Small Surfaces

Paul Golding asks whether mobile phones are designed to support people desire to fiddle with them. This is an excellent question, and in most situations phones only provide poor support for this kind of use.

“However, on close inspection (i.e peeking) at what some people do with their phones, the fiddling is a kind of mindless playing around – poking, changing, reverting back, going up and down menus, swapping settings back and forth, and so on – plain fiddling about. We like to tell kids not to fiddle with things – the remote control, the car controls, the radio, the computer. We often then go and do it ourselves…I wonder, have we fully embraced this fiddling-thingy within mobile design, or are we treating it as an exception?”

Link: Mobile fiddling… (wirelesswonders.blogspot.com)