What do you think about Clear?
It's a lovely novelty, but ultimately not very useful, which defeats the objective in something I would consider to be a 'utility'; a software discipline where form should always play second fiddle to function.
It's a beautifully crafted user interface. It's not innovative as many reviews have claimed, but evolutionary - I think Steve Jobs would have appreciated the vision - in that it takes existing conventions to the next level, rather than introducing entirely new ones.
Feature-set-wise, it's early days yet, and it would be unfair of me to trash it entirely simply because it doesn't sync with iCloud. That said, to defend its shortcomings by claiming that the very ethos of the app is about simplicity and purity (as many reviewers have done) would be to overlook the environment into which this app was conceived - a mobile environment, capable (and indeed demanding) of incredibly sophisticated contextual awareness. To build an app that ignored this environment in favour of some kind of zen-like state of simplicity would be monumentally shortsighted. I find it impossible to believe that this is the case with Clear.
We have to trust that these features are on the roadmap, and that a release-early-and-often policy is in place, as would be the case in any good agile development pipeline.
Effective (and successful) UX is not about removing complexity; rather it is about concealing and gradually revealing that complexity in order to make sophisticated software *feel* simple and intuitive.
My only real criticism of Clear is that those elements that make it so brilliant are exactly the same elements that render it so useless. The app seeks to be more useful than other similar utilities by stripping out complexity and using graceful, tactile gestures to mimic real-world physical interaction. Unfortunately, the practical limitations that these beautiful interractions impose on the interface only serve to erode its value as a utility.
For example, restricting the number of characters I can use on an item makes the interface and its response to my gestures graceful and more beautiful. But in doing so, it also renders the app completely unfit for purpose. Instead of having to concentrate on learning a few new interractions, I now have to invent and memorise dozens of new acronyms in order to help the app to fulfil its purpose. Why bother?
For me, Clear is a perfect example of how inspired interraction design can crush a potentially perfect user experience under the weight of its own brilliance.
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