James Higgs has an interesting point about Apple’s sleek industrial design at odds with their software UIs. But I think he makes it in a poor way, and I’m not convinced he’s right that software should look sleek always.

The locus of the infantilist aesthetic seemed to be Steve Jobs himself, if his pronouncements at keynote presentations were an accurate representation. The default book in iBooks? Winnie the Pooh. The trailers he used to demonstrate the video capabilities of the device? Pixar movies. The music choices? Resolutely mainstream, conservative and sentimental. At his recent memorial service on the Apple campus, Coldplay and Norah Jones played. Can you imagine these artists playing at a Dieter Rams memorial?

I like Dieter Rams industrial design, but I wouldn’t want a world that had only designs like Dieter Rams. Some software is kitschy but not repulsive. Design reflects the use. Computers, iPhones, and iPads are portals into software, and thus I think Apple’s got the right idea in not making the frame busier than the artwork. But the software— the UIs— are evocative, communicative, and flexible. You don’t send love letters in Helvetica, and you shouldn’t demand every app look like it was made with German engineering sensibilities.

Is this really good design? Heck, Comic Sans might have been a better choice.

James Higgs continues:

And why, when we have these beautiful, clean, efficient devices, do we put up with this horrific, dishonest and childish crap?

The idea of honesty in an interface is a fascinating one. There are many dishonest interfaces in computing. Take file sizes— a 10 gigabyte file takes up exactly the same UI space as a 100 byte text file. Real-life icons in software can help deceive: moving a Facebook message to the trash bin is deceptive because it doesn’t follow the reasonable real-life analogy of trash, and instead merely obscures it from your view. But that’s not to say that all real-life icons or design hints are inherently deceptive. For instance, I don’t think anyone is tricked by Apple’s skeumorphic designs in iCal.

For me, the most interesting software interface design is being done at Microsoft with Metro on Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. Here there is no effort to offer spurious concordance with the legacy technologies the software replaces. It is digitally native design.

I’m not sure what Higgs means by digital native. I spend over 70% of my waking life looking at digital interfaces, and would still say that if someone came up with a design utterly ungrounded in physical expectations, I’d be pretty flummoxed (see “Brainfuck“. Does anyone think a “digital native” finds a Brainfuck interface more obvious than real-life cues? No, because we don’t work like turing machines, even if born into a digital lifestyle.)

Caveat: while I don’t agree with Higgs about design generally, I do think that the latest versions of Address Book and iCal are more frustrating to use than previous versions. Skeumorphism isn’t inherently confusing, but nonsensical buttons are— that little red bookmark in the Address Book remains powerfully unintuitive.