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Edward Tufte reviews Apple’s iPhone

As I am sure many information designers were, I was excited at the idea of Edward Tufte reviewing the iPhone. For those unaware, Edward Tufte literally wrote the book on information design — actually he has written several. His style is typically dry, wry, insightful and informative. I was met with slight disappointment when he failed to be as insightful or informative in his latest review of the iPhone.

After watching the video review, I was left wanting way more insight and way less pointing out the obvious (and plugging his own visual methodology.) Here are some key nuggets of wisdom:

The weather screen should have more information: While I agree that more information would be great for the weather display, the design changes he proposes seem even less useful than the current design. My ideal weather screen would focus on today’s weather with a quick look at the rest of the week. Tufte suggests a satellite map, which while more “information rich” is still “useless information rich” What does a satellite map possibly say to the average user, especially when realistically that map is at least minutes if not hours old?

The stocks screen should have more information: He calls the apple design “cartoon-ish” but his design looks like something you would see on a papyrus scroll.

The bottom bar on the browser should be transparent: Tufte claims that there is a 10% lose of real estate from the bottom browser chrome, while this is true I believe that his suggestion to make it transparent will only confuse the issue more. I am also surprised that he agrees with the scroll off screen of the browser address bar. When reading a long scroll page, this is one of the features I really dislike about the iPhone browser.

I also feel it is a bit strange that his review was so “nice to have” feature (weather, stocks, photos, SMS) focused instead of a more in depth review of the must have features (Phone, email, calendar, contacts)

For those of you who sit squarely in the Tufte camp of thinking, I am interested if you had the same reaction to this review. As for myself, I have always regarded Tufte as only one side of the information design coin.