Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphic design has been hitting the headlines recently (in the specialist tech blogs, at any rate) because of Apple's use of the technique in their iOS and OS X operating systems. The name of the game is to make your software easier to use by including visual elements based on real-world items. You can see an example of skeuomorphism in action in Apple's iBooks app, which presents text in the form of a book, with page-turning animations and shading along the spine (along with other visual tricks to make the iPad look like a physical book). Whether or not you like this sort of thing depends almost entirely on personal taste. Steve Jobs liked these features so iOS is stuffed full of them, from iBooks to Calendar (designed to look like a desk calendar) to Contacts (looks like a tabbed contact book) to Find iPhone (looks like a folded map). Jony Ive apparently doesn't like skeuomorphic design and the recent changes to Apple's corporate structure, notably the departure of Scott Forstall, have prompted many pundits excitedly to predict the end of skeuomorphism in a flurry of app updates in iOS 7. To me that doesn't seem very likely. Would they really want to make large changes to most (all?) of there core apps? I suspect not but I think it's very likely that they will begin to remove some skeuomorphic features with the next release of iOS from the apps where those features no longer make sense or where they add little value. In some apps the first steps have already been taken. iBooks, for example, now has a continuous reading mode that allows you to scroll through the text without the (somewhat tedious but undeniably beautiful) page-turning effects of the original version. This takes some getting used to but it provides a much smoother interface and the removal, or at least the invisibility (since you can turn off the feature if you want to), of the skeuomorphic features doesn't in any way detract from the usability of the app. Could this, or should this, be extended to other apps? Apple will doubtless change their apps as and when they decide that doing so improves the user experience and, at least in my mind, removing the skeuomorphic features would probably be a good thing in most cases. It's likely that defining new interface elements that bear no resemblance to their real-world counterparts will improve usability once users get used to the changes and in many cases users probably won't have any problems at all. In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter whether you have buttons that look like buttons and pages that turn while you're reading a "book" as long as you can work out how to do everything you need to be able to do. Minimalism has some appeal and interfaces like those in Letterpress show that there are alternatives to skeuomorphism that work just as well. Exciting times are ahead of us.