Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

Our dear old Apple Inc has unveiled iOS 7: a radical overhaul of the company’s mobile design language and a renewed emphasis on how apps feel in motion over how they look on a static screen.

This presents third party software developers with a challenge: since graphical ornamentation has dominated the platform for such a long time, how do we migrate our products to the new world? And how do we migrate our selves? After all, we all liked the old look and spent years learning from it and emulating it. How could we have been wrong to do so?

We weren’t. I hate to say this, but there’s no universal truth in design. The old style wasn’t fatally flawed, and that’s not why it reached the end of its life at Apple. Product design is a tangled nest of features, storytelling, fashion, marketing, and technological constraint. It’s applied psychology. So it’s important to acknowledge where our love for the baubled aesthetic of iPhone OS 1.0 through iOS 6.1.4 came from, where our current displeasure is sourced, and why we need to adapt.

Why did we love the old style? It’s pretty simple: we love shiny, rounded surfaces and bright colors, and the old OS had those in spades. It was one of the most visually decorative operating systems of all time, and our appreciation for it was as natural and universal as our love of warm weather, vocal harmonies, and the smell of ripe strawberries. It looks great in screenshots.

iOS 7 has a lot less of that roundness and shininess. It doesn’t look like the hood (or the interior) of a classic car any longer. In motion and interactivity it’s way cooler and bubblier than the iPhone has ever been before, so you can tell why Apple has pushed video demos so hard on their marketing site, but it’s lacking some of the characteristics we found so appealing. It has fewer bulging surfaces as the old plastic buttons and toolbars are smoothed out. It has fewer rounded corners as more screen elements stretch from edge to edge.

But honestly, of all the changes we’ve seen, how many are contrary to the basic psychology of visual design? Nothing unveiled at WWDC 2013 actually makes you cringe (and don’t make me link to pictures that will actually make you cringe to prove you a hyperbole abuser). It has more of the bright colors we love. The old inner shadows, drop shadows, bevels, and gradients that muted the old aesthetic are gone. It’s the first truly Retina iPhone OS, and more than just allowing the team to use smaller fonts while retaining legibility, it makes each pixel work harder to earn its keep. Color and shape do all the talking now, and the blurred translucency of the interface allows the color to permeate the screen more than ever before.

Where keyboards, pickers, and action sheets were once imposing screen elements with a lot of personality of their own, they now reflect the personality of their environment. Your bright red app won’t have a dull blue-gray keyboard anymore; it’ll have a light red keyboard as the bits of UI beneath it shine through. If your app uses a lot of wood textures, the standard action sheets won’t look out of character because they’re no longer plastic. No matter what you do with your apps, iOS 7’s default visual language will be a better complement.

But even if you accept my assertion that the new visual style is not inherently ugly, how do you explain the strong gut reaction against it? Why are so many of us calling foul? Why is it going to be so hard for us to adjust?

Familiarity bias. Familiarity bias and loss aversion. We love what we know and we’re afraid of what we don’t, so we don’t want to see our old friend replaced with this new thing. It’s irrational, but it’s human nature. When we look at our parents and grandparents we don’t see a crowd of pudgy gray-haired wrinkle factories… we see our history. We love them even when they start smelling weird and wheezing all the time. We wouldn’t dream of replacing them.

Our mistaking a familiarity bias for inherent superiority is where our gut reaction against iOS 7 comes from. It’s a kind of xenophobia. Apple took our beloved iPhone and gave it back to us a stranger. Still walks and talks the same, still the heart and soul we love; just not the face we knew.

This rejection of the unfamiliar will fade over time, just as the weirdness fades after a friend changes their hairstyle or starts wearing glasses. The casual and uncommitted user, the person who bought an iPhone because their friends all have one, will embrace the change pretty easily. But as people who live and breathe iOS, our transition will be harder.

How do we transition our work? The same way we did it in the first place. The majority of good UI design done in the world is done in service of making something new feel like something familiar. That’s why we follow platform guidelines and idioms: familiarity is intuitiveness. We want to make our customers feel as comfortable using our apps as they do using the ones that came with the phone, so we cater to the platform rather than inventing UI from whole cloth.

Apple just reset the baseline for what is considered native. They’re changing the definition of familiarity. Like a government moving to the metric system or ridding itself of the penny, this change will cause a lot of difficulty for small businesses and piss off a lot of old-timers. But it’s ultimately for the best. iOS 7 is a new platform for us, and it’s time to port our iOS 6 apps.

Best to embrace it, the good and the bad, and get back to work.

When I was moving from Australia to North America, a lot of people would say things like “wow, I wish I could do that!” and I would look at them and say “you know you can, right?” They’d shrug off the idea. They had a job. They had a lease. They’d miss their family. As if those things don’t apply to everyone.

Big changes aren’t easy. They don’t just happen. I worked my ass off for a year to save enough money to move abroad. I had to apply for visas. I had to wait for my lease to expire and move out of my rented house. I had to put my belongings in boxes, or throw them away. I had to work and scrimp and save.

If you want to do something you think will make you happy, you have to make a plan and go for it. And if you aren’t planning to do something you think will make you happy, then what the fuck are you doing?

I used to move house a lot more than I do now. My dad is a handyman, the literal Jack of all trades, so his weekends (our weekends) were usually spent on home improvements. When you’re not paying for labor you can really do a lot of nice stuff on a shoestring.

