Yet quite quickly I felt myself longing for more.

Yes, Apple is still moving forward. But the competition is so much more aggressive and innovative than a few years ago, that Apple will need to speed up if it wants to be seen again as a leader in innovation and design. The question is whether it can move from being a fast follower to a faster follower, and eventually return to being in a leader position again – one that changes the game and disrupts. Then again, perhaps the bigger question is whether it even needs or wants to do that.

Credit where due

Much of what Apple aims to do with iOS 7 is laudable. The layered transparency is a positive improvement, as it offers continuity and context in a simple way. iOS 7 also uses space better, and there are fewer superfluous boxes within boxes (for example in utility apps like Calculator and Stocks). The transitions also help bring the experience to life, and make the OS feel more contemporary. In Safari it’s great to see the interface play a subservient role to the page content.

On the functional side, it’s nice to see Apple replacing the clumsy graphical back button with a swipe to go back. The multitasking view is also clearly improved. But the most positive improvements for me are found in the Photos app, where the smart clustering and grouping help users organize and make sense of all their photos, and in the location-aware app suggestions offered through Apps Near Me.

And importantly, the new design of iOS 7 is also truly comprehensive – nothing is left untouched.

Major missed opportunities

As iOS 7 continues to rely on a grid of icons at the top level of the OS, the iconography of the native apps feels surprisingly rushed and sometimes amateurish. Since Apple in its WWDC communication so clearly emphasized the need for “perfection,” it should really deliver on that too.

In some places where translucency is used the text contrast is rather poor, and it’s tricky to read the text quickly – it’s the very opposite of glanceable design. And while the Control Center is a good idea, it’s a very busy screen – and that’s the first iteration. Imagine how it will look after a few more generations and many new functions are added!

The parallax viewing on the home screen feels like a gimmick, as does the cheesy background animation in the Weather app. The photo filter fad is also given too much prominence in the camera mode. These all feel like populist design choices (a decidedly un-Apple approach.)

A course correction, not a sea change

Overall, iOS 7 feels just a bit too predictable. The first thing Apple apparently wants users to feel is delight and surprise (followed by love and connection). But iOS 7 doesn’t offer much cause for surprise because hardly anything in iOS 7 feels new. Instead it feels familiar, and that’s because many of the design approaches in iOS 7 have been lifted from other platforms.

For example, Windows 8 makes use of bold typography and uses smooth transitions to bring the experience to life; WebOS had a multitasking view remarkably similar to what was shown in iOS 7; and Nokia’s innovative MeeGo OS made swiping gestures central to the smartphone experience (while it also placed great emphasis on consistent and meaningful iconography). In iOS 7 Apple has clearly adopted these and others’ designs, and have aimed to further improve them. And so amazingly, in design Apple now finds itself in the role of a fast follower.

Cursed by the Innovator’s Dilemma

When I last wrote about design at Apple, I was asking for more fundamental changes: “a radical refresh of iOS, a category-defining entry into wearables, or a confident push into services like search or commerce.” Yes, iOS was refreshed this week, but if you look beyond the surface level, it was hardly radical. Perhaps the fact that iOS now has hundreds of millions of active users is both a blessing and a curse for Apple. With that size, its priorities have moved from disrupting others to scaling and protecting what it has. As things unfold over the next few years, Apple will probably become a new textbook example of the Innovator’s Dilemma.

In the 90′s, when Apple was in crisis and had little to lose, its “Think Different” campaign celebrated gutsy innovation. That tune has changed dramatically, and the opening video at this week’s WWDC instead celebrated patience and perfection. “If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? It takes time.” Apple rose to prominence as a company that brilliantly anticipated customers’ future needs. But today Apple focuses mainly on serving their existing customers’ current needs.

When Jony Ive says that “iOS 7 is defining an important new direction,” and Tim Cook says that iOS 7 is “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone,” it tells me that Apple will be quite happy to continue as a fast follower. And so I will continue to admire how Apple adopts and improves the designs of others, and how it gracefully evolves iOS over time. But it seems I will have to look elsewhere for game-changing design and innovation.

Olof Schybergson is CEO and co-founder of the service design consultancy Fjord. Follow Fjord on Twitter @fjord.

Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Flash analysis: smart watches

Harish Rao, CTO, Global Infrastructure Services at Capgemini, suggested that CIOs answer this question in the Post-PC world: “We know the consumerization of enterprise is growing with both new devices and apps. How do I bring this into a non-denying mode of acceptance with caution? The challenge is to understand, digest, and exploit this movement for business purposes.” Rao noted that the most open-minded and agile enterprises will likely be the most successful in harnessing this change.

