I wonder if we will finally go back to hardware design principles that prioritizes functionality over look.
The Design Of Everyday Things gives examples of great designs:
* Rotary dial phones were designed in such a way that when a phone felled on the floor it not only survived, but the ongoing phone-call was not hanged. Today countless users brake their smartphones glasses and yet the mainstream smartphones to do not incorporate any design elements that would make it harder to drop the phone or that would protect the glass from the impact. Such elements would make the designs less minimal, so are discarded.
* Cars, a complex machines that can easily hurt others, traditionally have controls designed in such a way that you can enter a car model that is totally new to you and comfortably operate it within minutes. You can operate most controls without a need of looking away from the road. Today, we are ditching this proven design in favor of a single touch screen, because it looks so much more elegant and modern.
Smartphone design is downright terrible in terms of functionality, they might look nice, but I've had so many phones that were very slippery and didn't offer a firm grip as if the manufacturer says you should buy a case. And Apple is the top offender, think antennagate, headphone jack...
That includes software, responsive design was created with the goal of adapting websites to smaller screens, as phones got bigger I don't see many sites utilizing responsive design so that I can still use my phone with one hand.
Also, I loved the MagSafe charging port on the MacBook, that is an example of great functionality on design, then Apple throws that out of the window and makes a single port laptop.
The MagSafe cables, however, were terrible. I've burned through three so far (in almost as many years) from the cable sheathing failing near the connector. Other manufacturers have included strain relief at this critical junction in their cables for decades, but nooooo, that's too good for Apple. So instead I get this form-over-function cable that fails all too quickly and is expensive to replace to boot.
I much prefer USB-C, even if only because the cables themselves are better engineered.
I'm really curious what you're doing with your cables. I'm on year 6 with my MBP adapter and that includes a year of traveling through Southeast Asia where I was constantly spooling and unspooling it, not to mention the number of times it got wet. It still works flawlessly. I also had a work MBP adapter for a number of years without any issue despite being spooled and unspooled each morning and evening.
Meanwhile, I've tripped over the wire countless times and been saved by the magsafe's ability to automatically disconnect rather than sending my 30-times-the-price laptop flying. It happens so often that USB-C charging is a non-starter for me. I'm buying older, refurb Macs until they realize their error. Short of that, I'm buying a bargain-basement PC that I can replace for under $1k because I know that kind of accident is going to happen eventually.
My experience could not be more different from you. My cable started fraying badly after 1-2 years and finally died after 3.5 years. I have only used it at home and a handful of trips where it been packed most of the time. I tripped on a laptop cable exactly zero times in my life. I accidentally brushed off the cable almost every single fucking day. I love this laptop but I hate this adapter. The brick is way to big and falls of of most outlets. The extensions cable helps but makes it way too long and akward to roll up.
My point isn't to say that your experience is less valid but the benefit of an open charging standard is that we each can pick power adapters that we fit our use case.
Edit: Also, my and his cable probably died because of using it on our laps.
Completely disagree with your disagreement. The brick definitely does not "fall out of most outlets."
I've had the same macbook air since 2011 that I have now donated to another family member. I also gave them the original charging cable with it. I have taken at least 20 flights with it. You just need to be more careful with your things.
MagSafe was _amazing_ because if someone snags the wire your laptop doesn't fall off the desk.
Did you notice the hypocrisy of your comment? I need to be more careful because my cable frayed but MagSafe is amazing because of all these people are so clumsy that they are tripping over the cable and launching laptops onto the floor.
If was using the same argument form as you I would say: Who are all this people that don't notice they are tripping on a cable? If you are not in an infomercial you will stop before launching a laptop onto a floor. I know a ton of people with windows computers and exactly zero of them have died from people tripping on the cable. MagSafe fixes a non-issue and is constantly annoyingly falling out.
I don't actually believe this but it is a silly and borderline rude way to argue. For some reason, you are in situations that benefit from MagSafe. This is a valid request, but I don't think is close to as common as you think. Since USB-C is open, you can get an adapter with a magnetic rip away section.
I am not excessively rough with my laptop. I used a badly frayed cable for 2 years without it breaking. I guarantee that you are not taking off and putting in your adapter multiple times per day and you are not using your laptop on your lap. Look at other peoples power adapters. The thin cable is not build to last and frays at both ends if you actually use the stupid wrapping things
Edit: I misspoke with regards to the size of the plug. Most of the outlets I used results in a delicate balance for the plug to stay in. Slight movements of the cable results in the plug falling out. Also, the folding plug makes it pain to plug into some hard to reach outlets.
I have an original 2011MBP MagSafe charger and a 2015MBP MagSafe 2 charger. The cable on the newer is stiffer has yellowed at the neck and feels gummier. It has been replaced by Apple twice.
My old MagSafe charger is still the original. The cable feels very flexible, and the only discoloration it has is from being dragged around and stepped on.
Whatever formulation Apple has changed in manufacturing the new MagSafe has shortened its lifespan.
I similarly am using a charger right now that's maybe 8 years old and has no fraying. The first models were notoriously bad, but they got better over time.
So the MagSage concept is good, but Apple's implementation isn't.
I use a somewhat similar concept for some of my mobile devices (Magsafe-like adapter) to charge and transfer data. I'm not sure how frowned upon it is to link to a specific manufacturer here, but I assume a USB-C adapter could be attractive to someone on a new MacBook Pro that miss the MagSafe connector.
It really bugs me when people complain about Apple cables not having strain reliefs. They don’t have huge ugly strain reliefs, and maybe that means they aren’t good enough, but they definitely exist.
Plato's cave comes to my mind... Also, whomever I talk to, from the most techy to least (and I'm a humanities student so nearly all my usual contacts are non-techies), I hear they want sturdier phones. Most people use protective side products like cases and films, even though the latter reduces the touch sensitivity. About half of the phones I see people use have cracks here and there. The industry thinks that people prefer thinner and cuter over sturdier and functional because most people just try to make the best use of what's available and don't bother providing feedback, public or otherwise; and those who are vocal about these new innovations are the tech-geeks and the like. (edited to add:) The market researchers probably confound the people trying to extract value from what's available on the market with their actual preferences. People can't buy what's not available, so, certainly, if all you see is sales data, you will never know that there's a public that wants a decently sized, sturdy, yet nice looking phone with decent hardware, that does not break when somebody farts close by and runs their favourite apps.
I'm not gkya (the parent poster) but I believe what he means is that the prisoners in the cave only understand reality as
presented to them through the shadows. Likewise, we as consumers have only been offered minimalist, breaky phones with modern hardware/software, so we have grown to live inside that awful reality, and not realize the true scope of what is possible/better.
Thanks, this is half if what I meant; the other half being the inverse: the producers and the marketers have present a very remote, inorganic knowledge of their customers' preferences, only a shadow of their ideas. If they were set free from their echo chambers and cubicles, they'd see that the numbers they based their decisions are not really representative of preferences, but of choices that their clientele had to do.
