“A set of polls on the Polar app [reveal that] of more than 45,000 votes cast on iOS 6 vs iOS 7′s icon designs, 65% of all votes were for new iOS 7 icons. The icons are only a part of the story, of course, but they reveal an important part of the design process (and problem) with iOS 7,” Anthony Wing Kosner writes for Forbes.
“The Next Web reports that Jony Ive actually farmed out the graphic design of the icons to Apple’s marketing team, who worked independently of the app team. By this logic, the somewhat uneven collection of icons was selected via some elaborate A/B testing process. This would explain why although designers seem to favor the individual icons of iOS 7 or iOS 6, ‘taken together,’ Polar founder Luke Wroblewski tells me, ‘the consensus seems to be the design of iOS 7 is off,” Kosner writes. “Why the divide and conquer approach? One obvious explanation is that the 7-month time frame was too fast for a more integrated design process.”
Kosner writes, “Mark Wilson on Fast Company’s design blog raises the idea that, ‘Ive let Apple’s marketing department build the new face of iOS because, in effect, the face of iOS is little more than a marketing ploy anyway.’ Wilson cites the use of transparent panels of graphics over user-selected photos as an example of how people will tune iOS 7 to their own tases anyway. ‘In practical use,’ he continues, ‘the iPhone’s new look and feel will be more often dictated and personalized by its users—thanks to a whole slew of choices made by Apple’s more traditional design team.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Exactly. See our own early example (iOS 7 beta 1) below: Apple’s basic iOS 7 example on the left vs. a MacDailyNews iPhone 5 running iOS 7 on the right.
Kosner writes, “I think there is a bit of a ploy at play with iOS 7 altogether—and the target is Android. On the Android and Me blog, Dustin Earley suggests that Apple’s new design could hurt Android merely by keeping developers occupied updating iOS apps instead of switching over to Android development… Apple has essentially created a boodoggle for developers to keep them occupied tending to their iOS apps and buying some valuable time until the release of the iPhone 5s.”
