[Sigia-l] 2 steps back and 3 steps forward?

[Will Parker]

On Mar 4, 2007, at 11:26 PM, Christopher Hadden wrote:
> The haptic element is there and there's also a sense that the surface
> will be more aesthetically durable because it's not glossy. As a
> designer, I would get this angst when my chrome-backed iPod got
> smudged with fingerprints. I felt compelled to keep it polished.

Hmmm. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever played with a tamagotchi (http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi)

We're primates. Therefore, small, attractive objects that require  
frequent light grooming keep the owner interested and invested.

> I was glad to finally get rid of it after the hard drive crashed.  
> It's the
> same angst that someone has of door dings when parking a fancy sports
> car (isn't that annoying how they double park at the far side of the
> parking lot?)

Was it the smudges (readily fixable) or the scratches (not fixable)  
that soured you on the iPod? The annoying bit about cosmetic damage  
on a car is that it's too expensive/troublesome to have fixed. Few  
sports car owners (that I know) complain about the washing and waxing  
chores.

> Together, those two little quirks of human nature may
> keep the iPhone from being the ringing success we'd like it to be.

Possibly, but I'm betting there are a hundred manufacturers of iPod  
skins working on solving or mitigating those problems within weeks of  
the iPhone release.

> On 3/5/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> With the iPhone Apple opened new UI vistas by replacing physical  
>> input
>> generators (keyboard, mini-joysticks, buttons, etc) with multi-touch
>> goodness. But what if you're not Apple and you can't (or prefer  
>> not to) go
>> completely virtual? Enter:
>>
>> <http://www.neokeys.com/en/nk_en.html> (Click on Demos for the  
>> videos)
>>
>> Is this crack for haptic junkies, a brilliant half-way solution or  
>> too
>> little too late?

My short-form objection is that the Neokeys design fails by starting  
with too few keys to adequately map all the intended functions.  
Designers are forced to map all application functionality onto 16  
keys (main keypad plus four dedicated keys in the bottom row) plus 8  
keys which normally offer mode-switch functionality.

Per the page showing the text entry functions, the user will need to  
switch between FIVE different keyboard displays (A-L / M-X / Y-Z /  
0-9 / punctuation) to write any significant message, with zero  
transfer from typing skills learned on a QWERTY keyboard.  
(Overloading muscle memory is a Very Bad Design Idea, as the people  
who investigated the Three-Mile Island meltdown will tell you.) I  
also particularly like the provision of a separate mode for 2 letters  
of the alphabet. The other application keymaps are better, but still  
quite limited.

In contrast, my current cell phone , an old candybar-styled Nokia  
6800, supplements a traditional 12-key numeric pad with an ingenious  
flip-out 52-key QWERTY keyboard. Switching between different keypads  
in this design changes the overall phone orientation from portrait to  
landscape (including the screen and non-keyboard control button  
functionality). The only adjustment required of a QWERTY touch typist  
is keypad size and pitch. (See http://www.mobiledia.com/reviews/nokia/ 
6800/page1.html for design details.)

It's an old, cheap, and not-overly-featureful phone, but the  
provision of enough keys for text entry in the most common layout  
makes it a great little note-taking machine. I retired my Palm device  
within a few days of purchasing the Nokia, an unintended and  
gratefully-accepted consequence.

The iPhone design allows the designers to freely reconfigure the UI  
to present controls fully mapped to the functionality required of the  
user. Aside from reducing or eliminating the workload of user  
management of UI modes, it also offers the possibility that the user  
can commit the unique motions required for any given task to muscle  
memory.

If that is so, an iPhone user will soon find operation of non- 
multitouch mobile devices _seriously_ annoying. I'm sure Apple is  
banking on that very fact.

- Will

Will Parker
wparker at ChannelingDesign.com
206-228-3187 (cell-preferred)
206-783-1943 (home office)


"The only people who value your specialist knowledge are the ones who  
already have it." - William Tozier