And then those people go and throw theor brand new phones right into giant sturdy cases. Maybe it's time to ignore the voices that pretend people want shiny when really that's what the bloggers want to crow about.
I don't think it's true. Some manufacturers did produce less thin phones, both for better resistance and longer battery life. Nobody bought them. Maybe you're right and it's the web that influences people into buying these or maybe people just want to buy the latest and "most bestest" (whatever the metric is, nowadays its thin and pixel density ... people are into 4K now, 8K is coming too)
Indeed. This was the same fallacy that killed keyboard slider phones. Sure, their sales were poor... but the reason why is because they generally came out 8 months later than the non-keyboard version without improved hardware. So by the time each keyboard phone generation came out, there was already newer hardware with newer features on the market.
I remember when the Motorola Droid took this strategy... at the time, Android (and in particular Motorola's Android skin) was quite a bit behind iOS UX-wise. Although I guess you could ask why it didn't dominate among Android users.
The thing is, everyone wants to protect their $600 “investment”. So if you make the phone bigger so that it’s more rugged, people will still put it in a case to protect the housing. So now the rugged phone is just massive and no one wants to carry it.
Now, if the rugged bits of the phone were easily and cheaply swapped, that would probably make it more appealing. But I can buy a new case for my phone for $10, so it’s hard for the rugged version to compete effectively.
They're not equivalent. A case can often fit many phones, so they're cheaper to repair and offer more design variety. In the early 2000s, you could find cases for the 3310 everywhere, but I found very little choice for my 3410.
and a really weird feeling that, indeed things do roundabouts, but it's not a perfect back-to-start revolution, the soil was raised but the people on it not so much (but they do feel they progressed). A circle that doesn't close properly is a bit a spiral.
I liked the MagSafe, too, but I like the USB Type-C ports better. Only one cable for a docking station (instead of two), and it (in theory) works for non-Apple docks/chargers (and non-Mac laptops in turn can use Apple docks/chargers).
USB 3.1 over a MagSafe-like reversible connector would be ideal.
Smartphone design is downright terrible in terms of functionality
I disagree. It seems obvioous to me that smartphones are optimized for easy insertion into and retrieval from tight front pockets in pants. That’s why they are shaped the way they are. It’s also partly why the headphone jack had to go. Wired headphones are a pain in the ass when you have to route the wires through layers of clothes and into a pocket or a handbag.
How about phones below 6"? The Nexus 6P or 5X for instance, a common use case I see is people trying to do quick things on their phone with one hand using the thumb for interacting with the screen, which if you have a phone in the 5-6" ballpark it is not easy to reach the top edges.
This is where solid design comes into play, Tinder's ease of motion and placement of control buttons makes it easy to use with a single hand which means increased usage, thus creating a habit-forming loop, this is critical to Tinder's success.
Any phone above 4.5, maybe 5" device diagonal (not screen diagonal) is basically unusable single-handed.
And this means that on such devices, people interact entirely different with UI. Which results in different UI paradigms.
I’d have to either compromise my UI for users of smaller devices, or for users of larger devices. But in either case, users of larger devices will never get a truly awesome UI, as that’s simply not possible. (Either you waste space, or parts of the UI are just not reachable).
Making part of the UI display-only is not wasting space.
The problem with these phones is the insistence to push UI elements to the corners on touch screens even though original the UX motivation for putting important things in corners was that they're the easiest mouse targets.
The usable space on a screen doesn’t grow much between a 4" and a 6" phone, because you hold your thumb further over the screen, and more parts are unreachable.
And while one could move the content into the top-left or top-right (depending on handedness of the user), the result is so ugly users preferred a UI with less real estate over it in tests.
With a 4" phone, the best reachable areas are the top and the left. Which is why Android 4.0 – which was right around the time when 4-5" phones became popular – moved all these actions into the top and left edges with the Action Bar and Navigation Drawer.
With a 6" phone, those areas are unreachable, the bottom and the right are obscured by your hand, and the only area left for controls is the center – but you can’t really break up content around the controls either.
The only solution that works partially are gestures, but those are very limited in what you can do, and are very inaccurate.
If you have a better solution for a chat client in which a user might have 400+ channels open than using a navigation drawer (with search) on the left, content in the middle, and input at the bottom, then please present some.
But currently, only for a small handful of apps the 6" problem is solved, and I believe that for many apps, it might never be solved.
what are you talking about? I have a Samsung S4, which the sort of "4-5 inch" (translation: 10-13 cm) phone you're talking about, yes?
If I'm holding it in my right hand, about the only part I can't reach with my thumb is the top-left and the very top. Which is about the opposite of what you describe. I'm really confused about just about any statements you made following that, can you explain?
Also, how do you imagine the hand obscuring any parts of the screen without firing touch events all over the place? Placing your hand on the screen will make any app go haywire (yea and we should fix that, challenging but not impossible).
BTW I'm not talking about text-input, just about accessing larger elements of a touch UI. I have kind of shaky hands, I've tried a lot of different ways to hold it and I think that I just can't do the two-thumb typing cause I'm unable to hold it steady in that position, or at least not in a way that's healthy to keep your hands in for frequent stretches.
Also, what is your background in UX? I don't mean a formal education, but any introductory background reading? I often wonder this in discussions like these. Similar to -say- typography, it's not a really hard topic to grasp the basics of. But just reading some intro stuff about it will provide you with: terminology, fundamental concepts, and a few rules of thumb (hahaha did you get that I'm hilarious). Things that you won't be able to intuit or figure out by just being smart-thinking and opinionated.
I'm asking because not only do you not point out any potential solutions, you even assume these might never be solved by anyone else either, for no good reason (and yet write a rather long and authorative-sounding post about it).
I’m studying compsci, took several classes on the topic, and have previously also participated in courses outside of university where we did UX work more practically.
> what are you talking about? I have a Samsung S4, which the sort of "4-5 inch" (translation: 10-13 cm) phone you're talking about, yes?
> I'm asking because not only do you not point out any potential solutions, you even assume these might never be solved by anyone else either, for no good reason
I’m saying it’s very problematic to solve this, because the real estate that is reachable and therefore usable for controls on modern devices has significantly shifted to an area where it’s hard to place controls.
The unreachable zone at the top is the reason why Google has started moving all their controls to the bottom of the screen, with bottom navigation and bottom search bar – except, now you get into the bottom-right problematic zone.
Of course you can solve it – but, as I mentioned above, with current UI paradigms you’d need to waste more space. And by the time we might have solved our current UX problem, our phones will have changed already again, so the solution is irrelevant. Just like today’s top bar and left navigation started to become popular right before today’s oversized phones got popular.
I have relatively small hands, but here’s a few photos: https://imgur.com/a/YIRAj – 100% of the screen is reachable, and on all below 4.9" also with a firm grip.
