Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of human interface design, has discussed the Apple Watch UI in a new Monocle on Design podcast episode. It follows an interview on Hodinkee Radio earlier in the month.
He said that a core challenge with the user interface design was working with the smallest display ever seen in an Apple product …
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Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design Alan Dye is no stranger to giving interviews about the Apple Watch and what goes into what shapes the software experience. Dye’s latest Apple Watch conversation can be heard on the Hodinkee Radio podcast where he discusses how Apple Watch faces are designed and much more.
After announcing the change in a company-wide memo last month, Apple today has officially updated Jony Ive’s executive bio on Apple.com to reflect his new role as Chief Design Officer. Ive was promoted from Senior Vice President of Design earlier this year. Ive’s bio notes that he reports directly to Tim Cook and is responsible for all design at Apple, including retail, Apple Campus 2, software, and hardware.
The Apple world this morning seems divided between those who seemingly haven’t grasped the implications of Apple’s ‘promotion’ of Jony Ive, merely taking Cook’s memo at face value, and those switching into full-on ‘Apple is doomed’ mode. The reality is, I think, a little more nuanced.
It seems pretty clear that this move is, as Seth outlined earlier, about Ive taking more of a backseat role – and especially being able to spend a lot more time back in England. Apple’s decision to announce the news on a day when the US markets were closed was obviously not coincidence.
Apple didn’t want to see a knee-jerk panic reaction on Wall Street setting its stock diving. But is there reason to panic? Or is it all much ado about nothing? Or something between the two … ?
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Alan Dye, Jony Ive, and Richard Howarth
Apple’s Jony Ive has served as the company’s Senior Vice President of Design for several years now, but Apple has announced today that the executive is being named Chief Design Officer (a newly-created position). Additionally, Ive and will be handing the managerial reins of both the industrial and software design units at Apple over to two new leaders on July 1st.
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 …
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WIRED has posted a new story on the Apple Watch, which revolves around interviews with Apple human interface designer Alan Dye and Apple’s VP Technology Kevin Lynch, who heads Apple Watch software. The piece shines new light on the foundation of the smartwatch project at Apple as well as some new details about the product — which ships later this month.
Amusingly, Lynch did not know what he would be working on when he accepted the Apple job. He walked into the role with the project already underway; early ‘experiments’ from the iPod team with click-wheels and such. Dye says that the idea for a watch blossomed during design meetings for iOS 7, Apple’s major software overhaul.