The Illusion of Smart
I’ve been obsessed with mobile devices for as long as I’ve been obsessed with computers. My grandfather was one of the first cellular phone retailers in the US and as recently as college I hacked together ubiquitous computing platforms to satiate my desire of pervasive connectivity to what we now call “the cloud” and then I just called The Internet.
My desk right now is littered with cell phones from all major carriers with all but one of the major Smart Phone platforms: iPhone OS, Palm WebOS and Android 1 and 2. As part of my very often fun job, I take it upon myself to know how people experience the content and experiences we create. To do so, I research all manner of non-desktop/laptop computing experiences (video games, mobile, etc). I also supervise app development, so there’s that.
The business press has been rife with the “______ killer” trope. For every winner, there has to be a killer, and for every imposed hegemonic “ruler” by virtue of success, the technology press (who are usually little more than regurgitation machines for blogs and press releases), name a “killer” and root for it as they simultaneously plan for its demise.
And so enters the iPhone.
And also entering the ring, a Droid and a Palm Pre.
I’m not going to get into my thoughts on the App Store process (which I view is Apple doing what they do normally, focusing on self-reflective consistency rather than appeasement), or the recent flouncings away from the App Store (which I regard as no different than high profile flouncing away from Apple in 90′s).
What I want to focus on is why one device (namely the iPhone) “feels” so much better than the others, and what the others should do to catch up. Oh, and what effect Pixar had on the iPhone.
In oenology or in the gustatory appreciation, there is a concept known as “mouthfeel,” the chemical and physical interaction in the mouth which causes the first sensation of taste and appreciation of what is ingested. Its the first way to tell if what you are eating or drinking is “good” even before primary taste takes over, or how it sits in your belly.
Smartphones have this concept too, and I’ll call it Finger Feel. It’s the near implicit, subjective feeling of “polish” that you get from smartphone in terms of interface speed, consistency, and the perceptual polish the device has.
The iPhone sets the benchmark for “finger feel.” Versus the Droid for instance, the iPhone’s interface “feels” good. Things are fast and the perceptual time between touch and action is instantaneous. Apple seems to understand that the instantaneous action/reaction is the most important thing, even over background thread performance. Like OSX, they put a lot of time into optimizing that experience through Quartz Extreme and use of a GPU to offset CPU load during these operations.
The end result is that while the processors might be identical (in fact I think the Droid is superior), the Apple “feels” better because there is less friction imposed through even fraction of a second
But that isn’t the only thing. The best way to give the perception of speed is cut animation entirely. And the best method of using animation is to dive head first into it.
The Droid and the Pre (but the Droid more) fall into the middle here. They adopt animation as a trope of their operating systems, but they don’t do it in a way that is consistent with what animation is, or more specifically, good animation.
It isn’t that animation is eye candy either. Animation in smart phones contribute to the feel of the device experience. They either help or hide perceptions of speed, yield a more tactile experience and provide visual (and tactical, even with haptics) feedback to actions on the screen. In some cases, animation driven by the user serves to increase dimensions of functionality (see Tweetie’s drag and hold to refresh).
Animation is, by virtual of adoption, no a fundamental part to the foundation of a smartphone experience. So lets see where the Droid gets it wrong, as well as the Pre, and why the iPhone gets it right.
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, of Disney’s original “Nine Old Men” wrote in their 1981 seminal book THe Illusion of Life about the Twelve Basic Principles of Animation.
These principles were deemed necessary to make sequential drawings infused with character and life, by exaggerating things in nature and on film that are taken for granted. They took the study of movement, physiology, mise en scene and single plane representation and came up with twelve rules that would give a collection of drawings life on the screen.
- Squash and stretch
- Anticipation
- Staging
- Straight ahead action and pose to pose
- Follow through and overlapping action
- Slow in and slow out
- Arcs
- Secondary Action
- Timing
- Exaggeration
- Solid drawing
- Appeal
It can be argued that these twelve laws only apply to film or video, and to some degree I agree, so we’ll only look at three laws that have specific applicability to smart devices.
So lets tackle a few points which I feel make the devices radically different.
- Anticipation
- Slow in and slow out
- Exaggeration
Anticipation
Anticipation is the subtle effect of movement opposite of the subsequent action. It acts to prepare the audience for an action. The wind up before throwing a ball is a good example of this.
Within the Android and iPhone OS systems, the use of anticipation is subtle. Within Android, there is little use of anticipation as the frame-rate of the animation wouldn’t make it read at all. The iPhone uses anticipation in correspondence with touch. Basically, the act of touching to indicate an action triggers a slight effect to indicate what action can be taken.
