Apple and the End of the Home Screen

While the purpose of WWDC is first and foremost a marketing-driven reach out to Apple’s increasingly large developer community, it’s interesting to note that over the last several years what is displayed has placed user experience increasingly higher as a priority.

The show this past week was much the same, with strong crowd reactions to developer friendly announcements like open sourced Swift, OS X 10.11 and iOS9, CarPlay OS updates, connections to HomeKit and of course the long awaited music service. More subtle but increasing important were the UI adjustments and changes that showcased Apple’s increasing desire to shift their traditional home screen driven user experience.

The demos and announcements showcased a consistent theme of predictive technology, push notifications and experiences, improved Siri support, multitasking and an extremely similar flipboard-style news reader. The last one is perhaps the most obvious example of Apple’s change in user experience philosophy; the former Newstand, which was a clear home-screen content driven UI is shifting to a visual mashup reader, taking users directly into the content rather than the old click and drill-in interface. It eliminates one step in getting to news, but more dramatically it changes the way Apple wants you to consume content in the first place. Rather than review one item at the time, it’s teaching your brain to multitask immediately on entry. This isn’t a new idea; as mentioned earlier it’s a clear shot at Flipboard’s user base… but for Apple it represents a subtle but important change in how users interact.

Having a better Siri is important for Apple’s long-term ambitions with the TV and the Car. Voice-driven interactions are clearly important, but despite the emphasis Apple has placed on Siri it has largely remained a one-way interaction and secondary method for search. The changes announced at WWDC have the potential to change voice in a way that clearly has long-term implications for the phone and beyond. The “Proactive Assistant” functionally, if it works well (and this is a huge if), would again change the user behavior from a home-screen driven interaction model into a more predictive, immersive one. Rather than search your content, relevant information is presented to you to interact with.

The Apple Watch already wants to remove the home screen interaction model, and with that device it’s a necessity. Even though Apple’s “bubble menu” is novel and looks impressive as an icon cluster, it’s hardly a screen you want to spend much time with. That’s why the device pushes notifications, alerts and different types of swipe behavior in order to avoid top-down drill-in interactions. What’s worth noting is that rather than find ways to bring the watch interactions closer to the phone, Apple is going the other direction by making everything more predictive.

Some have speculated that this is the road to Apple killing off the Apps market, but this thinking is painfully limited in what an “App” is. If you define an “App” as a clickable icon that launches a discrete experience, then absolutely this interaction will change and transform over time. But in a show where Apple touted billions of App downloads it’s hardly signaling that it wants to put an end to an ecosystem that has as much to drive Apple’s staggering success as the device itself. Apps will get more integrated with the phone. The value will change to become smarter APIs, connections to data, intelligent services, predictive user experience across devices and transformative UI. The value will be in the experience the application brings and how it’s smartly connected into your devices… and it will still be driven by a huge marketplace of developers. Those predicting that the browser will rise up more powerful than ever before are simply deluding themselves; the experience matters first, not the rendering layer.

Again, it all makes complete sense if you consider that Apple wants the phone, the watch, the TV, the home and the car to all work in harmony with each other. To really achieve a true connected world the traditional touch screen home screen interface has to come to an end… and Apple is clearly indicating that it is.