In contrast, on the 5.2" Nexus 5X, only with a loose grip is the left or upper part reachable, and the action bar’s up button is generally unreachable while holding the phone in a firm grip.
On larger devices, such as the Nexus 6P (currently none here, so I can’t take photos), it gets far worse.
Phone UI is designed for 4-5" devices, if you use larger, you have to live with that, but that’s your decision.
I'm a man whose hands are about 1/8" shorter than the average, and with your 5" phone, you're able to hit more with your tight grip than I can hit with my loose grip. With my loose grip, I can only comfortably hit about 1/4 of the screen. Maybe it has to do with the relative size of the palm to the fingers. It's actually one of the reasons that I'm a fan of big bezels on the top and bottom - it gives me something to grip if I need to use the top or bottom of the screen.
Yes. Phones that are switched off are easily reachable almost anywhere.
They also happen to have no active UI elements on the screen. Or visual feedback.If you'd switch it on, on that photo you you'd be long-pressing the (bottom-right) "back" key, and possibly generating word salad in any focused text input field.
Almost nobody has issues holding a phone with the active display switched off.
I can also hold them for you while switched on without issue. I photographed them switched off because it was faster to do it this way, as otherwise I’d first have to power them on and set them up.
But notice the Moto G (2014) in the album, which is on, and doesn’t show interference.
If you find someone who works on phone design for a modern phone manufacturer, I imagine they can tell you about hundreds of tiny unnoticed design elements which serve to make the phone more robust against falls. I am amazed at how well modern phones withstand falls, e.g. continuing to work after being dropped 6 feet and landing on one corner on a tile floor.
I have seen a rotary phone in a thrift store with plastic bits chipped off from a fall, and I imagine there are other phones which never made it to the thrift store because their mechanisms broke after falling. I suspect that given equivalent falls the modern high-end smartphones will withstand them better on average than old Bell phones (especially if you drop the full phone and not just the handset). It would be an interesting test though.
But telephone falls weren’t too common 40–100 years ago because they were enormous, attached by a robust cord, and didn’t get carried around in a pocket or purse all the time, held across the fingers while being manipulated with a thumb, or used to take selfies.
The best way to make smartphones more robust without compromising other essential attributes is to use stronger materials and a slightly grippier surface finish. The newer Apple phones have reportedly improved along these lines (the one I have is a few years old, so who knows..). For a customer who cares deeply about protection from falls, it’s always possible to wrap one of these things in a thick rubber shell.
Extra physical protrusions etc. are discarded from smartphones because they make them much less pleasant to hold in a pocket.
Never had a Nokia 3310 or another mobile of the same period?
Those were sturdy phones, capable of surviving a motorbike accident literally dividing in several pieces and they were working perfectly after being reassembled.
Modern phones are simply ridiculous from the robustness point of view, I have seen mobiles completely shattered from a simple fall from 1 meter of height.
> I am amazed at how well modern phones withstand falls, e.g. continuing to work after being dropped 6 feet and landing on one corner on a tile floor.
wait that's 1.80 metres, right? if you drop 10 modern smartphones from that height, making sure they hit with the corner on a stone tile floor outside, I'd be very surprised if more than one of them would show no more damage than a scratch or a dent in the side.
I've seen displays shattered dropped ~30 cm by sliding from an armchair, hitting merely the side and back on stone tiles (certainly the corners are most vulnerable, no?).
My phone has actually survived worse, but having witnessed the brittleness of other people's phones, I think I'm just oddly lucky.
I dunno what people are doing to their phones. As a pretty clumsy person who generally hasn't used a case, the most that has ever happened (across 4 Android flagships, an N900, an iPhone 6 and now an iPhone 8) when I dropped a phone is scratching and dinging. The G1, N900, and Galaxy S2 would often disassemble themselves upon dropping, but never damaged a screen or reduced any functionality. This includes many drops (clumsy, see above) for each of those (except the iPhone 8), from heights between 0.5m and 1.5m, onto carpet, wood, tile, concrete and asphalt.
I don't see many cracked screens when I'm out, but when I do, it's always in a case. I've wondered if some of these cases actually exacerbate the problem.
Just bought a Moto C. Its body is made of the slipperiest substance known to man. Only phone I've had to put a case around because I can't use it without sliding out my hand.
I remember kids breaking other things using rotary phones, and then those phones still working fine. Those big hard pieces of plastic were super tough. Maybe if you dropped the base of the phone on its dial or something...
Rotary phones are much, much better at surviving the expected hazards of their intended environment than smartphones. The exact frequency of falls is irrelevant.
That’s fine, but there’s a significant trade-off. You can still use a Bell phone from 1950 if you want to, but few people are willing to make that sacrifice in other features. Or if you prefer you are welcome to securely strap a rubberized feature phone to your wrist and never worry about dropping it again.
For that matter, a toy phone made out of a block of wood is much better at surviving the expected hazards of its intended environment than either of them, but it’s hardly a reasonable substitute.
Mainstream smartphones are that way because that's what the mainstream market demands. There are smartphones that put function over design (typically marketed as outdoor smartphones). You can absolutely get smartphones that survive falls, have replaceable batteries and sacrifice thinness and screen resolution for better battery life. But thin, magic rectangles that are all screen on every surface sell a lot better.
I don’t know. Isn’t that a matter of trade-offs? Sure smartphones used to have a very long battery life and were more robust in the “good old days”, but they had tiny screens and real keyboards.
Even though it never broke when I let it slip, I don’t miss my old blackberry. I can so do so much more with my iPhone today that I am ok with it being less sturdy.
It's always about trade-offs, the question is what are the sides of those trade-off and whether consumers really care about the things being traded in.
For instance, I don't believe that durability and large screens are mutually exclusive. Consider a popular phone accessory that is a rubber case. I've been using one to protect my (then) $800 glass piece, and it's totally fine after many drops. In fact, I don't know of people who use such cases and have problems with screen damages. All because it adds an extra impact-absorbing bevel on each side, including above the screen (so the screen isn't hitting the floor even if the phone falls face-first). What's the problem for manufacturers to add such a padding layer? Everyone is dropping battery replaceability anyway.
(Also: rubber cases improve grip, so the phone won't slip out of your hand or your pocket that easily.)
I feel it's like there is some influential person in the industry who strongly believes that what the customers really want is to get intimate with their phones, to caress their glass surface - that's why there should be no bevel, and if you can't make it all from glass, then make the rest from aluminium. Well, I for one don't want to get touchy-feely with my phone, I want it to stand a decent chance of not breaking when it hits something.
Designing for customization with readily available third party accessories is a design choice, and one that reflects a different consumer products ecosystem than existed in the mid 20th century. I don’t mind starting with a minimalist phone and then adding my own splash of color or protective bevels. And a benefit of this system isn’t just mass customization. I can give a used phone to my mother or my son and they can re-customize it with a new case appropriate to their needs. I have no desire for someone at Apple to take away my choice of case.
