Posts Tagged: scaling

, , , , , , , , , , , — 1 Comment
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)

, , , , , , , , , , , — No Comments
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)