Desktop Identity Crisis

Following a series of leaks, Microsoft finally unveiled the new hybrid UI of Windows 8, pitching it as a “no compromise” design approach that would bring the best of their desktop and mobile offerings into one unified touch-enabled OS. The typography-centric design language that they perfected in recent years, Metro, will in all likelihood become their bread and butter in the consumer market and will remain a hot topic for years to come.

Meanwhile, Apple was busy shipping Lion, a milestone update that brought multi-touch gestures, native fullscreen support and other iOS-inspired UI elements to the desktop OS. They also made sure to upset legions of users by changing the scroll paradigm to match their mobile implementation and the rest is history. Mac third-party apps are coming in all sorts of flavors, and the somewhat unified look and feel of yore gave place to a hodgepodge of visual styles and design patterns: popovers, pull-to-refresh, icon-based tab navigation, monochrome icons, you name it.

Social Innovation

After several attempts to make a dent in the social space, Google finally decided to get its act together and design a social product that mere mortals can figure out how to use. Led by Andy Hertzfeld, a prominent member of the original Macintosh team, Google+ has indisputably packed a punch in social design, introducing some clever UI novelties such as Circles and a refreshed visual style that soon made it to other flagship Google products.

Facebook retaliated by introducing one of the most radical UI changes in its recent history, the profile timeline. On the mobile front, they managed to ship the eagerly awaited iPad app as a universal package that uses and abuses vertical tab navigation. Overall, the mobile apps look significantly better thanks to the recent design talent acquisitions; whether they work and feel as good is a whole other story.

Twitter overhauled their interface by changing the information architecture and rebranding some core elements of their service in an attempt to make it less intimidating to new users and more accommodating to advertisers. They also ended up ditching swipe gestures from their iPhone app as the last UI vestiges of the original Tweetie app acquired a year earlier.

Speaking of mobile apps, Path has managed to steal the spotlight from major social players by releasing a completely revamped interface that showcases some playful interactions and experimental design patterns.

Honorable Mentions

• Web, Native… or Hybrid?

  The bi-polar tone of this pointless debate has given place to another discussion about the UX implications of webviews, a new hybrid technique that involves displaying web pages within native containers. Even though this approach garnered widespread adoption by large companies such as Google, Facebook and even Apple, it has yet to prove itself by curbing the user experience inconsistencies it entails.

• Gestures vs. Buttons

  As touch screens are in the process of becoming the de facto standard, the transition to gestural interfaces is dividing the design community. As users, our interaction mental model is currently in a limbo state; we can hardly keep up with the overwhelming number of new interactions that we have to deal with on a daily basis. As designers, striking the balance between ease of use, memorability and discoverability is becoming increasingly hard in the lack of industry-wide standards.

• Skype Mac Redesign

  A textbook case of how to screw an app UI and trick the design community into fixing it for free.

• Linen

  Now available in red.

Wrapping up

The question is no longer whether a radical shift in our field is underway, but rather where it will be taking us in the years to come.

Goodbye 2011, welcome 2012.

Photo credits: Jesper Dyhre Nielsen / Joysaphine / Niall Kennedy / Brandon Thomas / Nick Sherman

An interesting concept video of what could possibly be Skype 6 for Mac.

According to the design team:

The design goal was to create a Skype that was so polite, users would be happy to leave it open, and visible on the screen at all times. The current 5.0 version of Skype is so large we find that users often cover the window with other applications or quit the program all together.

This all sounds good, except that the solution they are exploring ignores the fact that people don’t bother with profile pictures. Most of my contacts are using built-in defaults, generic images or no avatar at all.

Having said that, the concept introduces some interesting UI patterns like detachable chat windows and vertical tab navigation.

The team of experts is back to work I guess.

1Password, one of my favorite —and certainly most frequently used— Safari extensions, got a major interface overhaul in its latest Lion update, featuring a markedly improved version of the popover concept previously introduced in its Chrome counterpart.

The redesigned interface is a significant departure from its former self, a glorified drop-down menu that has never belonged to the toolbar. Thanks to a healthy amount of animated transitions and a successful combination of popovers and icon-centric sidebar navigation —two of the hottest interface design patterns as of this writing—, the new extension feels right at home in Safari 5.1 and Lion.

If you consider for a second the fact that a Safari extension with a dedicated multi-view interface and full-fledged navigation was all but conceivable in the pre-iOS era, you would quickly realize that the influence of iOS on its desktop sibling transcends gimmicky launchers and borderline confusing multi-touch gestures.

Mozilla has released a set of screenshots revealing interface experiments that could possibly make it into future releases of Firefox. Understandably the new design bears a striking resemblance to Google Chrome that even pixel polish cannot conceal; the shape and position of tabs, the unified address and search bar and the toolbox icon to the right have all been flagship features of Google's ever expanding browser.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

The Firefox UX team has decidedly taken the famous Picasso quote too literally.