Information is the Interface

Edward Tufte gave a lot of great insights in his video about the iPhone interface and the pages excerpted from his book about kiosk design for the national museum.  He really likes the information-heavy, elegant design of the iPhone’s interface, but can always find areas for improvement.  Tufte manages to give design critique and guidance in nice little quippy phrases like “Content is the interface; information is the interface,” and “Clutter and overload are failures of design.”  The success of the iPhone, according to Tufte, is its ability to fit as much information in its high-resolution screen as possible with disappearing, transparent  frames, small or nonexistent borders.  While looking at the stock market app, he notes that more information is always preferable to the cartoon design and bright colors highlighting the important information.  By focusing fitting in more information, rather than better looking information, we can achieve cleaner, more elegant design interfaces.  The other aspect of interface design that Tufte believes we can improve, is that to clarify something simply add detail.  Designers frequently keep the hierarchy of computer software organization, imposing spatial organization methods like clunky borders and stacked pages.  Instead, we should add detail that helps in the understanding of information instead of an organization that does not benefit the user, only the developer.

When applying this to our iPhone alarm clock interface, I think it would make the most sense to adopt Tufte’s approach to computer admin, by leaving it.  He notes at one point that icons can be clunky, and sometimes just words are better.  For an alarm clock, this makes a lot of sense, since there is so much variation between clock face design, people understand the word “alarm” or “stopwatch” better than seeing different clock icons.  Finally, there is a lot going on in temporal space with clocks and calendars, and stacking would just confuse things even further.  Instead, sliding between pages would help users and lead to a more elegant design.