iTunes 7 and Interface Design

Or why every pixel is a pebble

The release of iTunes 7 has caused a lot of people — particularly developers — to dissect, detail, and discuss every minute change in its interface in order to divine and define what any potential new interface in Leopard might look like. At first glance it may seem crazy that every minute detail — from the use of all-caps in headers, to the use of flatter interface controls — is being discussed so much, but that’s what we do. After all, every pixel is a pebble…

Okay, before getting to my thoughts, some background. I’ve used Mac applications all the way back to 1984. I remember demoing MacWrite and MacPaint on a Mac 128K and watching people get blown away by the concept that you could copy artwork from a drawing application and paste it into a word processor. I’ve read and re-read Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines many times, all the way from the days when ‘Guidelines’ actually meant something closer to ‘This is how it should be done’ rather than ‘You know, you could do it this way, we’re not going to but it’s up to you…’.

As a company we’ve helped others design and implement their applications — on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux — from the design of their application and toolbar icons, through to usability testing and interface design. We’ve also designed interfaces for countless websites, web-based applications, CD-ROMs, touchscreens, and other bespoke systems.

So, whenever someone comes to us for advice on how to improve the interface of their application, we usually start by explaining that we know how difficult it is to actually get to the stage of having something worthy of criticism. That we know how much work it takes to get an interface put together in the first place. That we know the difficulty of coming up with a design that meets the different expectations of different users. That we know that there are always competing demands that can sometimes result in compromised decisions. That we know that cross-platform applications have their own issues, and that sometimes this means hard decisions have to be made. That we know that the requirements of backwards compatibility or future plans have an impact on the present interface design. That we know that there are lots of things that we don’t know about how they reached the decisions they made. That we know how much they’ve sweated to get where they are right now. And then we bitch and moan about every little thing that we can find in the interface that could possibly be improved. In a constructive and positive way of course.

So what does this have to do with the recently-released version of iTunes 7, and why does it seem that every other Mac developer and blogger is commenting on this application? For us, every little interface change that Apple makes is like dropping a pebble into the water — the ripples reach out far further than you might imagine.

Right now, countless Mac developers — ourselves included — are trying to work out whether the interface changes in iTunes 7 are an indication of things to come in Leopard; or whether they are changes intended for iTunes only, perhaps because of iTunes slightly unusual position of being a cross-platform application that has to wrap itself around the iTunes Store, which presents a lot of content in a very web-like fashion.

As Mac users we’re often very protective of the interface — we know it, we like it, we want to make sure that progress doesn’t spoil it. And as Mac software developers we’re concerned that the applications we write don’t suddenly look dated, out of place, or second-best.

Interface design is a big passion for us. We tend to obsess about every pixel and every click. And while we know that it isn’t always attainable, we’ll never stop pursuing perfection. And we’ll never forget that each pixel is a pebble that causes ripples.

Find out what other people are saying on this subject:

codepoetry, Michael Tsai, ThinkMac (2), Andy Matuschak, Dan Sandler