While good design helped Apple’s iPhone gain traction — it was not the driving factor of success, as many people assert. The driving factor was Apple’s innovation in touch screen technology. Nothing like it had come before — before the iPhone, you could only view sparse, text-only versions of sites like the New York Times.
Examining the evolution of technology allows us to recognize that technologies we see as normal today, such as the internet, were once simply imaginations in someone’s head.
Industry had attempted to create a responsive touch screen for years. The first was a resistive design, a soft touchscreen that flexed under touch to tell the device which part of the screen was being pressed. This flexible screen wasn’t very accurate because the device couldn’t precisely tell where the screen was being pressed. HP took the touchscreen a step further by using lasers. Touching the screen broke the lasers and allowed the device to move the cursor to where the screen was being pressed. This worked but didn’t allow for multitouch. In 2007, Apple released a capacitive touchscreen — the most innovative touchscreen technology ever seen.
While novel touchscreen innovation was the main factor for the iPhone’s success, design had a helping role. When a product is well designed, people are more likely to use it. Think about how flipping through news on Flipboard makes it addictive.
You can also think beyond a UI level about the product’s design more broadly — for example, compare Instagram to Facebook. People can post, like, and comment pictures on Facebook just as they can with Instagram. Many still prefer Instagram over Facebook, despite the features on Instagram simply being a subset of Facebook’s. The reason is Instagram is a product highly focused on one thing — seeing a snapshot of your friend’s life. On Instagram, there are less possible navigation states in which someone could get lost. The minimal interface makes it easy to figure out what to do next. It is this kind of design that plays a much larger role in paradigm shift. Consider the graph for example. Before graphs were designed, we were interacting with numbers either individually or in a list format. The invention of the graph enabled us to see the relationship between different variables in a way that we could not have before.*