If you make the phone without the built-in elbow pads, then both the people who prefer it to be thin and attractive and the people who prefer it to be enormous and grippy and bouncy can both be satisfied. Moreover, the latter group can choose from dozens of colors and styles.
There exist phones with fat rubberized shells. They sell terribly and have mostly been driven out of the market.
Still, the choice should be there for those who prefer the rubber shell phones.
And no, devices like the Cat S60 don't really count. They are abandoned basically the moment they leave the factory. It's questionable if you'll see a software update on that device, like ever.
That's the point. There's not enough money to be made catering to a niche market when add-ons can solve the problem.
Some of us would like a bulky rubber phone when we're hiking along a rocky stream and a svelte phone when it's in our pocket every day. I can add a protective case to a thin phone much more easily than I can disassemble a bulky phone.
> What's the problem for manufacturers to add such a padding layer?
Customization! Users can customize the color of the padding layer. Personally, I do not see any advantage of phone manufacturers providing it over users buying it from third party manufacturers. Most of the shops (in US at least) would also stock the cases along with the phones.
> I want it to stand a decent chance of not breaking when it hits something.
Very simple. Get a case.
> I do not see any advantage of phone manufacturers providing it over users buying it from third party manufacturers.
Sooooo many people whose display gets wrecked or walk around for years with ever increasing shattered lines and therefore severely decreased robustness and lifetime, just because they didn't get the rubber thing in the first week after they got it[0]. As long as you got yours, right?
I mean, really you should be arguing the disadvantage of the manufacturer including a €1 piece of molded rubber with a €600 purchase. They also put a plastic screen protector on it, right? (at least my S4 came with one, already applied, just below another more loose sticky packaging foil that came off after a day or two).
Make it boring black, just for protection until someone picks their cute custom case.
A great analogy is another fragile fashion item worn daily are glasses. Ignoring the cheaper below-€100 models (nothing wrong with those, just not for this example), but if you get a model over, say, €350 (let alone approaching the price of a smartphone), you expect it to come with a damn case. I might honestly get up and leave if they had the nerve to charge me for it (boy, do I ever hate upselling) And glasses don't even break if you drop them (because they're not made of glass, in case those of you blessed with perfect eyesight were wondering).
I also find it weird how most laptops don't come with a basic reinforced cloth+zipper bag.
One time it didn't make sense was a small frying pan that came with a cloth bag. Still not sure what was the point of that. But if a manufacturer of €40 frying pans can do it, even if there's no real reason for it ...
Seriously, benefit of the doubt is over.
They do all of this because don't want smartphones to last very long and try their hardest to put the blame on the owner (which they want to be "consumers", but you don't "consume" cooking utensils and eyewear either), trying to hide that they're manufactured this way.
It's wasteful and frankly I have heard enough of the idea that buyers don't want to pay for quality. Because the non-quality is overpriced and the quality is unavailable to choose for. Why wouldn't I pay 3x the price for something that lasts 4x as long (or usually much better even), and the nerve to push that on the consumer instead of the manufacturer even daring to offer this planned obsolescence shit.
[0] I tend to default to "no" if someone tries to upsell to me after an large purchase. Because my smart-decision-making juice is usually depleted for the day and I'm out of spoons. The times I give in, I end up with suboptimal useless crap. Even the smartphone case I got the very same day turned out to be all manners of "just wrong".
The amazing thing about making phones thin and light is that people who want that can have it and people who don’t can throw on a rugged case pretty cheaply, so everyone wins. If Apple started shipping phones smothered in rubber, some of their customers would be delighted, but a bunch would buy a different phone because they don’t want that.
Despite having better internals, none of my smart phones have felt as well designed as the original Droid, that had the sliding keyboard, solid metal case, and bevel that did a lot to stop fall damage. My current phone even has a similar size screen to it -- the only feature difference is that my current phone is thinner and every other feature is worse.
If anyone knows a smartphone with that style of physical keyboard, rugged style, and good battery please tell me.
I'll trash my cheap, thin piece of plastic and buy one instantly!
> Even though it never broke when I let it slip, I don’t miss my old blackberry. I can so do so much more with my iPhone today that I am ok with it being less sturdy.
Point us to a design principle (or anything), that proves these two are mutually exclusive. Defeatist attitude brings nothing to this discussion. What are you looking for, commiseration?
Tbh, while this article talks about design, it is really just about color.
Making keys green instead of black don't change the way they operate.
There are some practical reasons for using certain colors, red grabs attention, orange is highly visible, white reflects light and black absorbs and radiates it. However most of it is just a matter of style.
The iPhone 5C models with colorful plastic backs were on the market less than 5 years ago. They also make a rose gold iPhone now which isn’t my cup of tea but Apple seems to be opening up to exploring more color options these days.
> Today, we are ditching this proven design in favor of a single touch screen, because it looks so much more elegant and modern.
Tell me about it. I realised this had gone too far when Volkswagen moved the headlight angle adjust and dashboard backlight controls to the touchscreen, about 3 levels deep, with a slider. If you are driving at dawn/dusk and suddenly the backlight seems too dim/bright, you need to pull over and do it via the touchscreen. Moronic
For me it was when VW made a huge marketing push about a "hand-waving" feature in their cars. Basically instead of pressing a perfectly serviceable button on your steering wheel, you take your hand off of it and stard waving your fingers in front of the car screen to change volume or similar features.
At that point I kinda lost all trust in those people having the faintest clue of what makes for a good UX.
whaaat? hand-waving is reserved for communicating with other people and vehicles in traffic!! how did this idea even get past road safety, in particular in jurisdictions where using a phone is illegal
I guess those of us who are less resistant to groupthink (i.e. have working faculties) have to be responsible to get into positions of power so we can say, "fuck off" when designers want to take a line of technology and change it because "trend" without additional evidence.
If you want an old style cell phone buy one. I personally think new smart phones are fantastic. Sure it would be nice if battery lasted longer, but I have learned to adapt. Charge your phone every night, carry a back-up battery for long stays away from home.
I drop my phone all the time, and it hardly gets a scratch, and this is with no case at all. I personally think they are wonders of modern design.
As for design, maybe you have no feel for how far they have come in 10 years.
Most design in tech hardware prioritizes functionality over look.
Just because some colors pop doesn't mean the opposite.
The simpler explanation is just that we aren't very good (as an industry) at hardware design look or functionality design right now. We need to get better at both.
But making an all-gray phone with no stylistic touches isn't going to re-prioritize functionality, promise you that. Different problem entirely.
> You can operate most controls without a need of looking away from the road. Today, we are ditching this proven design in favor of a single touch screen, because it looks so much more elegant and modern.
I really don't get this. It's like everyone just forgot that when you're driving a car, you need to be looking through the windshield.
