Chapter 4. Designing a Usable and Navigable UI
User interface design has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary over the past decade. Most would argue that Mac OS X and Windows 7 both have much more refined UIs than their predecessors. As true as that may be, their changes improve upon existing ideas rather than offer groundbreaking new ways of interacting with the computer. Web design is no different. All the innovations that have transpired — such as Ajax and HTML 5 — have revolutionized the structure and composition of a Web site, but not how users interact with it. Moreover, mobile and handheld devices offered a variety of new platforms to design for, but these were either lightweight versions of a desktop OS or a simplistic character-based menu.
Enter the iPhone.
The iPhone interface is not a traditional desktop interface, although it has a codebase closely based on Mac OS X. It is not a traditional mobile interface either, despite that it is obviously a mobile device. You build Web apps using Web technologies, but the iPhone interface is not a normal Web application interface either.
Because the underlying guts of iPhone Web applications are based on tried-and-true Web technologies, many will be tempted to come to the iPhone platform and naturally want to do the same things they've always done — except customizing it for the new device. That's why the biggest mindset change for developers is to grasp that they are creating iPhone Web apps, not Web applications that run on ...
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