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5 Usability Flaws in iPhone OS 4

"Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design." -Edward Tufte

By the end of May 2010, Apple exceeded Microsoft by market capitalization to become the largest tech company in the world. Cue sinister music.  Are they now too big to fail (at design)?

I am a dyed in the wool Apple devotee who daily asks himself questions like "What would Jony Ive think of this UI?"  So maybe I've been spoiled by Apple's long streak of design genius.  Or maybe I've gotten pickier with my pixels.  But I was disappointed to encounter several usability flaws in iPhone's OS 4 update.

It's tempting to just point out the flaws and excoriate Apple for losing its way.  But usability design is tough enough. It doesn't call for back-seat driving.  So I've cooked up simple design fixes and workarounds.  There are, of course, more elegant solutions out there and I hope you'll chime in with your ideas in the comments section.

1. ZOMG Folders are Cluttery!  Imagine if all the desk drawers and organizers in your house were completely transparent.  You might go crazy staring down your stuff.  That is how I feel about the appearance of folders. 

Curation as a Metaphor to Live By

Internet-y people use the term 'curation' to mean the process of finding, filtering and organizing digital artifacts according to one's tastes. If you've ever filled out a social network profile, hearted a track on last.fm, or rated a movie on netflix, then congrats, you've unlocked the Curator Badge!

Two weeks ago, Silicon Valley Insider pronounced with great fanfare that Content is No Longer King: Curation is King! "King Content is dead! Long live King Curation!" you can hear the Interwebizens Liking from their Second Life villas. This got me excited too, albeit for a different reason -- I love words and their agency. I love that the metaphor of curation is being embraced by the internet.

Hello World!

Hey interwebizens! Welcome to my relaunched blog. I blogged from 2003-2005 about identity, aesthetics, and semiotics. It was an interesting experience, but I have to admit that I never got the hang of it. My posts were too long, too academic, and sometimes too indulgent.

Well, fixed, fixed and fixed. I want this rebooted blog to be a fun and inspiring read. You can expect 1-2 posts per week, so you can safely add me to your RSS reader. I'll blog about what I know -- taste science, product design, and internet life. And I'll look forward to following up with you via comments.

So again, welcome to my taste blog!

Housekeeping note: In the interest of continuity, I'll be slowly (read: manually) importing my old blog posts from 2003-2005. Caveat lector: these aren't much related to the new blog.

On the value of idle thoughts

Treasure your idle thoughts because they are the only thoughts which are truly yours.

That grand realization you had that later you realized was obvious-- don't discount those. It really was a grand realization; and the one who discounted your achievement was not you, but society censuring through you.

What ever happened to the subject in aesthetics?

What ever happened to the subject in "aesthetics"? Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, proclaimed that perception of beauty was more concerned with form than function or content. Hence the formalism tradition of aesthetics, born in Plato and Aristotle, was reinvigorated with Kant's claims of aesthetic universality, and along this line, aesthetics developed into the branch of philosophy that saw itself more often concerned with social and impersonal art criticism than joie de vivre; it fell away from 'experiential philosophy, the spirit of Europe', as Kundera put it.