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Apple’s human interface chief on the obsessive details you’ll never notice in your Apple Watch

There’s an oft-told story about Steve Jobs insisting the wiring inside the Macintosh be made to look neat even though few owners would ever see it. Apple’s human-interface chief Alan Dye, interviewed in Wired, says the same attention to detail lives on in Apple today, and is reflected in the care that went into the Apple Watch.

We have a group of people who are really, really super-talented, but they really care. They care about details that a designer might not show in his portfolio because it’s so arcane. And yet getting it right is so critical to the experience.

Dye illustrated the point by referring to the animated faces of the Apple Watch … 

Watching the animation of the butterflies or flowers or jellyfish, you might assume that it was artificially rendered. Not so, says Dye: you are looking at actual time-lapse photos.

We shot all this stuff. The butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it’s all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots.

The resolutions used for those photos were over-kill for the tiny display on the watch, way beyond what anyone could ever notice, but that doesn’t matter, said Dye: they wanted to do it right.

They shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch’s screen, which is less than a tenth the size. Now, “when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail,” Dye says. “And yet to us it’s really important to get those details right.”

Even the Micky Mouse animation, where Micky taps his foot once per second, is perfectly synchronised.

Line up a bunch of watches, Dye says, and they’ll all tap at exactly the same time.

Dye echoes a point often voiced by design head Jony Ive: that you know when you’ve hit on the right solution because it looks obvious and inevitable in retrospect. Yet reaching those ‘obvious’ solutions – like the concentric circles used to display activity against user-set goals – takes a ton of work. The circles, he said, took a year of thought and enough studies to fill a wall.

“Different ways that, at a glance, someone could understand that information, and easily assess where they’re at in their day, and hopefully in a really simple and visceral way feel like they accomplished something when they fill them up.” They arrived at three circles because there’s just something about a not-quite-complete circle that drives you just crazy enough to take those last 400 steps.

Check out the full piece over at Wired together with an earlier piece on the beginning of the watch project.

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Comments

  1. amine Bajeddi - 9 years ago

    Apple doesn’t innovate my ass !! That’s why Apple is really…really ahead of the crowd because every detail counts

    • irelandjnr - 9 years ago

      I hate the word innovation. It’s lost all meaning. Let’s change it for ‘care’.

    • mpias3785 - 9 years ago

      Apple innovates, but they innovate despite their customer’s wishes. 60% of iPhone users want better battery life but Apple innovates by making them thinner instead. Screw what the customers want, Jony wants to play.

      • If you think iPhone 6 doesn’t have a way better battery life than 5s, then I don’t know…

      • mpias3785 - 9 years ago

        Look at the Apple’s website, the differences are minimal. A couple extra mm of thickness and you could fit in a larger battery, add optical image stabilization and not have a protruding camera lens. People would’ve been happier with the longer battery life and better camera and I doubt anyone would’ve complained about the thickness.

  2. Mike Wilson - 9 years ago

    Nice internals, but at least for a watch Apple should have broken out of the rectangle beveled iPhone and made it round. It just not look right.

    • darwiniandude - 9 years ago

      Enough with the ‘it should be round’ garbage.
      Plenty of old classic watches are rounded rectangles.
      The fact is, square is better for displaying text. It also allows a round watch face with complications in the corners.
      Batteries are square etc.

      Photos do not do the watch justice, it looks so much better in person. It feels insanely expensive.

    • standardpull - 9 years ago

      Watches are round because rotating mechanical hands make a circle. The Apple Watch does not have that limitation.

      In the same light, telephone keypads are not round even though all telephones had a round dial for decades.

      • o0smoothies0o - 9 years ago

        Precisely what unintelligent people don’t get.

    • o0smoothies0o - 9 years ago

      Round would be highly unintelligent. Luckily Apple has the highly intelligent.

  3. mpias3785 - 9 years ago

    I suspected the Human Interface Guide was dumped when iOS 7 was being created and was convinced of it when Yosemite and iTunes 12 came out. You can probably find it in Jony Ive’s trash can.

  4. Shane - 9 years ago

    This is a perfect example of why I love Apple, and will likely get a watch even though I suspect gen2 will be the real thing. It is so hard to pass up even a first gen product from people who really care about what they do.

  5. Apple, awesome as always. My thought about those animated faces is, although they did it for the watch, it’ll be used on Macs as well, in some sort.

  6. o0smoothies0o - 9 years ago

    I knew those animations looked insanely real. I couldn’t believe they did such accurate work. Now it makes sense. This is why Apple destroys all other tech companies…that attention to detail.

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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