SMARTPHONE UI NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND THE IPHONE SAYS GOOGLE DESIGN CHIEF

The Vice President of Design at Google Matias Duarte says  the iPhone's user interface, or in other words, iOS, is "heavy and burdensome." He also talked about Android Wear UI design. The problem according to Duarte is that no major innovations have happened in smartphone interface design since, and the industry as a whole is stuck with the iPhone model without really assessing our changing needs.

"It's easy for things to settle on standards that are sub optimal. Its very for things to catalyse into local maxima that are hard to break out of... "You had things like the PalmPilot, which was a little screen with a little row of icons, but then you also had things like a Blackberry that didn't look like that at all... "Frankly it's not a world where the best package wins. It would've been very easy, if Apple had been a year later to market, that instead the market's expectations of what a smartphone should be crystallised around something that's more like what the Blackberry was... But it also crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don't scale very well. This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome," Duarte said.

When talking about Apple's watch OS Duarte said, "Why should there be a grid of apps on a watch? It's this tiny thing and it's hard to pick through and hard to organise and so on and so forth. And as you accrue and use more and more services that's going to start to get really ridiculous. You're going to have a massive grid on a little tiny screen. So that created this opportunity where we could try something new and different."

In case of design philosophy of apps arranged in rows on smartphones and tablets, Duarte said, "I'm tempted occasionally to just organise all my icons by color... It starts to look really old and it starts to bring a lot of baggage with it... It can't be the ultimate solution, it is completely implausible. It cannot be that the optimal solution for 30 years ago, one of the potentially viable solutions for 30 years ago, is going to be applicable for all time."

When asked what Google is working on for now and how it will change the smartphone in everyone's pocket, Duarte said, "I hope so. But even if I knew I couldn't tell you."

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