers and developers alike to think about usability in a broader context. For instance, instead of asking the question, “what’s a cool way that media should behave within my app?” they ask instead, “how can I follow the established behavior for media so that users of my app will intuitively understand how to use it?”
And contrary to what some have argued, adherence to Apple’s guidelines have by no means stifled innovation. Twenty minutes with an iOS app like Flipboard or Twitter for iPad and you realize that the most innovative and exciting software being developed today is for iOS. What’s more, these apps are setting a new standard of user experience and design excellence that’s rapidly making its way to other platforms like Android, connected TVs and, interestingly enough, even the web.
Consider for instance the aesthetic quality of The New York Times Chrome Web App (link works fine in Safari by the way):
It looks a lot like the New York Times iPad App, and like the iPad App, it’s simple, clean and easy to use. Which raises the bigger question, why isn’t nytimes.com more like their iPad app? Why the need for a special Chrome Web App, which is really just a redesigned website (it runs fine on Safari for instance). But that’s a bigger topic worthy of another post.