If you haven't seen it already, you might find this submission about redesigning the smartphone dial pad [1] interesting, which was posted the other week and goes into the history of the dial pad design a bit.
That's true for some rotary dial phones. Alas, in my house, I had a more ornate model which did away with the plastic guard to prevent phone calls from being cut off[1]. Instead any fall, would depress the place where you hung the phone up, and instantly cut off the on going call. As I remember, even accidentally jostling it by leaning too far onto the desk, could potentially cut off a call.
To me, that speaks a timeless truth---expensive and ornate tools are often less functional than their inexpensive peers. Today, expensive smartphones break instantly, but inexpensive ones which thick bezel on 'cheap' glass is resistant to accidental impact.
I wonder if we will finally go back to hardware design principles that prioritizes functionality over look.
As soon as we go back to renting our equipment from the telcos, we will get ugly handsets that last forever.
Cars, a complex machines that can easily hurt others, traditionally have controls designed in such a way that you can enter a car model that is totally new to you and comfortably operate it within minutes
You mean after you’ve received mandatory training and has been certified to operate them?
> I wonder if we will finally go back to hardware design principles that prioritizes functionality over look.
It's actually going the other direction. The fabric phone cover on the Google Daydream causes massive overheating problems. So this is a case of appearance over functionality.
If things were made to avoid breaking, it would reduce the need for people to replace them every 1-2 years. This is what you get if you make maximizing profit margin the only goal of society.
Apple has started moving slightly in this direction, by creating a plastic cushion layer around the edges of the screen. It probably doesn't help a whole lot, but probably still better than nothing. On the other hand, they decided to make the back out of glass again, so I guess that cancels out that plastic cushion feature.
> I wonder if we will finally go back to hardware design principles that prioritizes functionality over look.
Probably not. The article praises the Google Home "flannel hockey puck," which Google had to remotely cripple because it would randomly wake up and send audio to Google.
When friends talk about their new phone costing say €250 I promptly reply: "What? Only 250? You forgot to add the smartphone tax, didn't you?". Now this usually drags immediately their attention, so I can continue: "You should have considered the replacement of a new screen almost every year and a new battery replacement service after 2 or 3 years. ...this is going to cost you over twice that figure if you keep it for say 5 years", while a dumb phone will probably need just one easily replaceable €25 battery after some years.
It's not just weird, it's super weird. But the fact is that modern smartphones are so much more fragile than their predecessors that this "tax" must be taken into consideration, especially when phones become awfully expensive like nearly everything made by Apple and Samsung in the recent years.
Moreover, If I had a minor crash with the car my dumb phone would very likely still be functional for an emergency call (it survived intact a motorcycle accident months ago) while a smartphone would probably become inoperable with a broken screen after the first hit.
The Italian peninsula has a way of inspiring people and has done so for a long time. I was living in Italy when I became interested in graphic design, which I then learned from Milton Glaser — who was also inspired by his time in Italy — through his classic book, Graphic Design. Milton is still going strong at almost 90. Here he is, drawing: https://vimeo.com/6986303
It kinda was the Apple of the bureaucratic era. They had advertisement about how their furniture and machines would make work heaven on earth. All this for a bit of modular desks and drawers. Ok and nice electromechanical calculators. But the marketing speech is exactly the same as today. Buy our stuff so you feel you reached the top of the world of the year <insert any year>. [1]
Other thing, Olivetti invented a bunch of things in the days of early calculators, they were HP competitors. I remember the Olivetti living room TV computer and thought how come they missed the computer turn that much and died ? Well they didn't, capitalism pushed them into the grave. The Benedetti family, owner of Olivetti, did some stock acrobatics in the early 80s and failed massively, so they had to trickle down the loss just at the time Olivetti needed financial support to ramp up personal computer research and production. Bye
[1] computer chronicles demo of Windows 2 was the same idiocy. Now it can do backgrounds, and custom color so YOU can have YOUR own computer. Just like smartphones. It so much always the same it makes me physically sad. Chasing our own tails ...
> Well they didn't, capitalism pushed them into the grave. The Benedetti family, owner of Olivetti, did some stock acrobatics in the early 80s and failed massively
Sounds more like the Benedetti family pushed Olivetti into the grave than capitalism did...
What on earth does this have to do with capitalism? The reason the Lada Niva is still in manufacture is that there's still motivation/demand and the manufacturer hasn't given up on making them. The reason Olivetti doesn't make Olivetti anymore is that there's near zero motivation/demand, and nobody wants to make the products just out of passion.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but you can't aggress an idea. I am here to talk about ideas.
At first you imply that forgoing capitalism would save (or help to save) Olivetti. Olivetti only exists because of capital markets, and in a world without capital markets there would be no Olivetti to save.
You then said that, in your opinion, "capitalism allows for the speculation game to occur", which is too vague to be interpreted consistently. "the speculation game" isn't a common or publicly defined term, and it hasn't been defined here. You provide no reasoning to support your idea that this undefined thing occurs as a result of capitalism. Because of that, I said that your statement doesn't mean anything.
It certainly doesn't mean anything to me, and that's not a reflection of your character, your personality, or your worth. I simply have no idea what you are talking about, because you have been excessively vague in your "aggression" (to use your standard) toward capitalism.
Olivetti was doing fine, their owner made a mistake, in a world with less speculation game, Olivetti may have very well survived.
Apparently you like to be explained things, it means trading stuff for the sake of profit as much as possible, which is something detrimental if you don't only account for capital.
Also Olivetti didn't go out of business due to lack of demand, at all, they've been starved. So your previous comparison with Lada is unfit.
Stock trading is just one of many ways aimed at making capital available to whomever need it. Without capital Olivetti may not have existed in the first place (assuming they borrowed money during their existence).
You may blame lax of regulation in this regard, which may be fair. But blaming capitalism in general is disingenuous
Yes. Because what you described is the reason that literally everyone buys / sells most securities, or even starts a business. They're typically not in it for the warm fuzzy feeling, but to make a profit.
Yeah, they were the "it" thing for some period of time and created a sense of excitement that is palpable even now. Apple certainly held that baton for a while.
Google might be able to do it, but I don't think they're going to do it by imitating Olivetti style. Some incidental "homages" incarnated in a few design elements, sure, but there's a lot more to creating "object appeal" than reviving the past.
It's why the "new" VW Beetle was a breath of fresh air and got people excited. On the other hand, the Chrysler PT cruiser-- not so much. Design is a fickle, complicated thing.
I think the only thing holding Google's hardware back from being recognized as a design leader is the Google brand. Everybody already has an ingrained knowledge of what Google stands for, and it's not humanism or playfulness no matter how humanist or playful their industrial design is.
If the narrative here was "a bunch of ex-google and motorola engineers have started a new hardware company. look at their adorable smart speakers" instead of "Google hired a bunch of ex motorola engineers and now is making hardware", these designs would be enough to get people excited. But because it's Google, it's not exciting.
