Philip Haine's articles on Product Vision, Innovation and Design

3 comments to “Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone”

  1. On Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 11:49 am michelangelo wrote:

    hey there philip! i totally agree. i think for a first foray into phones, it’s a great effort. but the iphone falls short in a few areas and the buttons (or lack thereof) is one of them. i think some of the recent, smaller htc devices come really close in terms of button balance. unfortunately, they aren’t yet investing the kind of effort needed to tweak the windows mobile experience enough to make it shine. seems there is a hybrid waiting to be designed: the delightfulness of the iphone user interface, with the easy, minimal-tap experience for the major functions found in some of the competing phones (treo, htc touch, htc p3600, etc). man, you just have to go back 10 years to the palmpilot 1000 and steal that design and you’re pretty darn close! ;)

  2. On Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 9:50 am Apple bans keyboards from iPhones | The Product Vision blog wrote:

    [...] has a long standing button-phobia.  But their recent declarations that iPhone are a no-keyboard zone are disheartening: Apple said [...]

  3. On Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 10:51 pm Philip Haine wrote:

    There is a reference to Apple’s buttonphobia at Wall Street Journal, cited by this CBS News article:
    “Apple mogul [Steve Jobs] has a pathological fear and loathing of buttons.

    And it goes way beyond the sleekly buttonless iPhone. The elevator in Apple’s Tokyo stores has no floor buttons, forcing vistors to stop at every floor.”

    Is that a good design for an elevator? You be the judge.

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