Since the early days of Apple, their approachable design made digital software and interfaces accessible and usable, to the extent that even a child could use them. But their innovation since the launch of the first iPad has either been incremental (for example iOS or the iPad Mini) or flawed (for example Siri and Apple Maps). Their software design has also remained stale with many contending that a refresh is overdue. Arguably, Apple is now playing defense, giving competitors like Microsoft and Google space to innovate and set trends in interface design across devices and platforms.

Steve Jobs was—notoriously, to many members of the design community—a fan of skeuomorphism, a style that relies on real-world metaphors and textures in digital interfaces. Fake leather, wood, paper and glass became commonplace in Apple applications, in addition to real-world metaphors like bookshelves, paper shredders, and even casinos. While skeuomorphism might have been beneficial in the early days of computing in helping less-tech-savvy types navigate a user interface, it now feels out of place in a world where most people are using a host of digital interfaces throughout the day, and where younger people have never even experienced physical rolodexes, paper shredders or giant desk calendars. From a design perspective, when used excessively skeuomorphism is at best out-dated, at worst confusing and tasteless. More importantly though it feels at extreme odds with Apple’s hardware, which is designed with sophistication and constraint. So where might Apple’s designs go?

Image courtesy of Apple

Looking at competitors like Microsoft, its new Windows UI style, across operating systems, is at the direct opposite end of the spectrum from skeuomorphism. It’s a modernist Swiss style, where all excessive embellishments are removed. The life in the experience comes from content and transitions, not from visual UI ornaments.

The wildly successful Android OS lands somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between skeuomorphism and the new minimalist Windows style. While visually Android is not leading the way (and here I include all of the Android licensees), there are now several interaction patterns and solutions that are better designed and more advanced than what iOS offers.

Microsoft has claimed the minimalist corner, and a radical Apple departure from their current UI style could be confusing to existing users, and would also admit defeat (which is not a very Apple-like trait as well). Apple has long had a human-centered design focus, and has gone further than most to make technology accessible to everyone. Apple’s challenge then is formidable: To retain the focus on simplicity, accessibility and ease-of-use, while at the same time refreshing their UI style and introducing design consistency across their increasingly wide range of software and services. It’s a tall order, and will need investment, focus and talent.

The most transformative devices today are ingenious pieces of software wrapped in desirable hardware. The Nike+ FuelBand or the self-learning Nest thermostat are examples of new software products that are wrapped in well-designed hardware. Apple has long been the master at this, but competitors are encroaching on their territory. Microsoft has gone against its hardware suppliers in creating its own showpiece for Surface—a move it had to make to ensure that the hardware maximized the potential of the software. But creating this combo is not easy, and Apple will have to work hard to stay on top. Various pieces of Apple software on a range of different devices connect to incredibly advanced services and algorithms in the cloud. Orchestrating this, and presenting the services to people in a way that’s easy and delightful to use, is very challenging. Not many companies do it well and consistently (which is why the relative failure of the complex Siri and Apple Maps services weren’t a big surprise for some).

With iOS, Apple showed the world how the graphical touch paradigm should work. Modern touch interfaces are now characterized by responsive, fluid and direct interaction, while tapping, swiping and pinching have become dominant gestures. Apple led the way in making touch interaction mainstream. Looking ahead, interactions will move beyond the screen into thin air, and both input and output will increasingly use voice. Apple now has an opportunity to once again lead the way and design the dominant interactions for what comes next in computing.

The wearables category will need great design to go mainstream, and Apple’s entry in the race could be inspiring. A radically redesigned iOS would be very interesting, and a confident Apple entry into “control point” services like search or commerce would be fascinating. If Cook and Ive are able to succeed with a bold investment in a service play, they will not only create immense value for Apple, but also demonstrate that they can pull off their own innovations, rather than just incremental changes to what Steve Jobs envisioned.