Olivetti sold the first fully transistor-based computer, the Elea 9003. The front panel was designed by Ettore Sottsass and is extraordinarily beautiful: https://i.imgur.com/a10BXoB.jpg
Maybe you have your own favorite hideous tech thing of last year. Would be fun to see. It says just as much about the time or even more than the top brands that just have to stick to their aesthetic style.
This is because people need variety in fashion items, you can have non-mainstream clothing but still dress normally on other days, tech hardware meanwhile is bought because of functionality first, so (most)people don't have multiple smartphones to match different occasions and settings.
Software, OTOH, is also very conservative, this is because familiar design patterns ease users' learning curves(and conversion optimization in the case of commercial websites). However, there are some movements about creating non-mainstream websites such http://brutalistwebsites.com/ which I find interesting.
What's brutalist about those? I'd understood that movement to revolve around the aesthetic of the raw material (béton brut, "raw concrete"), which translated to the web would seem to suggest basic HTML and images with minimal to no styling and Javascript. The sites linked on that page seem instead to prefer a "high style" approach that's similar to the mainstream aesthetic in every respect save the look of the result.
TBH I think these websites use the term brutalist too loosely. I am not an expert but AFAIK brutalist architecture was about a lesser concern with aesthetics and more with function. I also expected brutalist web design to be more about minimal styling and javascript. I just pointed this site because that's what came to mind as to the closest that web design has to "non-mainstream ugly fashion".
Industrial design is all about the interplay of functional components with aesthetics. Think how the iPhone home button is a functional component, but there's visual design work that went into that specific shape and it's a part of the look.
Similarly, there are a lot of ways to put antennae on a router, and this company chose one particular way that would have one particular (hideous) look.
I love Material Design language. But never would have made the connection with Italian "Mod" style of the 1960s. For me it's more about bringing tactile sense and physicality back to digital interfaces.
Another touch stone of inspiration for me is Mid Century Modern Danish design. Consider this "Valet Chair" by the legendary Hans Wegner. It isn't just that the seat lifts up to form a rack for hanging your trousers. Or that the backing hides a jacket hanger in plain site. It's the final reveal: a mini compartment underneath the seat for "storing ones cufflinks and tie pins" ;)
The functionality of the chair is modelled upon the world it aspires to inhabit. It's a design for living.
I'm going to chip in with a random example, a sweet though perhaps flawed design for a tactile interface. The structure of it reminds me of a product type (i.e. an algebraic data type).
As an Italian this makes me happy and sad at the same time.
We had so much talent and so many great ideas, I'm glad that they're still around in the world, it's just a shame we couldn't understand their value and promote them around the world
I am making a living [1] on the fact that Rancilio has not updated their Silvia [2] espresso machines beyond some exterior styling for almost 20 years now. We did some innovation instead. It is still a popular machine, but it could be so much better.
My little Bialetti mokapot makes me smile every morning.
There is a family run Italian restaurant with premises in a 1960s shopping block on a corner. They have used the strongly horizontal feel of the space and produced something that is calm, feels spacious (actually quite a lot of covers) and looks great.
Scooters are still popular with youth wearing parkas here in the UK.
The value is travelling but not perhaps in the way that was hoped for.
You made me think of Smeg's 50's Style line of appliances. Not only are they, by far, the best looking appliances I've seen, they are also built to last a lifetime. Modern technology, retro design and built like they don't make them anymore, what's not to like?
The bits of color actually humanize things a little for the caretaker and there are innovative design elements like water bottles accessible from the outside so they don't require the cage to be opened to replace them. I have worked with several caging systems and Tecniplast are the best.
Italian heavy machinery (agricultural, wood and metal processing, construction) was pretty popular a couple of decades ago, simple and reliable, nowadays it's all Dutch and German. I wonder what happened.
Decline. An all-me hedonistic generation didn’t want to let go and retire, and kept the X and the Millenials at the door. Italy is now stuck in a 20 year long Groubdhog Day bitterly bickering about Berlusconi, corruption, The Crisis and Reforms (selling the last nails of the house before finally going bankrupt.) it’s a disaster... I have no words for the amount of regret for the missed opportunities...
but to be honest, it’s the Italian true spirit: a bit sleazy, servile, unwilling to take any risk to the point of being a hostile reactionary.
See Adriano Olivetti’s life and what came of his legacy.
I don’t understand where you get this obsession against taxes: It’s not the problem! Corruption, cronyism, backward selection process, those are the real bugs, not just taxes. Besides, in Italy they are high but only for the lower middle class, the well connected elite has been getting a free pass since forever
But Italy is still very strong in interior design right? On the odd occasion I leaf through a fancy interiors magazine I often find myself lusting after a beautiful Italian sofa.
the problem here is the lack of financing. most great startups get outgrown by better financed global competition and are left with scraps of the Italian market
> Central to Olivetti’s philosophy — and also to the designers that it hired — was that technology needed to be humanistic, not domineering
Today's Google is very bad at this. Their every product is creepy, cold, dumbed-down and surveilance-based. Maybe they are trying to somewhat fix that by visual aesthetics? Their hardware surely look great, and UIs in Android look good too, but UIs in their web apps look dull and authoritarian.
Google Photos is just "we exfiltrate all your photos and use machine learning on them". Its UI is like designed for monkeys. Compare that to Flickr or their old Picasaweb. Few buttons, no functionality except "we get your photos now you can look on them". I have lots of photos dated in future (from old camera which had bad clock) and there's no way to fix it (except to edit date on each photo).
Google+ was so cold and dead and creepy. Modern Youtube is just a stupid TV. Most "account settings" pages look like I'm viewing them on giant phone. They are saying "you don't need desktop computer, just use phone, you need only play and pause buttons". Their design is highly political. It feels more like eastern bloc's high modernism, not like Olivetti.
It's weird to me that you're choosing Google Photos as your example, as that's one of my very favorite apps of all time. Possibly #1. It does its job amazingly well, it solves an important and hard problem that has bedeviled me for over a decade (photo storage/indexing/retrieval/querying across multiple devices), and it's slick.
Picasa and Flickr were more about photo sharing, and required way more involvement to use. Google Photos is about managing your collection of photos across all devices and the web, and it's amazing at it.
When you hate a company, it's easy to make up reasons to hate their products, especially if you aren't worried about using an internally consistent decision algorithm.
In order to do this I have to select photos for specific day and there's no way to do it. On my computer these old photos are in directories named with date, one directory per day, but in Google Photos this information is lost, they are entirely random (these photos really have random dates, camera clock was randomizing each time I switched it on).
Simple script would solve that but Google Photos has no public API because public APIs are so 2006. There's no way to reupload photos with fixed EXIFs too.
> creepy, cold, [...] and authoritarian [...] designed for monkeys [...] highly political
You lost me completely. The complaint about photo dates seems reasonable. The rest sounds like the description of a video game enemy and not software UI design.
