Posts Tagged: complexity

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11
Sep 08

The iPod can’t scale

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.

ipodmenunew

“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to click—nearly triple that of the original iPod version (and that’s not including Nike+ integration on nanos). Plus, the new system has five screens just for settings, all of which are unrelated to the main “Settings” menu. How did things become so complicated? The iPod went from doing one thing really well to doing a bunch of things pretty well. But the UI was never redesigned to accommodate the functionality…Right now Apple’s sending city traffic down a one-lane, unpaved road.”

Link: A Sad Fact: The iPod’s Clickwheel Must Die (gizmodo.com, via)

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6
Jun 08

Complexity in Japanese Phones

“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 in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.”

Link: In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use (wired.com, thanks Dano)

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24
Mar 08

Evolving to baroque complexity

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 everyday life. Baroque products just tweak existing processes, trying to make them more efficient in some situations, but often complicating other tasks (and sometimes the most frequent ones — think microwave ovens). And to use them, you often need to learn a fair amount of new interaction concepts, operations, and other lingo.

”...Cell phones hit their sweet spot in the mid-90’s: pocketable handsets, with several days of standby and calling charges that didn’t ruin the average consumer anymore. What a change! Within years, people moved from carefully planning their evening out to “call us when you’re ready, we’ll tell you what bar we ended up in”...Today, cell phones have moved squarely into their baroque stage. In a 2007 study we did for German’s largest mobile technology consumer magazine, connect, virtually all models we tested gave users problems with even the most basic and essential tasks: turn on, mute ringer, call number. Being able to browse the web, take pictures, watch or record movies wherever you are is great, mind you, but it has overloaded the sweet-spot product and interaction design of the traditional mobile phone beyond recovery.”

Link: Sweet Spots and Baroque Phases of Interactive Technology Lifecycles (rwth-aachen.de, also at interactions.acm.org, via)

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25
Dec 06

Samsung gives phones point and click

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 Optical Joystick to easily scroll through the play list while listening to their music.”

Link: SAMSUNG’s Digital World – Press Release (samsung.com, via)

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12
Dec 06

OLPC Human Interface Guidelines

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 an intrinsic quality of the learning experience we hope the children will have when using the laptop. Activities are distinct from applications in their foci—collaboration and expression—and their implementation—journaling and iteration.”

Link: OLPC Human Interface Guidelines (laptop.org)

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11
Nov 06

Don’t shrink designs to small screens

“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, baby faces are different to desktop computers in ways that we are only beginning to comprehend. But this difference also presents great opportunities for interface designers to find new and valid interface paradigms, paradigms that will be relevant not just for baby faces, but for mass-market computing devices in general.”

Link: Will baby faces ever grow up? (viktoria.se, PDF, via)

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6
Nov 06

Designing games for people’s pockets

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”. The second thing is that you are dealing with alot of non-technical people, without any or little gaming experience. So keep things simple and intuitive.”

Link: Mobiles, design, and gameplay (orangepixel.net)

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23
Oct 06

Feature creep and cell phones

“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 many obstacles to great design. Inventing new materials. Predicting how the product will be used. Turf wars between designers, sales representatives and engineers. It takes a massive effort of corporate will – and the support of a visionary leader, like Apple’s Steve Jobs – to overcome them.”

Link: Style, function and the imperfect cellphone (iht.com)

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20
Jan 06

The simplicity meme

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 awry. “The incremental cost to add 10 features instead of one feature is just nothing,” says Oppenheimer. “Technology is this huge blessing because we can do anything with it, and this huge curse because we can do anything with it.”

“But the issue is also our conflicted relationship with technology. We want the veneer of simplicity but with all the bells and whistles modern technology can provide. “The market for simplicity is complex,” says Dan Ariely, a business-school professor who is spending a year off from MIT figuring out how to quantify the value of simplicity at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. “If I offer you a VCR with only one button, it’s not all that exciting, even if when you use it, it’s likely to be easier.”

Link: The beauty of simplicity (fastcompany.com)

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16
May 05

Complexity can be awful: Samsung 800

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, letter color, background color, the focal distance, etc.” Evidently, that “etc.” also includes “hopelessly inaccurate recognition software and overzealous marketing types”; it’s a rare feat indeed for the A800 to scan a card with 100 percent accuracy. And on a phone with no alphabet keyboard, correcting typos is no picnic.”

“The trouble is, all of these features saddle the poor little device with a complexity that will boggle even the veteran cell fan. You have to wade your way through a staggering 583 menu commands, along with far too many pointless “Are you sure?” confirmations, to find them all. Just looking up your own phone number requires eight button presses, for goodness’ sake.”

Link: The Cellphone That Does Everything Imaginable, at Least Sort Of