Dave Gustafson pointed to a great Gizmodo post that looks at the absurd place the clickwheel iPod has gone over the years with all the functionality that slowly got added to something that originally was designed only to play music.
“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to [...]
“Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master. “There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo. “Experimenting with different key combinations [...]
Jan Borchers wrote this article for the latest edition of Interactions magazine.
”...Sweet-spot products make your life simpler, baroque ones more complex. Sweet-spot products support you in a new way, making a previously difficult or awkward task change fundamentally. Learn just a few new things, and you get an almost magical boost in productivity, simplifying your [...]
Convergence has arrived. Samsung’s SCH-V960 now has a mouse. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.
“Users can point the cursor and click directly on icons on MyScreen, similar interface to that on a PC environment, and gain direct access to frequently used menus such as photo album, messaging, and music menu. Users can also use [...]
The One Laptop Per Child project has taken a fairly radical departure from the standard desktop metaphor, instead going for an activity-centric, social and temporally biased user experience.
“There are no software applications in the traditional sense on the laptop. The laptop focuses children around “activities.” This is more than a new naming convention; it represents [...]
“Shrinking” design paradigms to mobile devices often isn’t the best strategy.
“Designing user interfaces for small screens is a difficult problem, much more difficult than it may seem at first glance. We can not simply take established interface conventions and “shrink” them to baby face size, because just like children have a unique way of life, [...]
Some guidelines for the design of handheld games.
“There are two major things you have to keep in mind concerning the interface and user-experience, first one is that most players will be picking up your game in short breaks. They need to be able to quickly start it, and quickly put it away without losing “everything”. [...]
“In fairness to cellphone makers, it is exceptionally difficult to design anything really well, especially a technically complex product that is manufactured in huge quantities. A well-designed object, like the Apple iPod, looks so effortless and can be used so intuitively, that it’s easy to underestimate the Herculean struggle required to produce it. There are [...]
Fast Company is surfing the increasingly crowded simplicity wave.
“In the past, he says, adding features usually meant adding costs. Put a sound system or power windows into a car, and you’ve upped the price, so you better make sure consumers really want what you’re peddling. But in the digital world, that cost-benefit calculus has gone [...]
David Pogue pans the new Samsung 800 phone. It tried to do everything and fails on all counts. The convergence meme seems to be dominating thoughts at the moment (hey, even Mr Gates is talking about it).
“Unfortunately, as the manual puts it, “Phone may not recognize the biz card due to certain circumstances: letter type, [...]
Published by Gabriel White.