I have lots of photos dated in future (from old camera which had bad clock) and there's no way to fix it (except to edit date on each photo).
Select the photos, click on the "more options" button (the three dots), then on Edit Date & Time. There you can change their dates, and even choose between setting a fixed datetime for all or keep the relative time differences between each other.
You made me realize it might be dangerous to have pictures of sensitive documents in Google Photos, even with dual factor authentication... There's not much info on the extent of this "machine learning."
> Their every product is creepy, cold, dumbed-down and surveilance-based.
Aside from the always on listening for "ok google" crap that can (supposedly) be disabled, is there anything else you are referencing? Im genuinely curious.
Echo does this, as does the upcoming Apple Homepod, yet nobody complains about it every Apple/Amazon thread like they do with Google.
How else do you build a home assistant? It's not sending your data to Google during this period. If it did record/transmit, that would be a fairly easy thing to detect, yet nobody has.
Robots reading all your emails, analyzing all your images and documents? Tracking your searches, your video watches, and most non-search webpage visits too (via embedded Analytics)?
Great article, highlighting some great design history.
Google's new design also kinda reminds me of trends in the outdoor/sports apparel & footwear industry from about 2-3 years ago. Contrast stitching and zippers, muted tones with bright pastels, resurgence of 1970's bright colors and mountaineering styles. Patagonia's catalog from 2014 would be representative, as would lululemon around that time, and Nike and UnderArmour shoes and casual sport.
Tech is putting a new spin on it, but many of the themes are similar. I like it! The diversity and experimentation, with respectful nods to the past and adaptation for current trends is a great thing.
Not to be overlooked is Italy's heritage of graphic design. This comprehensive digital archive project by Nicola-Matteo Munari may waste hours of your time, if you are inclined to visual design.
There's a subset of Italian Design called Memphis which this seems to be based on.
The point of Memphis was to create funky colour combinations in living spaces filled with extravagantly geometric objects, not to decorate utilitarian objects with odd colours because "design".
Memphis was a big influence on early-90s graphic design, which - ironically - gives these designs more than a hint of early-Internet "What is this company called Google?" nostalgia.
I'm not sure if that's deliberate - and if it is deliberate, I'm really not sure it's a good look to be aiming for in 2017.
One of my pet peeves of late has been the ubiquity of black, grey, and white colour schemes.
Here in NZ and Australia, almost all new apartment buildings are some combination of those colours. It's not just new buildings - people are giving their houses the grey treatment when it comes time to repaint.
My own theory is that this has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from seeing houses as homes (and therefore as an extension of personal character) to now seeing houses as investments. No one seems willing to choose a colour scheme with character for fear of limiting the pool of potential buyers.
On top of that, new cars seem less likely to be any colour other than black, silver, or white. But maybe that's just my perception...
And what is so special about this? Companies like Teenage Engineering have been doing this for years and same could be argued for dirt-cheap headphones from Urban Outfitters. For a company like Google, I'd rather expect them to develop their very own stringent signature style after years of visual self-discovery and a hodgepodge of mediocre results.
You mean like how Apple developed their very own stringent signature style after years of visual self-discovery and a hodgepodge of mediocre results called Braun?
> The innovative rubber membrane and the “volcano” shape to the keys has been called “the most influential button design ever”, and combined with the eye-popping orange color, makes this a really stunning piece, especially when seen and held in person.
These kinds of rubber membrane buttons were popular because they were incredibly cheap.
They also suck.
(At least, every example I’ve ever tried was functionally terrible compared to real switches; I’ve never tried the Olivetti originals, but I would expect them to also suck.)
They didn't disappear, though. You know what's even cheaper and sucks even more? Capacitive surface "buttons". The ones that we now have on everything, including phones.
I’m not sure what your point is. If you want to attach an external keypad to your phone, those certainly exist. A touchscreen is a trade-off between shitty button feel vs. profoundly expanded UI flexibility, making it a much more general purpose input device. Touchscreens are not built into phones because they are cheaper than buttons.
If you want a phone that does nothing but make phone calls using numerical codes, nice physical buttons are surely better. If you want a “phone” that does 1000 other things, the physical buttons are untenable.
I think desktop computers should come with much better physical keyboards (ideally properly hand-shaped instead of stupid rectangular slabs) with nice buttons and many analog inputs (trackballs, sliders, jog wheels, ...), but for a pocket device forget it.
They are popular primarily because they're as cheap as they can possibly get - they have no moving parts. It's a combination of worst aspects of physical buttons (non-reconfigurable) and touchscreens (no tactile feedback).
The key surfaces are oddly small and spaced apart, and the entire keyboard is a protruding shelf above the desk surface with no wrist rest. I don't even know how you're supposed to comfortably use that abomination. It's a serious triumph of form over function.
I would gladly take a $10 Dell rubber dome keyboard lying flat on a desk over that any day of the week.
We’re talking about two different things. The rubber Olivetti buttons under discussion were the ones from the yellow calculator.
I’m not sure what kind of switches were on this typewriter.
Anyway, the rest of your comment is in my opinon quite misinformed about typing ergonomics. If you want to have an extended discussion about why offline, shoot me an email.
Unfortunately they still design their phones so that it turns off when I grab it. Because I have human hands with opposable thumbs and the power button is right there on the side where you grip it. I wonder what lifeform Nexus phones are actually designed for.
> Addition and subtraction operate in adding-machine fashion, with numbers being printed as they are entered into the register. C is a correction key which clears the whole of the current entry. The Total (T) key prints the result and clears the register; Sub-total (S) prints the contents and leaves the register unchanged. To encourage the habit of always pressing Total before starting a calculation, the D18 is made to power up with the error lamp lit, so that Total must be pressed before the machine can be used.
> Multiplication and division can be entered algebraically using the colour-coded legends printed on the keytops. For example, to multiply 2 by 3, use the white legends and press 2 X 3 =. For operators familiar with the "reverse Polish" entry of the earlier machines, using the moulded legends to the right of the keys will produce the same key sequence and the same result: 2 Enter 3 X . (There is only a single key switch under the Mult/Div/Enter button).
I was being sarcastic. Of course, it's been like this forever, but the bragging we see today is beyond control. Be humble about it, people are not that stupid. I'm especially disgusted by Apple's "the best iPhone ever". Of course, it should be the best by being the latest model! And the over-glorification of Jony Ive is pretty annoying. The reality is that recently Apple is behind the rest, got too big, fat, and lazy, and all design innovation comes from rivals.
> This isn’t a knock against the Braun style — there are many beautiful products that have sprung from that well.
A slight nit-pick, but does anyone else shudder a little when people use the adjective of 'beautiful' as an objective description of a particular design?
Design can certainly be beautiful. What I was trying to articulate (unsuccessfully, as usual) is people describing things as beautiful in an objective way. Ie, as if certain objects or products are impervious to changing trends and tastes. Particularly in tech these days, it feels like I'm always seeing marketing material around "creating beautiful layouts" or "beautiful products." Just an old man gripe of mine.
