Touch is great thing, suddenly you can touch, tap, double tap, flick, pinch and stretch to manipulate virtual object. It really revamped the whole mobile business mainly with the release of the iPhone and the capacitive touch screens, used in most smartphones today. But also in the stuff using infrared matrix screens like the Neonode back in 2004 that had quite good gesture control but never took off.

But let the touch stay there in a virtual interface on the screen. We all know and love what we got there. But if you have a real physical nice button DON'T MAKE IT A TOUCH BUTTON. Physical buttons should stay physical, a touch button is actually just an approximation to the real thing. That was cool in the 80-ties. If you really, really, can't help yourself, at least keep them safe from accidental touch. I’ll give you some example from bad to worse …

The new XBOX 360

This device uses touch to open the tray door and for the on/off switch. Its not a big problem here, the XBOX isn’t moved around much and mostly you don’t touch it by accident. But sometimes, you need to move it. I have it hidden away and I was opening the doors and accidently opened the tray. The sound it made when it hit the wall wasn’t too pleasing but it survived.

My stove

This one is even more annoying. The buttons are placed close to where you normally would have physical buttons and it works well when you and navigate them. But there are a few occasions… If you accidentally cover them they start to do all sorts of crazy stuff until the stove, as a security feature, shut down totally. Also, when you have a big handle cover one panel it reacts,  suddenly you wonder what happen until you realize that you have turned off the heat.

My Samsung Omnia 7

This is by far one of the worst examples of touch buttons. It doesn’t provide any functionality other than looks (and I think you could have gotten the same look with real buttons, with the right materials). It is constantly in the way and trying to play a game is almost impossible as you have your whole thumb over the buttons. I nearly thrown this out the window…

Are there any good versions?

Well I think my old Bang&Olufsen sound system from 1991 is ok, touch button is not a killer feature but adds coolness to this piece of machinery, not that I know what I’m going to use my CD-player or cassette deck for anymore

 
B&O 4500 with the military grade remote - could easily take out any enemy

It’s also good in that it’s easy to keep clean, it does not produce any false taps or clicks (being placed on a wall and all). It’s only a design thing using touch here but it doesn’t make it worse, besides, it’s the massive one pound remote that is used to control this…

The stove, again, is actually also a good contender for touch buttons:

Easy to clean

There is one really good reasons for using touch here and it compensates for the problems. It’s so easy to keep clean.

So, a final plea!

I first thought of this when I moved in and started the fight with my stove. Then there was mockups leaks of the Windows Phone 7 HTC models. Then when I got my Samsung Omnia 7 in October. I think this is THE most annoying “feature” of the Omnia. But now there as a bigger threat - the mockups that Nokia made for the new Windows Phone 7 models. Look here:

This is really scary, touch buttons, and even worse than the Samsung Omnia, the home button is also touch here. This is going to drive at least me crazy. So please forget about touch here!

I was trying to figure out what text size to use on the Windows Phone to make it readable. After using the 24” monitor where I get a “big ass” phone, also know as a … pad :),  I realized that it’s not going to work.

So I started out a little quest to find some data around the phone and what dimensions you could expect. However, there are no single specification around from Microsoft, so the actual size of the screen may vary. Searching around web brought very little technical specifications, but you know a few facts: It’s going to be 480x800 pixels, and 16:9 form factor on the screen. So I did a couple of educated guesses and assumed a 3.8” screen. Interesting enough, this told me that it actually is going to have a whopping 240dpi resolution, that's close to a an old laser printer, and in full color – amazing.

So on to the mockup, as soon as I got the dimensions right I started to print out a few pages, checking fonts and sizes (and got a surprise by how small the texts and icons got in the actual size). I used the skin from the emulator as base. Next, I wanted to get a feeling of it in the hand as well, so I started adding some depth. A few minutes later I found myself creating a cut-out paper prototype you see to the right here.

If you like you can cut out some slits  and do a left/right and a top/bottom sliding version. That way you can even use it to user test panoramic and pivot applications as well as that big sliding home screen.

So here it is the Windows Phone 7 series paper prototype, enjoy.

// Håkan Reis

This is a rant. As much as apple has had its focus mainly on the user they are now heading in a new direction. The new iTunes addiction is sales, the new incarnation of iTunes is only about how to get the next fix, closing the next deal.

The sad thing is that as with many other companies that has reach world domination - it cripples innovation. There hasn’t been much innovation in the user interface since it was introduced years ago. The few is focused on one thing, selling stuff.

