Edward Tufte on iPhone Human Interface Design

Inter­face Design and the iPhone

I found this thanks to John Gru­ber at Dar­ing Fire­ball and have been wait­ing days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte per­form­ing a super­fi­cial dis­sec­tion of the iPhone’s human inter­face design choices.

It’s a treat to hear some­one as adept in the field pulling apart the ele­gance of the iPhone and find­ing — largely — very lit­tle fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image res­o­lu­tion” and “Car­toon res­o­lu­tion” that I don’t get com­pletely — that it’s some­how a bad thing that the Stocks wid­get looks car­toony com­pared to his exam­ple of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app com­pared Apple’s ele­gance to some­thing you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watch­ing if you’re an iPhone aficionado.