Being a designer means looking at everything around us. The chair I’m sitting on, the sidewalk, the handle on the frying pan, the smart phone. We’re not really cranky. We only seem that way because we’re asking questions, like, “Why aren’t sidewalks better at treating runoff water?”
Designers continually look at how things could work better. The chair could have rounded arm rests that don’t catch on things, throwing them to the ground. The sidewalk doesn’t allow water to filter through – instead it dumps it into the gutter (another designed thing). The frying pan handle’s geometry means I have to lift my arm too high at a strange angle to toss ingredients.
Case in point: “smart” phones. What if…?
Unfortunately, my “smart” phone looks little like this image. I can’t have bigger, custom buttons. No, I must be happy with three screens of tiny, look-alike icons that are hard to organize the way I want. Sure they’re easy to drag, but that just pushes something else away, not necessarily where I want it.
Apple products used to just work, generally speaking, but that was before the separation happened. It’s a design risk, separation. It’s where you start to think that you know more about your product’s users than they know about themselves. You stop asking basic questions, stop thinking like the people who will use your products. You think they’ll all wade six levels deep into a control pane to adjust their ring tone, when all they want is simplicity. You think the bezel details are more important than handling attachments well in the e-mail app. It’s where you spend a lot of time designing each little button on the screen instead of asking if a grid of little buttons is really the best way to organize and activate your applications.
As a designer, the phone and its user interface aren’t exempt from analysis. Here’s mine, written knowing that absolutely nobody at Apple will read it nor take it seriously.
- Why isn’t the screen recessed right out of the box so it’s protected? And the associated question, why do they spend so much time on the color and detail of the back of the phone when everyone will buy a case for protection and pop their phone into it as soon as it comes out of its box?
- Why isn’t the phone two millimeters or whatever thicker, so the battery could last perhaps a day longer? Is having to carry a recharging battery for long trips away from power sources (like air travel) really excellent design?
- You can be interrupted in so many ways with a smart phone. It notifies you of everything, without any real ranking of importance or relevance. A message from a client gets the same treatment as the latest e-mail ad from the supermarket. Both demand immediate attention. Yet the phone also has an address book, containing contact information for everyone you know. It can contain groups, like family, clients and even supermarkets. You might think it would be smart enough to know that family and clients would be a higher priority than the supermarket, but no. It seems these things aren’t correlated – except by the application that received them (not by most recent?).
- What about planning a pizza night with some friends? We all have Apple phones. Why can’t we ask our phones for a night in a week or two where we’re all free and have it propose something that works. No, we each must glue our eyeballs to the screen, scrolling around, individually searching our schedules to find holes, calling them out until one works.
- Ring tones? Why can’t I record Annette’s voice saying, “Hello!” as a ringtone so when she calls I’ll immediately know it’s her? The phone has a microphone, after all.
- And all those buttons? Some do similar things: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest… why not have a bigger button with its own logo, or (gasp!) even a custom logo that could be chosen from the photo library and cropped? I can group these things together, but all I get is a tiny button with even tinier versions of the apps inside. Lame! Why can’t I have a big button, say the size of two to four normal buttons that fits in the “grid”, with a clear logo that I could see quickly?
- What about those “important” apps that you assign to the bottom of the screen? What if these could be the groups mentioned above?
- Why can’t I delete unwanted apps installed by Apple, like Stock Market? I could always load it again if I wanted it, right?
- The phone has two speakers: one for your ear and one for ringing. What if these were tweaked so they’d work as stereo speakers in landscape mode for sharing videos with friends when I don’t want to plug in ear buds for quality sound?
- How about GPS? I’m in Berkeley for some Indian food, but I’m not sure how to go home. I tell the phone to take me home. I put the phone where I can see it while driving. JOIN A WIFI NETWORK immediately appears on the screen, completely blocking the map (yeah, the map I need to see so I’ll know where to turn). Right. The geniuses at Apple thought there was an 80 mile long continuous Wi-Fi network? I have to pick up the phone and correctly hit the tiny CANCEL button to recover the map with my route. If it ever finds a Wi-Fi signal it likes, I might have to do this again. Worse, the phone knows I’ll be driving 80 miles (well, actually 82.4 miles). Why doesn’t it know I won’t be able to maintain a continuous WiFi connection?
How does this relate to landscape design? I see it as a cautionary tale. If we’re ever infected with narcissistic tendencies, we might start dictating and stop collaborating. We might stop asking questions: how should this work? Does this work? Where can it be improved? What can be simplified? How can we apply new things we’ve learned?
In other words, we might start worrying more about button icons and bezels than overall function.