Part of the problem is the sheer number of devices, and likewise, the number of platforms finding their way into the corporate world. COO of Box, Dan Levin said the typical IT shop has 5 operating systems to manage now, requiring a next-generation set of solutions. Harish agrees, noting that we previously saw a ratio of 1 employees to 1.2 devices in the past. “Now it’s 1 to X and we don’t know what X is,” he said.

Levin himself carries no less than 7 devices to manage his workday: 2 laptops, 2 phones and 3 tablets. “I grab the one whose form factor is most suited to my task. And I want all my apps, content, access to be provisioned transparently across all of those devices,” Levin said. Surely that’s a nightmare for today’s IT unit. But there is at least one way to mange this problem while also providing data security.

“Simplicity is a given,” said Christian Lindholm, Board Advisor at Fjord. “Design-centric solutions are transforming and setting the trend. Simplification on the front end will solve some of these problems with multiple OSs.” Whether that’s virtual machines or remote access across devices, PCs and the cloud will depend on a business’s particular needs and resources.

Of course, resources are budgeted, so that’s a constraint. The BYOD crowd is getting around even that, however. Harish noted a “black market” for cloud services is cropping up. Instead of dealing with restrictive corporate policy and finances, employees are pulling out credit cards and their Amazon Web Services account to get things done. One way or another then, the BYOD crowd is going to use the hardware, software and services of their own choosing in this post-PC world. You can fight it and lose good talent or you can embrace it and look for opportunity.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Data markets: in search of new business models
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

Is this “less is more” approach revolutionary? Nope. Evolutionary? Absolutely.

As designers, we admire Clear’s UI, and we think it ties into some trends we’re watching here at Fjord (a digital service design agency). We’re betting that we will see more of this stripped down approach in the near future thanks to three big industry trends:

1.   A “mobile first” approach to features

The small-screen real estate of mobile devices has forced companies to scale down the bells and whistles and extraneous content afforded by the web, prioritizing features and services that make the most impact for the business and customer experience.

This also means that, in order to be successful, these types of applications are focused on a very narrow subset of features. In the case of Clear, not only did the company select the most rudimentary functions in a to-do list, it also followed through with a minimalistic form in the interface.

A simple interface requires paring down interactivity to its barest essence. It requires prioritizing features and focusing on the essentials needed for the desired outcome. The challenge is to know how much you need to create a viable and desirable product, how much can be stripped away, and how to prepare for scaling up the product and service. It will be interesting to see how these applications evolve and scale (or choose not to).

2. Thinking in 4-D and making the user a magician

User interface designers are beginning to realize there is no longer a need to hang on to representations of real life objects and drag them into the digital space. Digital is something else. It gives the user magical powers. It is no longer the user, a mouse and a complicated ballet of hand eye coordination. It is the user directly manipulating a screen or an object to access a magical, four-dimensional world (time, space, people, information) that exists invisibly almost anywhere the user goes. Clear’s focus on gestural UI bestows this sense of magic by escaping the traditional paradigm of check boxes and text inputs that normally exist with digital to-do lists.

3. Getting Agile with it

Both designers and mobile platforms are pushing toward cinematic user interface designs. While motion is nothing new in every day life, appropriately and meaningfully adopting it into consumer-facing applications poses a new set of challenges for designers who are more accustomed to formulating designs using static wireframes. A new prototyping and blended-discipline approach to software and product development such as the Agile method and the new Lean UX movement are making it easier and more acceptable than ever before to create and communicate dynamic, looks-like, feels-like prototypes. This has allowed for a cinematic approach to design that employs more dynamic movement. And much like a good movie, the most crucial bits are often found between those still frames.

It’s exciting to see Clear’s bold interface and the new capabilities it presents. But the Clear app is just a hint of the exponentially more thrilling interfaces we are likely to see in a coming wave of more complex products and services that will go far beyond the to-do list.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• How to stand out in the app development game

Fjord is headquartered in London (it’s the team behind BBC iPlayer’s mobile app and Flickr’s Windows Phone 7 app, to name a few). Each year they brainstorm and research the future of digital services, interfaces and design. This time last year, Fjord predicted that some of the big accomplishments of 2011 would be better ways to search/manage app overload (see improvements to iTunes/Siri), the reimagining of iPad magazines (Zite launched and was acquired by CNN) the gamification of everything, and the rise in mobile payment options (Square, Google Wallet). It’s also great to see that much of the areas we’ve been writing about here at GigaOM and GigaOM Pro for many months are either predicted to finally explode next year or they’re going to see a much-needed shakeout.

