A worm in the Apple?

When you opened a movie file in previous versions of QuickTime, you got just that -- the movie in a standard window, with basic controls. At the bottom of the window there were small "play," "forward" and "back" buttons. A pop-up vertical slider (revealed with a click on the speaker icon) controlled volume. These were all standard Mac OS cues -- which made it difficult to distinguish QuickTime as a technology distinct from the operating system, which perhaps, to Apple, was a problem.

QT4, in contrast, presents a "player" that mimics the appearance of a real-world object -- a high-tech Sony Watchman, say. Instead of opening a movie in a simple, Mac OS-standard window, QT4 presents movies within thick borders, designed to look like brushed metal, that consume valuable screen real estate. In fact, if you open more than one movie at once, you can quickly cover your entire screen. Despite this expanse of pixels, the QT4 player offers none of the standard Mac OS window elements, other than the "close" box, which has been so thoroughly made over as to be almost unrecognizable; if it weren't in the expected upper-left corner, it might lose all of its functional cues. It takes some non-intuitive and time-consuming noodling to resize the window, and as for collapsing it -- forget it.

It gets worse. Again, the real-world object metaphor dominates far beyond the suggestions of the Human Interface Guidelines. It's true they condone the use of metaphors -- after all, what are files? -- to "take advantage of people's knowledge of the world around them," but they also advise designers to keep in mind the limits of the ability of the computer "to support and extend the metaphor."

Case in point: QT4's volume control evolved from a vertical slider to a thumbwheel in the beta version. A thumbwheel? On a real product, which you can actually touch with a finger, a thumbwheel is an elegant technical solution as well as good ergonomics. On a computer screen, though, it's a disaster. Do you click and hold? Move the mouse upward in a straight line, or in an arc? It's difficult to figure out, and to use -- and this is the most-frequently used control in the application. The designers pulled back a bit on the final version and made it possible to control volume by dragging the mouse near the thumbwheel in a vertical motion; it works better, but not well, and the only way to come upon this trick is by trial and error. (Don't even bother clicking on the speaker icon as you used to -- that, for some reason, turns the sound off.)

QT4's other controls, including such basics as the "play" button, are at least as confusing. I've been using Macs for over a decade, but the QT4 "play" button has become a continual source of bafflement for me. Traditionally in the Mac OS, buttons have three states, all with distinct visual features: normal, pressed (highlighted) and disabled (grayed out). The buttons in the QT4 player hew so strongly to the high-tech color scheme that all the buttons appear disabled. Open the player without a file loaded, and the "play" button looks the same as when a movie is ready to go. What's more, if you press "play," it highlights (as a Mac user would expect), but then stays highlighted, and thus looks enabled. I can't count the times I clicked away uselessly before sussing this out.

There's more, far more -- enough to not only place QT4 at the top of the Interface Hall of Shame, but to engender criticism by Bruce Tognazzini, the founder of Apple's original Human Interface Group and publisher of the free webzine In a review of the new QuickTime, he writes: "In the hands of an amateur, slavish fidelity to the way a real-world artifact would act is often carried way too far. For example, in QuickTime 4.0, you cannot click on the little drag bar in the bottom center to open the 'drawer.' Instead, you must physically drag the bar down the screen. You cannot pass over the weird little buttons, like the one that looks like a shirt button on the right, and find out what they do. I guess since tooltips don't exist in the real world, the designers have eschewed them in their fake world. Another big mistake."

Finally, he adds: "I suspect you will see a lot more ego-driven design before things get better. I would suggest you do what I did, which was to move to a company that still prizes usability."

Apple declined to comment on the changes in the QuickTime 4.0 interface or what they may mean for the future of other Apple interfaces. But design and usability are hardly trivial concerns: Look no further than the tremendous sales of Apple's iMac, which was marketed on the merits of its sleek exterior and ease of use. As Tognazzini puts it: "Apple's claim to fame is that you can plug the machine in and use it." He adds, "a forgiving and supportive interface provides a smooth road to entry -- as these anomalous interfaces [such as QT4's] come in, the road gets bumpy."

Roy McDonald, the president and CEO of Casady & Greene, which produces and publishes software for both PCs and the Mac, agrees, saying, "The homogeneity of the interface standards is one of the things that sells the Mac."

A cautionary example is the interface overhaul Adobe Systems gave Version 7 of Illustrator, its industry-standard drawing application. In the Mac version, long-standing keyboard and tool shortcuts were altered or eliminated. The changes were so unpopular with long-time users that there was a "huge backlash," says Adobe's Illustrator product manager, Ted Alspach; many disgruntled users decided against upgrading, which cost Adobe a significant chunk of expected revenue.

Next Page: Will developers hang in if the interface gets funky?

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