Om Malik’s recent piece here about the change-up at Apple highlighted an increasingly schedule-driven release culture under Tim Cook’s leadership. This might indeed become a challenge for software innovation. If the question “when do we ship” ever becomes more important than “what do we ship,” true innovation, risk-taking, and design excellence become hard.

A radical refresh of iOS, a category-defining entry into wearables, or a confident push into services like search or commerce could spell the real making of Tim Cook. Right now the jury is still out. For us designers, Jony Ive now has the chance to upgrade his status from mere legendary design Lord to design demigod. I hope he takes it.

Olof Schybergson is CEO and Co-Founder at the service design consultancy, Fjord. (Twitter: @fjord.)

Apple image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Chris Jaffe, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix, told us on-stage at our Mobilize event last week that this user interface was coming soon, so it shouldn’t be a total surprise. Jaffe explained how the interface on tablets is different from that of traditional televisions, adding that “With TV it’s left-right, up-down where as with the iPhone or tablet, it’s omnidirectional. We have to resolve the tension between being ubiquitous and being the best interface for the job.”

Jaffe shows off the new Netflix interface for Android phones in this video and if you’ve seen Netflix recently on a tablet, you’ll note the extreme similarity:

Indeed, the interface is now identical on both my Galaxy Nexus smartphone and Nexus 7 tablet. I particularly like the tapping mechanism Netflix uses now: One tap on a title provides information on the content while a double tap starts playback. And loading up the app on my Apple iPad shows even more consistency: Netflix now has one interface across multiple mobile platforms, which makes it easier to find and watch content regardless of the device used.

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Called Nina, the new virtual assistant software is targeted at the growing number of customer service apps companies are stockpiling in the iTunes and Google Play stores with a particular focus on mobile banking apps. According to Nuance VP and GM Robert Gary, customer-facing mobile apps have become increasingly complex which makes navigating the multiple layers of options available all the more difficult.

Nina aims to cut through that clutter, allowing a user to perform thousands of different tasks within a customer care app by simply stating what he wants to do, Gary said. For instance a simple credit card payment could require a dozen different actions on a mobile app: navigating to the payments section, selecting the card receiving payment and the account the transfer comes from, entering the date of the transaction and finally amount being paid.

Nina can reduce all of those steps down to a single simple command: “Pay $300 to my gold card from my checking account.” Nuance’s speech servers not only understand the words, but also mines them for as much information and context as possible. Whatever additional information Nina needs, it prompts the user with spoken follow-up questions. So in the example above, Nina would immediately navigate to the appropriate payment screen and populate the fields for a $300 transfer from the customer’s checking account to his gold card. Nina would only need to ask the customer whether he wanted to make the payment immediately or schedule it for a future date.

Nuance is offering Nina to customers as a white-label service they can customize and embed into their applications. In the demo I saw, Nina’s voice was that of Siri – Apple licenses the Siri’s audio library from Nuance – but Nuance has library of 40 different voices it plans to offer to developers so everyone doesn’t wind up with the same Siri clone. Enterprise customers can hire their own voice “talent” to further differentiate their virtual assistants from the field.

Nina’s first customer will be USAA, the financial services provider of the U.S. military. It plans to launch the voice assistant as part of pilot within its mobile banking app this month and then offer it to all of its members by early next year.

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I’ve been covering the wireless industry for 12 years, and for seven of those years I was sort of an unofficial wireless consultant for my decidedly non-technical friends. Every few months, I’d get asked my opinion on what phone to buy, and I would go on about 2G versus 3G, Symbian and BlackBerry vs. Java and BREW. Usually after a few minutes, my friends would cut me off and impatiently ask “which phone makes the best phone calls?”

I say “for seven of those years” because around five years ago those questions stopped. Sure, I would have conversations with friends about devices and the merits of different carriers, but my supposed expertise was no longer needed. Suddenly all these lawyers, teachers, cooks, writers and artists – and even some of their children — were no longer mystified by smartphone or mobile data services. They stopped asking questions about voice quality because the phone was no longer a mere telephony device.