We’ve cherry-picked the list a bit to bring you a quick rundown of a few of next year’s next big things to watch out for, courtesy of Fjord, and what they mean for startups and entrepreneurs:

Consumer apps capitalize on the corporate market

Many companies have been dealing for years now with employees wanting to bring their own smartphones and tablets to work. It’s great for workers of course, because they use the devices they’re comfortable with and that makes them more efficient, but it’s also creating new expectations of consumer-type experiences when it comes to the software and services we use at work too. Workers want to use Dropbox, Evernote and Skype the same way they do at home.

What this means: As this continues to be more commonplace — companies of all sizes are starting to figure out how to do BYOD — doing security and compliance right are valuable services. Fjord predicts there will be a skyrocketing demand for these kinds of “corporate specific services, they just need to be built for the users and not the IT department.”

The wearable tech gold rush

The digital guys at Fjord believe there’s going to be a big change when it comes to wearable tech next year. “Prepare for a gold rush to stake out the territory of smart watches, digital jewelry and ‘wearables’,” they say. This means iPods as watches — which Kevin Tofel has written about extensively — as well as personal fitness devices like the Jawbone Up and the FitBit, but also stuff we haven’t seen yet. Perhaps an iPod watch with Siri that you talk to?

What this means: When technology is affixed to our clothing, on our wrist, or in our running shoes on a near-constant basis, it will trigger “a whole new category of service innovation,” says Fjord. That means new startups will be the gold prospectors on the hunt for fresh, thoughtful interface design, functionality and new ways to have wearables interact with our mobile phones, since that’s the most likely network to connect wearables.

Living room revolution

There’s a lot of change coming to the living room. Almost no one watches TV in the traditional way anymore, thanks to TiVo, Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Roku and a bunch of game consoles that act as media centers. With content companies embracing new platforms in fits and starts, the companies that will totally disrupt the pay TV model first are still being sorted out (Ryan Lawler recently discussed what he thinks is going to eventually have to happen). We still have confusing, terrible remote controls, and too many of them too — “for every new box and additional remote control in the room, end users are left more bewildered and frustrated,” notes Fjord. And when it comes to interfaces, that’s still up in the air.

What this means: While that traditional TV model is still sorting itself out, Fjord believes the hottest area of innovation next year will be with the “companion” device to the TV, a third device perhaps, where users interact with friends via chat, see what others are watching in real time (which we see in services like GetGlue and IntoNow), an important area for service providers to make money.

Banking 2.0

Some aspects of traditional banking have already been disrupted, like with peer-to-peer payments from PayPal, but coming next is mobile credit card payments (Square, Intuit) and near-field communications (NFC) payments, according to Fjord. Google is aiming to be a big player with its Wallet technology. But who else will emerge? Once the idea of a digital wallet takes hold, according to Fjord, it “will begin to shift the overall financial power balance from banks and credit card companies to companies that provide the smartest and best digital wallets. Banks will continue to move too slowly to take the lead.”

What this means: To survive, Fjord says, the most progressive banks will figure out how not to be just the “dump pipe” of transactions, but “put true user-centricity and customer value” front and center. That means prioritizing digital services and embracing mobile technology with an eye toward security.

Hands-free and eyes-free UI

We’ve already mentioned Siri twice in this post, so it’s no surprise that Fjord is betting multimodal interfaces that use voice and gestures instead of just touch are going to be huge next year. Siri’s not the only example though — Microsoft has its own version of voice control tech with TellMe, there’s Nuance and Vlingo. But Siri is the implementation of voice control that has finally brought the technology to the masses. Which means we’re going to see a whole lot more of this in the coming year. When it comes to gesture-based controls, Microsoft has already made it an established interface thanks to the success of Kinect for Xbox, which allows gamers to control and interact with their video games via voice and gestures. But next we’ll have to see how or if gestures make it big outside of gaming.

Another input is facial expressions — we already have some interfaces that recognize those. “A logical next step [is] to allow users to tag things as ‘liked’ by simply showing a thumbs up, or perhaps this gets as commoditized with an action as natural as the blink,” says Fjord.

