In this month's Scientific American column, I took a look at the outburst of controversy over software skeuomorphism, especially Apple's. (That strange bit of design-industry jargon comes from the Greek words skeuos, meaning tool, and morphê, meaning shape.)
A skeuomorph is a design element that's supposed to replicate the look of something that was a functional necessity in some previous incarnation of the product—such as fake woodgrain on vinyl flooring.
In software, skeuomorphs are everywhere: recycle bin icons for discarded documents, floppy-disk icons for the save button, and so on. But design critics say that Apple's recent love of skeuomorphism has gone too far.
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Truth is, the average Apple customer probably doesn't care nearly as much as the design critics (and neither do I). But here are some examples cited as skeuomorphism run amok:
•Switches: On the iPhone, the camera app offers a slider switch that moves between still photo mode and video recording mode. It resembles a toggle switch, like a light switch—and as a result, most people try to push the tiny button from one position to the other, which is a frustrating operation. (In truth, you can simply tap the switch to change its position, but not many people realize that.)
• Bookcases: The iBooks app (for iPad and iPhone) displays your downloaded e-books as though they are sitting, cover facing out, on a wooden bookcase. It's a strange, space-inefficient, slightly disorienting design; real books on a real bookcase don't sit cover out, of course. (It's an even weirder metaphor in the Newsstand app—who puts magazines on a wooden bookcase at home?)
• Sewn leather: Sometimes, you understand what Apple was going for; the green felt of Game Center is meant to represent a Las Vegas casino table, the yellow lines of the Notepad are meant to look like a legal pad. But the Find My Friends app on the iPhone has the look of sewn leather, complete with stitching. What real-world surface is it meant to suggest? Find My Friends has no analog in the physical world, so the faux leather is just bizarre.
• Paper shredder: The Passbook app is designed to collect and manage your e-tickets (boarding passes and movie tickets, for example). When you've used a ticket, you tap a little trash-can icon—and then you watch an animation of the ticket going through a paper shredder. The novelty wears off quickly, it is slow, and it is not consistent with the delete functions in other Apple software.
• Brushed metal: Apple's first skeuomistake has long since been fixed, but it was an omen of controversy to come. It was the QuickTime Player 4—the standard video-playback app on every Mac. Critics of the player had plenty of complaints. For example, the volume control was a weird thumbwheel peeking out of the left side of the window. Sure, you "turn down" the volume of your car radio, but on a screen? "The user is expected to make linear movements to operate a rotary control," one review observed. But the most baffling part was its margins, which looked like brushed aluminum. Who has a real-world brushed-metal TV?