What happened, of course, was the introduction of the iPhone. It certainly wasn’t the first smartphone to emerge in the wireless industry, but it was the device that bridged the gap between the technical and the consumer classes. Through Apple’s innovations with the Safari mobile browser, the touch user interface and the App Store, the iPhone first demonstrated that more than just a rudimentary Internet and computing experience could be had on our handsets.

It may have had precursors, but it was the iPhone that kicked off the mobile data revolution. The astonishing thing is Apple succeeded where the rest of the wireless industry had failed. Carriers, network vendors, handset makers and OS developers had the same vision as Steve Jobs and Apple. They just couldn’t execute it.

The first 3G network went live in 2001 in Japan. What followed was six years of missed opportunities and dashed expectations. Palms and BlackBerrys and Symbian devices – as well as the hordes of feature phones — added some traffic to the network, but few people were signing up for data plans, and those that did were only willing to pay a handful of dollars a month.

In Europe, carriers began grumbling that they had far overpaid for their 3G spectrum. The biggest single source of mobile data revenue for operators was SMS – a 2G service. That cockamamie idea — the unlimited plan — was born, haunting operators to this day. At the time carriers’ 3G networks were still largely unused and no one could conceive of a smartphone consuming more than 100 MB a month. Why not open up the spigot?

Well, the wireless industry got what it wanted, and now it’s drowning in its own riches. The iPhone, followed by Android, has precipitated an explosion of traffic on their networks. But it was hardly a controlled reaction. The mobile apps and services that now abound aren’t the voice, SMS, ringtones and wallpapers that carriers could easily monetize in years past. Instead they’ve become dumb pipes, and though their networks are carrying far more data than voice traffic, they’re still largely dependent on old-school voice and text revenue for their profits.

What’s more, that explosion in traffic quickly filled up their 3G networks, forcing them to invest billions in 3G upgrades and accelerate their 4G plans. If mobile data, however, continues to grow at the pace that Cisco Systems, Ericsson and independent analyst firms claim it will, then those investments will hardly be enough. Operators will need to radically change the fundamental designs of their networks – and grab as much spectrum as they can – to meet that demand.

Ironically, carriers once again find themselves dependent on Apple to keep the mobile data revolution going. The mobile data boom is now much bigger than the iPhone, but Apple’s devices are so pervasive that the choices it makes in radio technologies will have big repercussions throughout the industry. As I wrote in a recent GigaOM Pro analysis piece (subscription required), so long as Apple continues to make 3G iPhones, operators will be forced to continue investing in 3G networks.

I know some of you are going to accuse me of exaggeration here – that I’ve minimized the contributions of Palm, RIM and Nokia. I give those companies their due credit for some of the key innovations that led to the modern smartphone. But none of this produced a seismic shift in the mobile industry. The iPhone was the fault line, and ever since its first tremors issued forth in 2007, wireless has never been the same.

Please check out the rest of our stories on the fifth anniversary of the iPhone, collected here.

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What’s most impressive about Digital Life’s plans aren’t the individual apps, but the glue that binds them all together. If AT&T is truly going to build a service that will network hundreds of sensors, appliances and objects, there needs to be some kind of central intelligence to manage and filter that flow of information. There needs to be user interfaces that allow us to easily access and act upon that information. Otherwise, our personal Internet of things would quickly become filled with endless chatter, which, far from being useful, would actually be annoying.

Managing, filtering and redirecting that information, as well as building the interfaces that allow us to grok our home networks, are going to be monumental tasks, and I’m skeptical that a single company can put all of those disparate pieces together. But Lurie claimed that AT&T has the expertise and the resources to accomplish it. Luire isn’t just talking about building a simple iPad app or a management portal. He hinted at future in which we might be able to interact with our homes the same way comic book superheroes interact with their lairs: by voice command.

