Dead icons must die!
I recently spoke at Handsets World in Berlin about what specifically Apple has done to make using the iPhone a good user experience. The take away is that there is no secret magic to it. It is simple demonstrable, understandable principles and when a companies tries but fails to create good products, the primary reason is often organizational. It is not because the company does not have the right "rock star" design talent. It is because the organization has layers of management above the designers who has other priorities than creating great products and who wouldn't know a great product it it jumped up and bit them in the behind. Managerial talents are most often political and financial and they have the "yes, but" veto. Design priorities has to be driven from the top dog, or it will have limited effect.
According to some comments afterwards, I managed to annoy most of the audience who were high ranked people from the leading handset manufacturers and operators. Well, that wasn't my original intention, he-he, but I'm happy that the talk stirred some controversy and discussion.
Dead icons
The panel discussion afterwards was about "Achieving End User Delight" and one of the panelists, Sofia Svanteson from Ocean Observations had a great comment. She said said something along the lines of "Dead icons must die". Instead of static icons just symbolizing a function or some content, icons should reflect the content it represents. This jives with "using the content itself as the interface" something I have written about before.
IIRC she used the Sony Ericsson Xperia as an example. The Xperia home screen has "panels" that are live(?) miniatures of web pages, the calendar, music player, etc. The panels are user configurable.
She also used iPhone home screen icons as example. The icon for the Weather widget displays the actual weather for the default city, the Calendar icon shows today's date, etc. (Interestingly, the icon for the Clock does not show the time. The reality of power consumption. A constantly ticking clock would probably drain battery.)
Should the Stock widget icon show the stock price? Should the Maps icon show your position? Should the Notes icon show your lates notes?
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What we have in the iphone is a mix of icons that by nature are dead, like the youtube, the calculator, the sms,etc and the others in which in some cases could be alive or no.
All those icon running at the same time, i don't think would be a good idea.
Posted by: baakanit | November 19, 2008 at 16:57
Think the correct quote is "Death of the dumb icon".
Posted by: seba | October 07, 2008 at 10:21
The iPhone weather icon is probably not "live" because it has to get info from the internet = lots of 3G data traffic = expensive = angry customers who wants to turn it off.
From a UI perspective it would be cool though. I would also like to see a "proximity icon" that checked my phone book and displayed people near me (using the GPS). Privacy groups would go mad, though :)
Posted by: Jonas Persson | August 03, 2008 at 20:26
Do live icons need to become an engine at all if they are utilizing the underlying Java/Internet frameworks and just being shown on the screen?
Posted by: Antoine of MMM | July 21, 2008 at 18:59
The concept of living icons is genius and I fully agree.
But the iPhone's implementation (though admirable) leaves a lot to be desired. The main challenge is that they are not consistent.
The Text, Phone, Mail and Calendar are the only icons that surface real-time information (usually with a red dot and a number indicating number of waiting messages).
The weather icon does not show the current weather for the default city. You only assumed it did because there are other icons that are accurate. It's always showing sunny and 73º no matter what.
The clock, the weather, photos, and maps are worse than "dead icons" because they show fake information.
Posted by: Joe Pemberton | June 25, 2008 at 21:29
Oddly enough, I'll agree with Barbara :)
As soon as icons become 'live' they become widgets, or portlets. And this is a good thing to me. Yes, even when very small. Simple, glanceable icons of weather, time, messaging, etc. are absolutely what a mobile idle screen should be.
As far as the clock goes, how about updating 1x/minute? Like everyone else's clock does. Just toss the second hand, then. Seems obvious, and quite specific enough for the idle screen.
Posted by: Steven Hoober | June 20, 2008 at 17:22
That's very interesting.
I am just wondering if is really possible to create a J2ME application with live icons taking in consideration all the "restrictions".
Being a visual mobile designer I am always trying to push barriers and create inovatives looking feel, sadly most of the designs and functunality need to be discarded when it comes to development process. Makes me crazy.
Pål Bråtelund where can I find information about live icons in the Nokia S60s?
Posted by: diegooriani | June 20, 2008 at 11:07
I know this isn't regarded as sexy as the jesusPhone from Apple, but:
With Nokia S60s you can now build interfaces wiht live icons like these in web-run-time and create a whole menu as a widget.
Posted by: Pål Bråtelund | June 20, 2008 at 10:12
Very interesting post. To nit-pick: the iPhone weather icon *doesn't* change (at least v1.0), though it would be neat if it did.
Posted by: Kevin Arthur | June 19, 2008 at 17:16
At what point do "live" icons become a full fledged widget engine?
Maybe one better: certain applications can use larger icons, with correspondingly more live content. Which applications? Could be user configurable, based on frequency of use, don't know.
Posted by: Barbara Ballard | June 19, 2008 at 14:58