Will Jony Ive Let A Flat Design For iOS 7 Fall Flat?

It has been the received wisdom that Jony Ive's major league debut as a software designer—the forthcoming iOS 7—will combine the exquisite minimalism of his famed hardware design with the trendy "flat" design that is considered to be the antidote to the skeumorphic fetishism of his former boss, Steve Jobs. This is considered such a sure thing that the fantasy prototype league, software division, has been cranking out the unauthorized prototypes. The best one so far, to my eye, is by designer Philip Joyce at the Irish digital agency Simply Zesty.

As you can see in the video above, Joyces has put as much attention on movement and interaction as on the more obvious cleaning up of the user interface (UI). This is a really important point about what the next version of iOS has to deliver. To understand why, consider the role of interface design, historically, in Apple 's products. The original Macintosh operating system (simple called "System") was remarkable just for what it was—the first commercially available graphical user interface (GUI) for a personal computer.

Each subsequent version of the MacOS, and eventually the versions of iOS, have used the design elements of the GUI to showcase (or show off) the rapidly advancing computing power of its chips. All of the mirror reflection in the iTunes cover flow, for example, is just a potlach of processing designed to impress.

Just as Microsoft 's Windows has existed in an uneasy dialectic with MacOS, the Windows Phone response to all of the synthetic illusionism of iOS has been a design end-game that intended to beat Apple by cutting off its options. In terms of market share, it has not worked out that way, but in terms of design it has made things a little difficult for Ive and Co.

The video above, put together by mobile design genius Luke Wroblewski, shows the interface elements and transitions from the 2010 release of Windows Phone. There is a lot of cool movement, but by contemporary standards it seems glacially slow and is perhaps trying too hard with too large a movement repetoire. The relevant modern design principle, articulated in what was then branded as "Metro," is that you make your elements simpler so that the whole system can be more dynamic. In computation terms, if you are not "spending" your calculations rendering fancy icons, you can allocate that processing power to the ways the elements interact.

Windows Phone, in attempting to cut off Apple's future options, tried to have it both ways, though. First it made it's icons completely flat and then it made some of them "live tiles" that would update with dynamic content like news headlines or social media images or videos. These dynamic elements both create the opportunity for network bottlenecks (which kill performance) and uncontrolled visual elements (which threaten design consistency). The space left for Apple to maneuver in is pretty accurately captured in the Simply Zesty concept designs. You will notice that the icons and such are flat-ish, but do contain some subtle gradients (which themselves could animate). And, as noted above, there is an interesting and original set of interaction movements that click along at a very brisk pace. It is, I think, in raw speed that Ive can communicate the super-computing surplus of the next iPhone's faster chip. What has previously been expressed by Apple through skeumorphic illusionism could now by rendered through interaction patterns that are blindingly fast.

Of course, as I discussed in my story about the use of physics in the (still) forthcoming Famo.us platform, once we have full control of the physical properties of our screen interactions we will begin to play those properties as we do with music. Fast movements will be contrasted with slow movements to create certain cognitive effects. Famo.us is also a leader in creating fully cross-platform control of dimensionality within interface design, and it will be interesting to see how much Ive decides to break the frontal plane to suggest the world behind the screen.

Most importantly, perhaps, Apple has to demonstrate with the next version of iOS all of the reasons why native platforms are superior to the web. Famo.us and Firefox OS, to use just two notable examples, are continuing to push what can be done in HTML5 even as many big tech companies have re-pivoted towards native apps. So things like the way the camera interacts with the other default apps is particularly critical, because that is one "device APIs" not yet available in HTML5.

With competitors like Samsung's "Life Companion" suite of onboard apps in the Galaxy S4 and Facebook 's "Home" there is increased attention to the ways that the "circuits" of default apps work together. I would expect that Apple's design team is focusing beyond flatness and onto the movement possibilities that flatness engenders to make all of these pieces work together in the beautiful way that we expect from Apple.

If Ive does it right, iOS 7 will feel like what we imagined iOS was all along—a world of subtle interactions engineered with the same kind of precision as its enclosing hardware. It is the ways that the design moves beyond flatness that will keep it from falling flat.

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