eringorshin: iOS 6 gripes: App Store search is now less usable

iOS 6 gripes: App Store search is now less usable -- MOCK UP

With iOS 6, Apple has totally changed the way search results appear in the on-device App Store app. Gone are the drab if informationally dense list views that let you see a large selection of apps at once and choose the one that caught your fancy. Now you get a card-based view (not dissimilar to Safari Pages) which functionally only shows you one app at a time. And that's not good.

With the old App Store search, 5 results were immediately visible in the list view. With the new iOS 6 App Store search, 1 result is visible. If you're searching for something specific, like "Tweetbot", it won't mean much because the first result will likely be the right one, so you only need that first result. If you're searching for something more general, like a game made by Electronic Arts, but you can't remember the name, the degradation is severe. You're presented with 1 possibility instead of 5. That's an 80% loss in information density. Ironically, the new 16:9 aspect ration of the iPhone 5 would have allowed for even more search results in the list view, 6 in total. Instead, with the new iOS 6 App Store search, we still get 1. Only longer. That's an 83.33% loss in information density.

Cards also make the interface considerably slower. The old App Store search was easy to flick through, and since only the icons had any visual weighting, it was highly glance-able. If you were looking for something specific, it was incredibly fast. Admittedly, if you weren't sure what you were looking for, discoverability wasn't great, but the addition of a screenshot to the card view in iOS 6 App Store search doesn't improve that drastically. It just makes for another highly weighted interface element to visually parse.

In other words, it looks better but doesn't work better. To get an idea of how badly the metaphor works for search in the App Store, all we have to do is extrapolate it to Google search.

If anything Apple should be exploring metaphors like this for the fast app switcher, where the visualization of content makes sense. Here it just borders on the absurd. (And, ironically, iOS 6 still provides a list view in the purchased tab, where the card view would be especially frustrating, but that section lacks the search/filter system that helps make list views manageable.

So how could Apple fix it? An option to toggle between new-style card view and old-style list view could be a compromise. Apple could also simply present the list view in portrait mode and the card view in landscape mode, where at least more than one app could be seen at a time. That would also match the behavior seen in the Music app with CoverFlow.

Taking it one step further, Apple could implement the portrait interface they use for app categories and present a few horizontal list views. The first could present search results filtered by keyword relevance, the second by rating, the third by how many "friends" have the app, the fourth by recency of release, etc. So, for example, a search for "Twitter" could result with the official Twitter for iPhone app showing up first for relevancy, Tweetbot first for overall rating, and Flurry for most recent.

While that could add complexity, it could also service different interests -- "I just want a Twitter app" vs. "What Twitter app are my friends using?" vs. "I want to try a different Twitter app, which are the newest?"

If Apple's going to use the mixed vertical and horizontally scrolling pages anyway, they might as well use it to enhance sorting.

The iOS 6 App Store did not come gently into this world. The betas were fraught with strange behavior, some of which did not get fixed prior to release. The combination of vertical and horizontal scrolling elements through the app can be quirky and off-putting to navigate. Purchased lists sometimes don't display and when they do, the scrolling and touch events are janky. Search algorithms, reportedly now using technology from Apple's Chomp acquisition, have changed repeatedly.

For an app so important to Apple, developers, and users, it's a pain, and it's something that needs some considered, usability-focused attention from Apple. And soon.

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