What Jeff Atwood Knows about UI
blog.dansingerman.com
blog.dansingerman.com
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Hmmm....
Let’s take it slow:
“The iPhone, in fact, has the best fricking UI since the light switch.“
Pure assertion.
“The things that make it so great are the little details you don’t even consciously notice (the responsiveness, the accuracy of the touch screen, the beautiful transitions…)”
Unrelated to the home screen.
“The iPhone interface has changed the world. We have web apps now influenced by iPhone apps: we expect (good) web apps to save state, be responsive, be well designed…just like an iPhone app. When I see a Kindle now I want to pinch to zoom. I want to touch any screen I see (pretty much.)”
Unrelated to the home screen, assertions.
“Now I am not going to claim Jeff Atwood knows nothing about UI design. Stackoverflow has a decent usable layout, not much obviously wrong with it, but as Aaron Walter descibed in his great talk at FOWA- saying a web site is usable, is like saying food is edible; it meets minimum, not sufficient, expectations. There is little in the SO interface that delights.”
Doesn’t matter.
“Everything about the iPhone UI delights. And that is what makes it the best UI in decades.
Plus, I think they have sold a few too, so calling it a failure, well…”
Assertions. Unrelated.
There is nothing in there that could or should convince anyone that the iPhone home screen is the best.
I think that tweet is not rely worth replying to. There is nothing in there that could or should convince anyone that the iPhone home screen is bad.
It might be defensible to say something like “Your electrician has utterly failed if you have to press fifteen buttons to turn off the light in your bedroom” because while this sentence provides no argument to convince anybody in any way it is obvious enough. Most people will be able to think of a good argument on their own. That’s definitely not the case with Jeff Atwood’s tweet. That’s what you should have said in your blogpost. If Jeff Atwood wants to claim that the iPhone home screen sucks he has to be prepared to provide actual arguments.
2) The claim was the UI failed. I rebutted it with a description of why I believe it hadn't. If the original claim made clear that it was only the home screen at fault then you might have a point; I would be making a straw man argument. But that is not what I inferred. Especially given the hyperbole.
3) Ok, you don't like my post? Fine. Feel free to downvote. But I still think it does not deserve to be flagged.
4) I think I'll leave it with this: http://xkcd.com/386/
Two reasons:
1) Widgets. I have the controls for Spotify on the desktop, so I can hit play/pause/next without having to open the app.
2) Notifications. I can have a count of all of my notifications at the top of the screen, and pull down to see them all.