In an interview at Connected World earlier this month, I asked Lurie about the Watson voice recognition and natural language understanding technology developed in AT&T Labs (not to be confused with IBM’s Watson). Lurie’s division has already begun trials with Porsche and RIM’s QNX to use Watson as the intelligent interface for the connected car. Lurie wouldn’t commit directly to whether AT&T had plans to craft talking houses, but he did say that a connected home platform would be ideal use case for new technology coming out of the labs.

“I can’t make any forward-looking statements,” Lurie said. “But you can make some assumptions. When you think about the very high-quality voice recognition technology we’ve developed in AT&T Labs, you know we’re going to try to use it wherever possible. You’re going to see a lot more of it in the future.”

Building a platform, not just a service

While the applications and the interface will be the consumer-facing elements of Digital Life, the industry should think of it as an operating system like iOS for the home, Lurie said. If AT&T can pull all the pieces together, Digital Life’s developers won’t just be coding apps. They will be building devices and objects, which will be sold in AT&T’s online and physical stores and eventually on the shelves of hardware and electronics stores, Lurie said.

Right now, Digital Life is working directly with select camera, thermostat, door lock, power control and sensor companies (AT&T is still a bit closemouthed about who its partners are), but Lurie pledged to eventually release a software developer kit to third party devs, opening up the platform. Developers will then not only be able to link their appliances to AT&T’s digital home controller, but also embed their controls as apps into the Digital Life’s tablet, smartphone and Web interfaces.

What’s more those devs won’t just be building apps that sit in a vacuum. They will be able to interlink them, feeding information to each another and allowing the apps and their attendant devices to act autonomously on that information, either individually or in unison. For instance, a solar sensor could communicate with an app controlling a home’s window blinds, lowering them gradually through the day to block out direct sunlight while raising the blinds at the other end of the home to let in indirect light.

A connected refrigerator (yes, Lurie brought up that old chestnut) wouldn’t need to send you a text message every time the milk expired or the ground meat starts sending off spores. It could simply add those items to a pantry or grocery list app embedded within the Digital Life interface (and hopefully alert you not to consume them when you open the fridge door).

The key, Lurie claimed, is to make that linkage automatic and seamless. “When I plug that refrigerator in it has to come online,” he said. “It just has to work.”

Will AT&T become your home’s overlord?

Ceding that much control to a digital home platform sounds a bit scary, and Lurie was quick to point out that this level of interconnectivity won’t be for everyone. Digital Life will suggest profiles that cluster together groups of devices, but ultimately the power will be in the homeowners to decouple them.

If you don’t want your dishwasher talking to your coffee maker, that’s fine, Lurie said. If you want your home security system to text you every time the front door opens, rather than only alert you when it opens at a time it shouldn’t be open — that’s fine as well. Ultimately the power will be in the customers’ hands to customize these systems anyway they please, he said.

There’s also the issue of whether consumers or developers want to put this much power into the hands of their phone company. As the central control point, AT&T could become like Apple in more ways the one, determining which developers and which vendors make it into the Digital Life “app” store. Forget figurative walled gardens; AT&T could build virtual walls around an actual garden.

Lurie said AT&T is taking steps to keep the platform open, promising that Digital Life will be completely independent of its wireless and wireline consumer divisions. You will be able to use a Verizon iPad to access Digital Life, and you can connect your home to the Digital Life grid with a Comcast cable modem, he said.

But when it comes to acting as gatekeeper for applications and devices, AT&T probably won’t be making any apologies. Your home isn’t a smartphone. Apps linking into Digital Life will be able to access your door locks, your furnace and the cameras monitoring your children’s bedrooms. AT&T will keep its full API very close to its breast.

If we’re really going to achieve the Internet of things, we’re going to have to put a deep degree of trust in the entity that manages these interconnections. The question is: will that company be AT&T?

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user alexmillos

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Google is sharing this video to kickstart ideas and gather feedback for the connected, wearable device concept. It may sound like a silly project, but when you think about it, the device actually makes sense.