To start with, what is iTunes?

Well this is one problem, it has become a beast, to the user it is foremost a media player, or at least tries to be. It’s not among the better media players but it gets the job done. As a media player there has been added a few extra features like burning CDs, music sync to iPod and oh, it let’s you buy new music.

But later on they have added more and more bloat; iPhone calendar and contact sync, application sales, pushing media and stuff you already own, podcast, video downloads. Oh, and the updater doubles as a portal for pushing safari as well.

The iTunes beast of today

iPhone sync - Why on earth do I want my iPhone to start up a (now) bloated media player just to sync contacts, calendar details and some music? Why not a blazing fast slimmed down sync application that use the database from iTunes to get the playlists, media track and application that are stored there?

The pusher – For a long time now iTunes ha added a little arrow to each and every track in the library, clicking it took me to iTunes music store, so that I could easily - buy the track I already own. Not a big problem as you could just remove it with a little setting. But not anymore, you can solve it with a hack but how many user are able to do that? We are going to sell more whether you like it or not! And it gets worse.

The genius - Masquerading as smart playlist manager genius gives Apple a way to display even more buttons with the word BUY in them. Now they have taken up 10% more of my screen real-estate with lists of music to buy. The playlists are not that bad, but I guess using genres, artists and some randomness would create about the same result. 

Grid view – The latest “innovation” is the ability to show albums in a grid…wow. And the cover flow before that, that turns out to be, not that useful. I love Eye candy and think it can serves a purpose but adding a black blob with a reflection in the middle of the database grid that represent all your tracks doesn’t help much.

What they could have added

Folder watching – I tend to move my music around, as there are not enough space on my laptop to have all my music and there are no easy way to have a central place for all tracks I have a subset on my machine, about 10GiB of music. So why not just add some smart folder watching? Thankfully there are people out there that get it.

Re-sync of statistics – If I play my music on my iPhone it would be so easy to count and then sync that back, as well as what tunes I skip etc. that would be excellent statistics for that genius playlists…

Native OS support – I’m a windows vista user, I actually like vista, and applications should behave. This is not a new problem with iTunes. But when are you going to address it? Not in one single place have they added right click support. You know, we use it a lot in windows. Or even looked at the Visa UX guidelines. But then again, why would they add functionality to us windows user that would be missing for the Mac OS crowd?

There; now I can get back to syncing photos, buying ringtones clips of music I already own and let iTunes steal GDI and memory resources from my system.

// Haqwin

I was at a interaction design specific conference at June 12-13, from business to buttons. I haven't gotten around to jot down my thoughts about it until now. A short description on some of the seminars follows:

Day one

Keynote by the man, Don Norman. And a little plug for his new book The Design of Future Things - I probably will get this book as all the others. Don't get me wrong this was not just a book review, there was a lot good insights and it was good listening.

Next up was a session with Kim Lenox a really good session. A good look on how they are changing their way of work, they are clearly moving towards a more agile and involved process. I mean; whiteboards, post-its, direct communication and collaboration over the borders. This is getting good and fun. This was a new session, as Ryan Freitas had to cancel  his, and a very pleasant surprise.

Next up was a mix containing three shorter session on New interaction techniques.

Most interesting of these was a session on multi touch and gestures. Quite interesting stuff, this also sprung a small fear that Apple et al are doing their patent stuff here. Multi touch and gestures should be open, not locked down by patents. 

There was a quite fun session on clothes and electronics from cutecircuit.

Last session of the day was by Kars Alfrink from Leapfrog on playful design, how the knowledge from gaming can be implemented on business. There are lots of interesting stuff that can come out of that mix, I'm sure.

Day two

For me the day started out with a keynote by Dr Patrick W Jordan around the four pleasures; Physio, Psycho, Socio and Ideo. This was a excellent session with lots of real world data and anecdotes. Like the clunk of BMW doors and the Heineken psst.

Last out was a workshop on agile methods and interaction design. I think that a few answers came out of that session. Most important though is that developer in agile projects need to get the interaction designers on the right track. Share your knowledge. I think Interaction designers need to learn a lot more on this issue. Many are still stuck in big up front design, and this has got to change.

Sessions, pdfs and stuff can be found at the from business to buttons site.