What this means: While many of these new input methods are just arriving in the mainstream via a couple of brands of smartphones and video game consoles, there are going to be new business models emerging around them, Fjord predicts. The really forward-thinking companies will start to embrace new interfaces in the coming year for their products and services and figure out how to make it work for everyone, not just tech-savvy.

We’ll of course continue to cover these trends here at GigaOM over the next year to see how they develop and show you where they will take us in terms of gadgets we use and how we do business. What are your thoughts? Feel free to weigh in on how you think these themes will shakeout in the next year.

Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Eustaquio Santimano

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The Future of TV Can Bet on “Apps Everywhere”
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

We all know that Jobs was not simply a designer — but what does it really mean to be a designer? I think it’s someone who can take abstract ideas, turn them into reality and delight users. And make money while they’re doing it. By this definition, the last hundred years have not seen a greater designer than Jobs.

Some might disagree and claim Jonathan Ive is the real design force behind Apple.You could have said that of Susan Kare, who created many of the Mac interface designs some 30 years ago, or countless other brilliant designers. But recognising Jobs’s genius is to believe that design is always a process — the birth process of services and objects.

Jobs transformed the computer industry twice, first with Macintosh and more recently with iPad. He revolutionised the phone business, plus the music industry with iPod and iTunes, and the movies with Pixar. He even influenced retail with the Apple shops often referred to as “tech temples” for camped-out fanboys. Where else do you see customers smiling as they queue?

When I speak with friends, they all have their Steve Jobs inspiration stories. CEOs, business unit heads, general managers, product leads, business development: from everywhere within a company, from creative to financial, all look to Steve for inspiration, and salute his exceptional skills.

Great products are born out of deep, relentless dissatisfaction with the present and the status quo. Inside Apple’s walls, Jobs almost seemed to carry the burden of all humanity’s frustration with bad products. Apple kept its part of the bargain; now it is up to the rest of us to continue Jobs’ legacy of pursuing elegant simplicity.

Dear Steve, not only did you bring us great fish, you taught us to fish. Your craftsmanship was evident across the latest Apple products launched this week, and they are again an example of your leadership.

I believe you taught us that users do not only need new objects. What they need is constantly improving and empowering experiences. Form may be what ignites the lust in us, but it is experience that sustains our love. Steve Jobs was, and through his incomparable influence still remains, a true design genius.

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
– Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

Christian Lindholm is the Chief Innovation Officer at Fjord, a London-based convergence design agency. He worked at Yahoo and also spent ten years at Nokia in various roles. He invented the Nokia Navi-key user interface and is regarded as the father of the Series 60 user interface.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

After decades of click-and-scroll based interfaces for phones, the touch interface has effectively taken over, thanks to the success of the iPhone, and every mobile device maker is trying to catch up and figure out how to take advantage of it. That’s what Christian Lindholm — a managing partner of mobile design firm Fjord and a former handset designer for Nokia — told the GigaOM Mobilize conference today. Lindholm’s firm has helped design apps and services such as BBC’s iPlayer and Yahoo Go, and the designer is a former vice-president of global mobile services for Yahoo.

“Phones have been, and probably always will be, hit products,” Lindholm said in a discussion with Om Malik. “Whoever gets that hit is going to make billions,” he added, and Apple has clearly had the biggest hit in years. “When I was at Nokia, we tried to perfect the click-and-scroll user interface, and I think we nailed that.” In the past two years, Lindholm said, “Apple has nailed touch, and everyone is scrambling to catch up.”

The designer said that he sees touch evolving into several different categories of device in the future: one he called “big touch,” which would include devices such as the iPad (which Lindholm referred to as his “maxi Pad”), and that there will be a race to see “who has the balls to put the biggest display in their pocket.” Another category would be the standard 60-millimeter-wide phone form factor, but with touch, and then a third category would be what Lindholm called “small touch” — meaning devices that will be very small, possibly worn around the neck like jewelry, and will use touch but also smart keys and voice input.

Lindholm said that one thing this new class of devices could use as an interface is what he called “smart keys,” which would respond differently depending on how a user presses them or in which sequence. The designer illustrated this by touching Om’s shoulder and then squeezing his hand, asking “why can’t I have that kind of relationship with products, where if I squeeze them hard they respond faster?” Devices have to get smarter at understanding the context that a user is experiencing them in, Lindholm said, and right now they are “still at the Neanderthal level.”

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=gigaomtv&clip=pla_96858338-6da1-40e9-84ae-f6d96be31edc&autoPlay=false