In UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row I describe gadgets that lack globally accessible buttons for most frequently used operations. Let’s call it “buttonphobia,” the fear of adding buttons that are actually needed. It is a form of UI Friction — design choices that impede the most frequent operations by adding steps or delays.
A design that avoids needed buttons is like a guy with poor eyesight avoiding glasses. He looks pretty cool standing there, until he starts moving and bumping into things.
The iPhone, too, looks great on a spinning pedestal. But the clumsiness of its outstanding but buttonphobic UI did not escape the reviewers at CNN:
[..] the lack of buttons requires a lot of tapping to move about the interface. For example, the Talk and End buttons are only displayed when the phone is in call mode. And since there are no dedicated Talk and End buttons, you must use a few taps to find these features. That also means you cannot just start dialing a number; you must open the dialpad first, which adds clicks to the process. The same goes for the music player: since there are no external buttons, you must call up the player interface to control your tunes. For some people, the switching back and forth may be a nonissue. But for mutlitaskers, it can grow wearisome.
(To its credit, Apple included physical volume controls to the iPhone, controls that remain absent on the iPod.)
By adding these buttons back, are we giving up too much? Would the iPhone or the iPod be what they are with another two to four buttons on the outside? Here is the industrial design challenge for Apple: find a way to give the products the buttons they need, while remaining sleek and cool. Maybe blend them into the black surface to keep the device looking stark and minimal. Maybe put little OLED displays behind them.
This also constitutes a design to steal for cellphone makers scrambling to catch up with the iPhone: add a small number of globally-available mode switching buttons for key tasks. Then, in your marketing, play up how much more efficient your user interface is than the iPhone’s.
And remember: the right pair of eyeglasses can actually make its wearer look cooler.
7/26/07 Update: Wall Street Journal has an article specifically about Steve Jobs’ animus towards buttons.
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!
[...] has a long standing button-phobia. But their recent declarations that iPhone are a no-keyboard zone are disheartening: Apple said [...]
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.