Blackberry versus iPhone

Last summer, iPhone’s App Store had over 50,000 apps; Blackberry’s App World had just 2000. Today, there may be 100,000 apps for iPhone. What's behind this dominance? Are iPhones that much better?

Recently, smackerel was working on a series of mobile apps for both Blackberry and iPhone. Designing for both platforms, side by side, gave us some perspective on the 25:1 preference for Apple’s platform.

We saw that Apple is much better at nurturing a designer/developer ecosystem. Blackberry is reasonably supportive of their developer community, but they seem to have little understanding of designers. Yet designers come before developers in the product cycle, and more designers would presumably put more apps in the pipeline. RIM needs to support both developers and designers, for the sake of the quality and quantity of the app design on their platform.

WHY DO DESIGNERS LOVE iPHONE AND NOT BLACKBERRY? — Lets get the obvious out of the way: the iPhone is the richer platform. Esthetically, its still breath-taking, more than 2 years after its initial release. This is important, but does it account for 25:1 advantage in apps? I don't think so. Historically, creators have had no trouble embracing the lower fidelity medium -- think video vs film for example. Because video was more accessible, creators didn't mind lower fidelity. The trouble for RIM is that Apple has made the iPhone more accessible to designers. Much more.

GETTING STARTED — Its easy to get started designing iPhone apps. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ready-made design templates and stencils for Visio, OmniGraffle, Photoshop, Fireworks, Balsamiq, etc. These templates act as training wheels for designers working on their first app. They shave weeks off of your learning curve, and get you started directly visualizing your app, instead of fussing with questions about standard UI elements.
I have searched, and found exactly zero ready-made templates for Blackberry. Obviously these assets exist, but no one is sharing them. Designers working on Blackberry apps, apparently don't see themselves as part of an community the way iPhone designers do.

DOCUMENTATION — Perhaps the iPhone has a community of designers because Apple takes the trouble to speak to them in there own language. Their UI documentation, 'iPhone Human Interface Guidelines' , is no mere catalogue of UI elements and behaviours. Its all about creative inspiration. The first chapter is all about how decide what 'style of app' you feel like making today: "If you have a subject you’d like to explore, think about the objects and tasks related to it. Imagine the different perceptions people have of that subject. For example, consider the subject of baseball. Baseball brings to mind, among other things, teams, games, statistics, history, and players. Baseball is probably too extensive a subject for a single application, so consider just the players. Now imagine how you might create an application that relates to players—for example, using their likenesses on baseball cards."

Blackberry's UI Guidelines are very different. It begins, "Applications designed for BlackBerry® devices should provide a balance between the best possible user experience and a long battery life." The document is written for the engineering department. Designers don't appear to exist in RIM's app development universe.

DRINKING THE KOOL-AID — Designers love Kool-aid; they love aligning their work with a broader mission. The iPhone stands for something: they're changing the world by bringing the richest touch-and-gesture-based interactivity to a smart phone. Its the kind of mission that designers can get excited about.

I used the know what the Blackberry stood for: they were the corporate smart phone that does practical things really well. Its not as stirring, but its a mission. I can get behind designing practical tools to help practical people do their jobs. But now the water is muddied. RIM says they want Blackberry to be a consumer platform, and their new models like the Pearl and Storm don't do practical things like text input very well at all. I don't know what the Blackberry stands for anymore.

WHAT DOES RIM HAVE TO DO? — Lots of things; but from a designer's perspective, we can see half a dozen good moves they can make: Reach out to designers, and communicate a coherent mission to them. Bake that mission into your UI documentation. Taylor those documents for designers, by structuring the document to support the questions, tasks, processes that are common to designers. More pictures wouldn't hurt either. Make it easier to get started by providing UI templates in Visio, Omnigraffle, and any other tool you can think of. And finally, make it easier for designers to prototype basic interaction, on the device, without having to code in Java. Sounds like a lot of work, but they could knock off everything but the prototyping environment in about 2 months, and it would make a big difference.

Rosettastone.com wins design award

Congratulations from smackerel, to our client Rosetta Stone, and their marketing agency HZDG. From over 1,400 entries, the Rosetta Stone website won Best Web Design (Non-Flash) in the semi-annual American Design Awards. We're thrilled to have a firm like HZDG helping to tell our client's story! Visit www.americandesignawards.com to learn more about this honour.