But when you’re renovating your house every weekend for three years it becomes your hobby. And when you’re “done” renovating… that’s when you get bored. Some people would find another hobby, but we just moved instead. My family moved every three years from the time I was eight until I graduated from university. It’s not that we were actively trying to flip houses – I don’t think this was a particularly profitable venture – it was just what we did. Move into a fix ‘er upper, fix ‘er up, move on.

And so we wandered the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. Moving wasn’t that much of an imposition when there were no stairs and your dad owned a truck. Perth was a major city, but outside of the downtown area it was flat as a tack: a gigantic coastal plain sprawling with single-story homes, big yards, and double garages. The only reason you’d live in a high-rise apartment building was if you wanted a view of the water from over the top of some other building.

When I eventually left home to live with friends this pattern continued, except now it accelerated. The impetus to move became the termination of a lease rather than the state of a renovation, and I think I moved between rental houses every year until I left for the United States. Moving to the USA though was the ultimate in moving: packing all my belongings into a suitcase and a carry-on, no trucks in sight.

I spent my first summer in Palo Alto, California, in something of a straw hut near Stanford. It was a mother-in-law in the backyard of some student housing. Then on to the Vancouver neighborhood of Kitsilano, where I took a room with a nudist drug dealer and a float-plane pilot. Craigslist is weird. And then to Vancouver’s West End with an Australian friend, to Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood with my friend Brad Ellis, and then back to California. All in less than two years. Moving itself had become a hobby.

But now here we are… living in the same San Francisco apartment for 28 consecutive months.

It turns out your closet gets a little crufty when you stay put. I never realized this before, but if you’re moving all the time you’re given plenty of opportunity to throw away the things you aren’t using. Your medicine cabinet gets purged of expired drugs and ex-girlfriends’ makeup remover. You only keep one pair of shoes around. The pages and pages of notes and doodles you accumulate from work either go into cold storage or they go into the trash, and the shampoo and conditioner you took from that hotel one time are discarded. When you’re relatively stable, the crap just builds up. You have Christmas wrapping paper left over from two years ago and you start looking for “storage solutions”. Of course I could move, but nobody in this town owns a truck and there are a million stairs to climb. And I have rent control. And the cost of rent everywhere else is getting increasingly insane. And I kinda like my apartment.

So I stay. I set an annual reminder on my phone to clean the medicine cabinet, and I found a new hobby. As it turns out, new hobbies are actually kinda fun.

I used to be a blogger, but I haven’t been for a long time. I got out of the habit.

I still write an awful lot every day — I write to think, I think to design, and I design for a living — but I don’t noodle around aimlessly with words like I used to. Time to fix that.

So I left Square a few weeks ago.

I started there in early 2011, designer number three at a company of fifty people. Those were the days of doing all our own photography, not having quite figured out how to design for Android, not really having the bandwidth to design for the web, and staying up late working on Keynote decks before product announcements and board meetings. It was as hectic and stressful and exciting as any startup you can imagine. Except, y’know, with a profitable business model.

I’m amazingly proud to have been part of it during those formative years, and it’s helped me grow as a designer (and as a teammate) more than I can describe. I’ve taken on dozens of challenging — sometimes even bizarre — projects; working with some of the city’s best and brightest in every department. I’ve had long arguments with the likes of Jack Dorsey and Keith Rabois and sometimes even won. And I think I’ve learned more about the credit industry than I’ll need to know for the rest of my life.

Long before Square, before moving to the United States, I’d spent most of my career as a freelancer. Company structures and cross-team communication were unknown to me, collaborating and critiquing work with other designers was a mystery. I didn’t really know which parts of the design spectrum I was good or bad at, and didn’t really know what my process was because I’d never communicated it to anyone. Interviewing hundreds of designers, hiring dozens, and having to work and communicate in an ever-growing team of all different skills will teach you a lot. Square’s a big company now, and it’s been a helluva ride, but all rides end.

The whole time I’ve been at Square I’ve maintained my partnership at Black Pixel, my “other baby”. And maybe as a side-effect of keeping that contact alive, Dan Pasco and the rest of the partners never ever stopped asking me when I’m coming back. Eventually, the timing was right. It’s an amazing team that has grown and done wonderfully in my absence. I’m hoping with a few years under my belt elsewhere I can help make it an even better place to work, and produce ever more wonderful products. It’s a big challenge, and I’m glad to be back on board.

I don’t think I, or anybody in our little Apple-orbiting community of designers, engineers, and journalists can overstate how much of an impact this one man has had on our lives. Steve Jobs wasn’t merely a man, he was a phenomenon, and he’ll be terribly missed.

The thing that makes me saddest about his absence going forward is knowing that every time we quote him, every time we invoke his name, it’ll be in posthumous reference. Like quoting Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr, or any of the misfitting, troublemaking, beautiful souls in Think Different, we won’t be quoting a titan whose taste and work ethic and personality still drive an industry. We won’t be quoting him like we might still have to face him backstage at WWDC and pretend not to be shitting our pants. Going forward, every time we mention Steve Jobs we’ll be remembering a great man passed. I hope his legacy never fades.

His approach to life, his approach to building things the world can fall in love with, is timeless.

Lukas Mathis has at long last written a book. Lukas is one of those people whose blogs I’d encourage you to read instead of this one if you really had to pick, but thankfully you don’t and we can stay friends.

His book is called Designed For Use and I can assure you it’s worth a look. I say this as a man with a perennially half-read copy of About Face on his nightstand and a low tolerance for dry prose. Instructional design books tread a fine line between compelling reading and academic bore. Designed For Use delivers the goods with accessible writing and content that is broadly applicable.