Apple's MobileMe: good design, bad design

Apple’s process of migrating its .Mac service to the new MobileMe has not been as smooth as both users and Apple itself would have liked it to be. Fortunately, though, I’ve been having enough uptime to be able to explore its web interface and have a taste of its new features.

This is no place to discuss these features in detail, since there exists plenty of information on the subject. What I’d rather focus on is the discrepancies in design evident in the MobileMe website. First of all, I’m not forgetting that MobileMe is not like any other website: it’s a high-end, web-based interface to services that are not necessarily web-based. Nonetheless, in this regard the web interface should not (and does not) escape the basic needs of any other website, which can be summarized in three aspects of design:

information design;
graphic design;
web design.

Although requiring different technical skills, these three aspects of design are intertwined, so much that a lack in one ends up affecting negatively the other two. I would like to briefly explore how MobileMe approaches these aspects, then move on to some considerations on the one that is most neglected.

MobileMe’s information design

The most obvious consideration that can be made is that the website must depend on MobileMe’s overall information structure, and in a way replicate it on the web. This is not entirely accurate, since MobileMe’s desktop equivalent is split between different applications – and for good reasons. On Mac OS X: Mail, Address Book, iCal, iPhoto (and iMovie ‘08) and Finder for iDisk access. The same can be said about its mobile counterpart on iPhone and iPod touch. The web interface, on the contrary, treats these functionalities as branches of the same tree, effectively making sense out of the common MobileMe denomination.

But the website doesn’t just aggregate services, it also selects among a wider number using MobileMe to keep data synchronized. The ones left out of the web interface are either third-party services or ones for which a web interface makes little or no sense.

MobileMe’s graphic design

To effectively render this information structure, MobileMe’s interface draws its basic elements from its non-web counterparts, namely Mac OS X (more so than .Mac ever did) and the iPhone interface. The former is reflected in the window and icon design and iDisk’s column navigation, while the latter clearly shows in the square buttons used to access each application.

This combination makes a couple of important statements, especially for a service that, contrary to its predecessor, is not directed exclusively at Mac users: one is that, if it weren’t clear enough, Mac OS X and the iPhone/iPod OS are variants of the same beast (in this case, maybe, a Leopard?); the second is that thanks to the openness and flexibility of the web, anyone can enjoy an environment that not only looks similar to OS X, but also has the same ease of use.

MobileMe’s web design

There is clearly more to web design than (X)HTML and CSS. There’s also more to web design than a nice, clean, user-friendly graphical interface. This is where the three main elements of design come together and, if not finely tuned, clash. And this is where MobileMe shows its weakness.

One would expect a new web application, whose natural environment is Safari 3, to be not only totally standards-compliant but also absolutely flawless in terms of design. Here I’m talking about that part of the design that makes a website completely usable – and this includes letting the user manipulate the interface without hindering its basic functionality, let alone its aesthetic appeal.

I am not sure how much MobileMe’s website complies to standards. Although it does declare to be based on XHTML Strict 1.0, the single pages fail to validate, mostly because of the validation engine’s difficulty in digesting JavaScript, but also because of a number of XHTML errors.

Unfortunately, that isn’t all, because the website fails a very simple test: increasing the font size even of just one step breaks the design, and does so quite evidently. At first it’s only a matter of unwanted background images showing up, then, a couple of magnification steps further, text itself starts becoming impossible to read. This means that visually impaired users will have to resort to screen magnification, with less than desirable results.

OS-level resolution independence has still not been rolled out in Mac OS X or any other graphical OS interface, but an approximation of it can be performed. Even more so on the web, thanks to standards and to a few simple rules that can make even the most graphically complex designs flexible, resilient and shock proof on all modern browsers.

Personally I wouldn’t expect anything less than that from Apple: if web is not “its thing,” MobileMe might be a sign that it soon will be, and for this reason its web design should be on a par with the rest of its products.

Nella sezione

Filosofia

sabato 12 luglio 2008