I saw a post on Google Plus yesterday from someone criticizing the design of the new “Find my Friends” app on iOS 5. While I agree with the notion that its design is too loud, brash and irregular I disagree that this is a fundamental flaw in Apple’s policy of app design.

Most of the apps built into iOS, or elsewhere by Apple, are as minimal as possible to make things easier. The whole point is that no one should need a tutorial to use it and it should just work. This is fine, especially when there’s a huge amount of conformity with your apps and app design. Anyone can find a button, slide bar or widget in iOS or OS X because it’s plainly obvious what you’re looking at or what you’re trying to do.

Game Center suffers the same fate as Find my Friends. It’s not as simple as everything else they made. It’s not as obvious as Mail, for example. Using it feels different. While you don’t need a map and compass to find your way around, it’s not as intuitive as Mail, Texts or anything else. Look at how the Text app switches elegantly from normal SMS to iMessages. The button goes blue and it subtly says “iMessage”. Game Center, by contrast, looks like a playing card table with a green background and the cards are games. Find My Friends is designed like a small note book with a leather fabric feel to it.

Where my dislike for this falls down is other people. The first comment I actually read on Find My Friends was that it reminded them of little notebooks they had to keep details of their friends numbers and addresses.

I don’t have to think about how to use Find My Friends, it’s obvious. It’s easy and it’s still a damn sight nicer then most of the integrated apps on other systems. But this familiarity thing for normal people (as opposed to ultra fanboy nerd people who studied Computer Science, like me) is most likely what Apple were going for. To quote a common theme these days, I’m the 1% of people who look at these things far too closely. The 99% won’t care about ubiquitous design in apps. They just want it to feel right… and most of the time it does.