On a side note, I think that many interaction designers are afraid that they will loose out on the design if not all methods and tools are applied. And some methods and techniques cannot be applied directly in an agile projects. However, the gain in communication and development speed [in agile projects] are  so great that there is no return. They have to learn that you don't need all the answers at the table at the start. And an interaction designers work is not done when the project starts. It has to be done continually during the development.

A little background

So, I sold myself to the space plastic. I got myself an iPhone. After some tricking with the software I got it up and running. There are just a few rough edges left but in all a great experience. It really delivers, a few quirks that you get used to it in no time at all. You have to get used to the keyboard but it only took me a one or two days to nail it.

Most of the basic applications work great, the integration is the best part of it, you can add the address for a contact and from there go to the map and get directions from your home address - real sweet.

The calendar is great but why couldn't it just sync with windows calendar or any iCal file out there? Could it be that they want me to buy a mac? But to be honest, no other phone maker makes it any easier to sync.

A few pointers, the text messaging works great as a conversation but sometimes you need to send to more than one or forward, then there is the SMSD application that handles messages as you are used to. There even is a solution in the works to handle MMS, at SwirlySpace you can have an application that for starters handles sending MMS.

But the functionality, responsively and integration of all other applications are so good it doesn't matter. And the updates the pump out seem to offer more that bug fixes that should have been in place by delivery. But that has to be proved.

So where are all the others?

Why didn't Nokia, SonyEricsson or any other of the mobile companies out there deliver this kind of product?

The main problem here is history. For the past decades mobile phones have been selling on features, the developers are the driving factor, together with marketing. In the beginning you really sold a telephone, just the bare minimum of features (calling, handling contacts and SMS). This was easy, 4-5 items in a menu and you were safe. Add a few extra features and you would sell more, shrink the size, add to battery life. Any other extra feature was a main selling point as there was only so many ways to dial a phone number. But as the feature war went on there was casualties, too bad it was among the users. Marketing locked on to all the features that the techies invented and now they are stuck there. The feature list keeps getting longer and is expected to expand with GSM, SMS, CDMA, Bluetooth, GPRS, MMS, PTT, TDMA, WAP, GPS, 3G, EV-DO, UMTS, HSDPA, EDGE, Turbo-3G, CDPD, GAIT...

Want me to continue? That is what most mobile companies are selling. Not a great phone, web surfing experience, music machine or personal planner. And they are so stuck in selling acronyms that they have trouble to cut lose. Drop all buzzwords and sell an experience.

The only company with a full experience focus, coupled with the marketing money, is Apple. The last building block was the timing, available processing power and hardware to support the UI. They were able to start fresh with no history in what's expected other than a great experience and a fanatic crowd. There are a few players, Neonode is one but unfortunately I think it's too late for them. Another major player here might be Google. They have the muscles to provide a platform, now let the experience guys do something cool stuff with that. Keep the Linux geeks at bay or we will have an interface like Gimp.

Don't get me wrong here I do think that SonyEricsson sell a lot of great phones. I have a few myself and they are my second choice. But I always feel that they have the potential to do so much more. And by the way, if you know most of the acronyms above you’re in trouble, take some user experience and get yourself out of the featuritis.

Mike Harsh did a great talk about media integration in Silverlight. One of the most impressive sight was when a full screen feed was overlayed with nine smaller feeds. Looked great, and when i fired upp the process view it was producing a load in the CPU round about 50%...wow!What more? The media encoder in Expression can be used to produce a live feed from one or more video sources so you get kind of poor mans video studio. Nice...The possibility to use media brushes in Silverlight to wrap it to object, and with some xaml coding you can split the video onto any number of objects.Silverlight now is IE, FF and Safari and from a direct question around opera it was more in the line of a couple of bugs in opera that held it back. Eventually a "coming soon" was heard. And its still beta you know...One thing that struck me was the lack of support for other media formats. Well, I'm not a codec guy but it might be that some of the formats out there put a bit to much strain on the codecs, with the risk of hogging too much CPU cykles. Another is the size of plugin, filling it up all kinds of codecs is not a good thing. And hey, flash do not to my knowledge stream WMV or MPEGS, they use their format. It all goes in through the mediacoder anyway...

Looked into the designer view of blend. And well prepared bindable objects seems to be one of the absolute keys to collaborating with development. To bind buttons to bindable commands in a bindable objects beats having to add an event handler and adding code for that. At least in a designers perspective.I picked up a few tricks along the way, hard to recap in text, I suggest you try it out for yourself instead.