The initial design vision is for lightweight frames that don’t actually have full-sized, traditional glass lenses. Instead, a small display is available up and to the outside of the right eye so that information doesn’t interfere with viewing the world around. And as shown in the video, there would be some type of eye-tracking mechanism allowing users to interact with data on the small display — similar to a touchpad tap — although much of the interface could be controlled through spoken commands.

As silly as the idea may look or sound to some, I find merit in the approach, as it seems like a logical next step. We have gone from immobile desktops to portable laptops and now we are toting tablets and pocketable smartphones. Where can we go from here if not to the growing number of connected, wearable gadgets that we have been reporting on for well over a year?

From a consumer perspective, Project Glass also forwards another theme that has been growing. Touchable user interfaces have reinvented how we use mobile devices, but hardware design is advancing to the point where the interfaces are starting to disappear. Instead of holding an iPad or other tablet, people are interacting directly with an app, Web page, photo or other digital object in a reduced interface, with either voice or minute gestures. In essence, such glasses would allow people to digitally interact with the physical world around them without a device or user interface getting in the way.

This quote, told to the New York Times from someone who tried the glasses, says it better than I can:

They let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.

I expect that any first-production version of these glasses would heavily leverage a smartphone’s connectivity, much like many smart watches do today. The glasses would likely have a low-powered wireless connection to a phone, which would provide Internet connectivity, a place to store photos or a way to shoot them to the cloud, a GPS for location purposes, and so on.

Think of these spectacles as the next iteration of a smartphone, just one that you can wear and not look geeky. Well, not too geeky anyway. I’m all for wearable gadgets, so if Google is looking for beta testers, I’m in. How about you?

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However, after two weeks with my new iPad, I’m suddenly taking advantage of these gesture functions like never before. In fact, I can think of only three instances that I even need to hit the home button anymore: Waking the device, grabbing a screen shot and getting out of the mode that lets you delete or move apps around.

Gone is the hardware button double-tap to switch back and forth between apps. No more pressing the button to return to the home screen either. After rediscovering these gestures and then making them part of my navigation workflow, I’m getting around the iOS environment far faster on my iPad. Here’s a summary of the multi-finger gestures currently available for iPad navigation; aside from the standard two-finger pinching and double-tap to zoom functions.

Five-finger pinch: Here you just “grab” the screen at any point to get back to the Home screen. It’s quick, fast and simple.

Four-finger swipe up: Want to see the multitasking bar, showing you the most recently used apps? This gesture replaces the double-tap of the Home button. You can pick a different app here or simply swipe four fingers back down to hide the multitasking bar.

Four-finger swipe left / right: Thanks to this gesture, I actually don’t use the multitasking bar much, if at all, anymore. By swiping four fingers left or right, the iPad quickly moves you through your running and most recently used apps. I strategically open my most used apps one after another, so I can quickly swipe between Mail, Safari, and the Kindle app for example.

A few extra hints and helpers

First, you have to make sure that gestures are turned on for your iPad. Look in Settings, General, Multitasking Gestures to set the slider to On if needed.

Second, you can actually remove an app from your multitasking bar with gestures, although you can’t remove an app from the Home screens without the Home button. To do this, use the four-finger swipe up to show the currently running and recently used apps.

Then tap and hold on any of these apps to get into editing mode. Tap the upper left badge — the red minus sign — on any app or apps you want to remove. When done, simply do a four-finger swipe down to hide the multitasking bar and the selected apps are gone!

Again, these gestures first appeared over a year ago and you could have enabled them by a little bit of tweaking effort and a $5 download. But they’re the real deal now and after embracing them these past two weeks, I find the iPad much simpler, intuitive and quicker to use all around.

Maybe I’m just slow to the multi-finger gesture game though. Let me know if you’re using them in this simple little poll as I’m wondering if these gestures are a type of hidden function that some iPad owners don’t know about.

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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.

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