Thursday, June 11, 2009 |
11:01 - Form Enslaving Function
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/design.html
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Oftentimes there's a very fine line between the design decisions Apple makes being genuinely functional—and therefore elegant—the way the company's fans like to believe they are, and being stubbornly stylish for the sake of style alone, defying attempts to justify them on functional grounds.
The little features they point out as points of pride on the new laptops are prime examples:
There’s a story behind each part. Take the thumbscoop, for example. It’s the indentation that allows you to open the display. If the scoop is too deep, you put too much pressure on the display to open it. If it’s too shallow, you struggle to open the display. It may seem incidental, but if the thumbscoop is well designed, it makes the difference between a bad experience and a good one. The challenge of the thumbscoop was to create a crisply machined scoop that was still comfortable to use. The designers at Apple worked on hundreds of versions of the thumbscoop — even examining them under an electron microscope — to get it right.
Then there’s the sleep indicator light. An indicator is functional only when it’s indicating something. Look to the right of the thumbscoop. You see nothing. Until you close the display and your MacBook Pro goes to sleep. Then an LED glow appears from inside the enclosure. How? During the CNC process, a machine first thins out the aluminum. Then a laser drill creates small perforations for the LED light to shine through. These holes are so tiny that the aluminum appears seamless when the light is off.
Very cool. And if you watch the video, you see what they're talking about—it's a joy to see such things in action. You can really feel why they feel so strongly about the things they do; once they've had a vision of how good something can look and/or work, it's hard to accept a compromise that means saying "no".
But look at this again: An indicator is functional only when it’s indicating something.
Um. Think about that for a second. Sounds like common sense at first. But it's not. At least not in this context.
The sleep indicator is indicating something, even when the laptop is awake. By being off, it's indicating the state of the machine. If you can't see it at all, it's telling you less than it is if you can see it, because you don't know it's there to indicate anything.
Why am I reminded of Hotblack Desiato's stuntship?
"Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it."
These laptops tell you nothing about the sleep state unless they're asleep. There's no visible indicator or even a label to show you were to look for one if it's not asleep. It can be argued that if the machine is open and running, it's obvious that it's awake; but then it's not obvious whether, if it's open and the screen is off, it's powered off or the screen has simply gone to sleep. Same if the screen is closed and it's hooked up to an external monitor. There are a variety of conditions where it's not giving you all the information; it's not a comprehensive indicator.
And that's very Apple: they know the fundamentals of utilitarian design, and then get carried away with stylishly novel user interface flourishes. They make deliberate decisions to simplify even an already simple concept—a sleep indicator—to remove utility in the interest of visual coolness. I'm sure this is not accidental; it's all very deeply ingrained into their moo.
Yet I'm not prepared to say that their devotion to form over function is so pervasive as to cause a problem. They're also aware of where the boundaries are beyond which they'd in fact be hindering usability in the interest of style. This indicator light is a pretty minor thing. And it does cover the bulk of use cases anyone would be interested in.
But it's not a perfect solution. And their invocation of what sounds like an industrial-design axiom misrepresents their motivations.
But hey: that's showbiz, baby.
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