1.  Over-Blown Visuals

Probably the oldest, yet extremely popular design problem is overdesign. Designers of
iPhone applications often tend to disregard common design and usability
conventions by offering users slick and shiny user interface designs that go
way beyond their standard look and also way beyond their claimed functionality.

Why make things look, feel and work complicated and why do designers like to re-invent
the wheel? The answer is simple: they want the application to be different;
look different and stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, a different look
isn’t necessarily helpful for application’s usability and functionality.

Whats wrong with the above design?

Some of you may say, “Well, nothing is really wrong with it. It’s beautiful.” I agree, it’s
pretty slick. But, there’s a catch: while beautiful, it is also inconsistent
with other apps. It’s different. Let’s compare this screen to the settings
screens of other iPhone applications:

The 4th design being inconsistent with other products makes it worse for two reasons:

1. Going against convention makes your application less
intuitive. Over-styled controls look different and require users to re-learn
how they work.

2. It’s a waste of time and money. The resources you have spent
to make your app look different, but not necessarily better, could have
been used much more effectively.

2. What about branding?

It is possible to
strike a balance between having a unique look but not over-designing. Here’s
one example:

Here, we have an over-designed text input field at the top. You can barely recognize this as a field when you first look at it. The version on the right hand side is much better.

A standard input field makes the screen’s purpose much clearer, while remaining
consistent with the application’s style and branding.

Here is another example by iFitness. Users are supposed to enter their weight day by day on this
screen. But you have to flip through the months and days with a horizontal
swipe to find the right one, and then you have to enter your weight digit by
digit using five separate scroll fields. And then you have to press the very
modest “Record” button, which you miss at first anyway and only find the hard
way: after you have lost data. Much better:

99.9% of users will want to enter today’s weight. This redesigned interface has one-quarter of
the controls. The screen space that has been saved can now be used to present
useful information, such as weight statistics. Date and time can be recorded
automatically, and the selection of the metric or imperial system of
measurement, which is not terribly important, has been demoted to a settings
screen.

The Yellow Pages app uses tabs, which work well on the Web, but standard toggle controls are more
familiar to iPhone users.

Apple has already done an excellent job of creating standardized controls. Losing some of that
functionality is almost guaranteed if you try to reinvent the wheel. By earlier example:

If we take a closer look, we’ll see that one-third of the screen space we would have had is now
lost because of over-designing.