Ionrock Dot Org

Today I took a look at the apple student blog. It was pretty hokey. It reads like a group of silly kids whose lives revolve around why Apple is so amazing and why everything they want in life revolves around their lives on their Macs. Pretty sick. I can't say that I am fan of Apple beyond they do hire good designers. The thing that Apple does better than anyone is marketing. I agree they have some good usable designs, but I would argue that it is not because of the design alone. I do not think they have found the absolutely most usable path for things as much as they have introduced an interface that people want to work with, and more importantly, learn. A good example can even be seen in the student blog.

The menu at the top (of the blog, not the standard apple.com header), looks very clean and interesting. I moused over the links to see a submenu come up which also looked very clean. There was an smooth animation that slowly brought the submenu to view, increasing it opacity at an extremely well thought out pace. The problem is, when I tried to click on a submenu link, the menu crept back into obscurity as it appeared. Given this looked great, and dog gone it, I hovered again, but the same thing happened. I gave it two more tries before getting my mouse above a submenu link and it not disappearing. After that much effort, I didn't have the desire to give them another click.

This kind of flash is really nice and while my example is probably not the best, I think it is still important. If a person takes the time to learn the system as the designer intended what does that say about the "raw" usability? It seems that it would skew the results from a scientific standpoint, but let's be realistic. We live in the real world, so when someone learns to use a system it is perfectly valid to say that the system they are now an expert in is usable. I think Linux has this problem in an extreme way. People should see it and think to themselves how they would love to spend the weekend seeing how it all worked. Some people do and they enjoy Linux a great deal. It is the masses that need to get the same passion and I think that it may be alright to let go of a little scientific usablity in favor of creating something georgeous folks want to spend way to much time looking at.