They do this through “sticky” state. Meaning, when you touch the icons on the spring board and move half an inch in either direction, the screen moves, anticipating the action of sliding springboard screens. But the tolerance is such that subtle movements, while anticipating the action, don’t necessarily trigger it unless followed through with (larger movement).
The iPhone uses this type of anticipation in other places, for instance the Slide to Unlock.
It’s a very creative use and something missing on most of Android. Android 2.0 has some form of this with their unlock screen, but the primary interface lacks the graphics speed necessary to make the small areas where it appears in the general interface work. On the iPhone it works to make the interface feel tactile. On Android it feels jittery.
Slow In/Slow Out
This is a principle also known as easing, and Core Animation has this as a default function of its animation library. You can see this in evidence in the way that lists slow down, in the way that elements accelerate then gradually slow on the screen.
The Droid attempts this, but something isn’t right. Lists are jittery, and lack the exponential deceleration that you come to expect when using the iPhone 3GS. Further, in the iPhone, easing is used in every transition, which in conjunction with the touch screen responsiveness, yields a tactility that even the haptic feedback in the Droid can’t match.
Easing, or Slow In/Slow Out is such a fundamental part of animation, its a wonder that no one but the iPhone can get it right. The Pre almost does, but it’s processor speed and graphics library is too sluggish to make it smooth.
I wager that the large part of what makes the “feel” of the iPhone so nice is the attention paid to just this function.
Exaggeration
In animation, exaggeration is used to make a cartoon look more lifelike. Because of the nature of the complexity of human acting, animation, if done with the subtleness of live action would look static. Exaggeration gets around this by making gestures larger than life, or “cartoony.”
Along with easing, this is something that the iPhone does really well, and to some extent, the Droid and Pre do as well. The iPhone again, by virtue of its better frame rate does this better. You can see it in action in a list-view. You can over-shoot the end of the list and the iPhone exaggerates the springiness to emphasize the terminus. In some applications like Tweetie, this is now being used as a way of refreshing the list.
This also happens in the Springboard when reaching the end, in flipping from view to view, and even in the “zoom in/zoom out” visualization when opening and closing an app.
Exaggeration is used in all of the devices to indicate changes of state, limitations and to call attention to transitions. However, on the iPhone 3GS, Apple has leveraged it in a better and more consistent fashion, I believe. Right down to something as simple as opening an app.
Conclusion
Does adhearance to good animation practices automatically make a better smartphone? I don’t think so. However, it makes for a better “feel” to the phone itself, which I do think engenders a better experience. I like the Droid, and had I never touched an iPhone 2G, 3G or 3GS, I think it would be the best phone on the market. It does a lot of things really well, and the Android 2.0 OS is pretty far progressed from the Sharp Zaurus’ Linux based PDA OS.
However, I’ve been an iPhone user since day 1. I have little problems with AT&T in Los Angeles (I do have problems in San Francisco but on my last trip up, it was better), and I also have the luxury and duty of having accounts on every provider.
For me, moving to the Droid, even for a short time, was frustrating. The interface was intuitive, but the level of animated, tactile and haptic feedback was sluggish, jittery and frustratingly inconsistent. More, the device didn’t “feel” as polished, even though on the pure technical level, it certainly is, if not more so.
The Palm is more polished aesthetically and in terms of animation principles, but again its processor makes those nice touches moot in relation to the jittery performance.
What Apple does right, and what they usually do right is favoring the feel over the perception of function. The iPhone, when reduced to its core, does very few things very very well. The App Framework is kept super strict to ensure that even as functionality is added by others, those things that it does well will still continue functioning in a consistent, predictable manner. This is why you can’t over-write the keyboard (which you can do on the Droid). Or install third party apps (like Pre and Droid).
I have problems with all the major cell networks. Verizon is reliable but slow often times, and slow to adopt/approve anything. T-Mobile is a non-player in service. Sprint, again. AT&T, horrible reliability and inconsistent service. They all are terrible. Always have been, always will be.
The device is what should matter, and given the nature of my job, is the only thing that does. Should the iPhone move to Verizon, would I follow it? Probably. Would I move to the Droid though to get Verizon permanently on my main phone? No.
The iPhone and App Store have fundamental problems. But they all have fundamental problems. Ideologically, technologically and procedurally. Competition is the best thing for Apple, Google and Palm. In the case of Palm, acquisition is the best thing, but that’s another topic. Device, network or app-store isn’t religion to me.
A device that serves as a digital avatar for yourself should function as smoothly as you want your life to be. For me, the iPhone fits that gap because I can treat it as a logical extension of my brain and a predictable connection to my outside brain in the clouds.