> people describing things as beautiful in an objective way
All people who have passed a certain intellectual threshold recognize that when another person says "beautiful" or "lovely" or "right" without giving reasons, they're expressing a personal opinion, although perhaps one informed by years of experience in a particular field.
It's not necessary to preface every opinion with boilerplate signifying that the writer is a human being with a limited perspective and that the opinions they express aren't intended to be absolute pronouncements on the nature of objective reality. It's understood.
I'm not sure how one could extract this sentiment from my initial comment and progress to such a patronising and paternalistic dressing-down, save for a thoroughly uncharitable disposition.
I'm with you. "Beautiful" has become a dominant end-goal, promoted by plenty of software/services as a focal part of the product.
It's hard to articulate why this feels objectionable. Perhaps I'm suspicious that emphasising beauty over functionality will lead to dumbed-down products that don't interest me. Perhaps I'm irked that beauty is valued by customers above functionality/reliability/etc, or that the sales/marketing teams feel that's so.
Do resources spent on beauty detract from resources expended on improved functionality, reliability, usability, security...?
Perhaps I'm concerned with the continuing march of users who can barely operate their many very expensive devices, and the security and support risks that come with this.
Then again... who am I to turn back the tide. Perhaps the role of the software developer is to predict "under the hood" problems that come from an emphasis of beauty, and fix them before they happen, to ensure the buttery-smooth experience users expect.
I don't think they can. I do think they can be beautiful to the vast majority of humans looking at them, but that's still subjective; an alien might disagree.
Not reading this article but I don't think there's anything to this. Pretty much all the most-lauded product designers have been continuing in this tradition ever since it was born - that it's not ubiquitous is attributable to timid and price-conscious clients. I don't think Google has any internal ideology whatsoever that is pushing this - they're just a company new to the hardware space who has lots of resources and a desire to build brand cachet, and they see hiring respected designers and getting out of their way as an effective way to do that.
The Design Of Everyday Things gives examples of great designs:
* Rotary dial phones were designed in such a way that when a phone felled on the floor it not only survived, but the ongoing phone-call was not hanged. Today countless users brake their smartphones glasses and yet the mainstream smartphones to do not incorporate any design elements that would make it harder to drop the phone or that would protect the glass from the impact. Such elements would make the designs less minimal, so are discarded.
* Cars, a complex machines that can easily hurt others, traditionally have controls designed in such a way that you can enter a car model that is totally new to you and comfortably operate it within minutes. You can operate most controls without a need of looking away from the road. Today, we are ditching this proven design in favor of a single touch screen, because it looks so much more elegant and modern.
That includes software, responsive design was created with the goal of adapting websites to smaller screens, as phones got bigger I don't see many sites utilizing responsive design so that I can still use my phone with one hand.
Also, I loved the MagSafe charging port on the MacBook, that is an example of great functionality on design, then Apple throws that out of the window and makes a single port laptop.
I much prefer USB-C, even if only because the cables themselves are better engineered.
Meanwhile, I've tripped over the wire countless times and been saved by the magsafe's ability to automatically disconnect rather than sending my 30-times-the-price laptop flying. It happens so often that USB-C charging is a non-starter for me. I'm buying older, refurb Macs until they realize their error. Short of that, I'm buying a bargain-basement PC that I can replace for under $1k because I know that kind of accident is going to happen eventually.
My point isn't to say that your experience is less valid but the benefit of an open charging standard is that we each can pick power adapters that we fit our use case.
Edit: Also, my and his cable probably died because of using it on our laps.
I've had the same macbook air since 2011 that I have now donated to another family member. I also gave them the original charging cable with it. I have taken at least 20 flights with it. You just need to be more careful with your things.
MagSafe was _amazing_ because if someone snags the wire your laptop doesn't fall off the desk.
If was using the same argument form as you I would say: Who are all this people that don't notice they are tripping on a cable? If you are not in an infomercial you will stop before launching a laptop onto a floor. I know a ton of people with windows computers and exactly zero of them have died from people tripping on the cable. MagSafe fixes a non-issue and is constantly annoyingly falling out.
I don't actually believe this but it is a silly and borderline rude way to argue. For some reason, you are in situations that benefit from MagSafe. This is a valid request, but I don't think is close to as common as you think. Since USB-C is open, you can get an adapter with a magnetic rip away section.
I am not excessively rough with my laptop. I used a badly frayed cable for 2 years without it breaking. I guarantee that you are not taking off and putting in your adapter multiple times per day and you are not using your laptop on your lap. Look at other peoples power adapters. The thin cable is not build to last and frays at both ends if you actually use the stupid wrapping things
Edit: I misspoke with regards to the size of the plug. Most of the outlets I used results in a delicate balance for the plug to stay in. Slight movements of the cable results in the plug falling out. Also, the folding plug makes it pain to plug into some hard to reach outlets.
My cables stay pristine over years of heavy travel, my co-workers are all in pieces - so I wanted to know why.
My old MagSafe charger is still the original. The cable feels very flexible, and the only discoloration it has is from being dragged around and stepped on.
Whatever formulation Apple has changed in manufacturing the new MagSafe has shortened its lifespan.
Personally, I put a circle of electrical tape over each end to provide strain relief.
Family probably went through at least half a dozen.
Never had a plain USB cable disintegrate on me IIRC.
I use a somewhat similar concept for some of my mobile devices (Magsafe-like adapter) to charge and transfer data. I'm not sure how frowned upon it is to link to a specific manufacturer here, but I assume a USB-C adapter could be attractive to someone on a new MacBook Pro that miss the MagSafe connector.
https://imgur.com/ZCt8R5g
It really bugs me when people complain about Apple cables not having strain reliefs. They don’t have huge ugly strain reliefs, and maybe that means they aren’t good enough, but they definitely exist.
And a not good-enough strain relief is no relief at all.
The strain reliefs Apple uses work fine for a lot of people. I used to use an MBP with a MagSafe connector and never had any strain relief problems.
Now people have grown a bit, they'll ask for other values and the production will realign.
Waves and spirals
Do you mind elaborating on this? I'm familiar with Plato's cave and I don't see the relevance.
Because those phones lacked many other features that people ALSO wanted.
I'd love to see different proportions and design decisions, I'm sure there are sweet spots
Now, if the rugged bits of the phone were easily and cheaply swapped, that would probably make it more appealing. But I can buy a new case for my phone for $10, so it’s hard for the rugged version to compete effectively.
Or, more optimistically, sometimes people dont know that they wanted something until it was given to them.
Like "swings and roundabouts"? I've never come across this variation.
and a really weird feeling that, indeed things do roundabouts, but it's not a perfect back-to-start revolution, the soil was raised but the people on it not so much (but they do feel they progressed). A circle that doesn't close properly is a bit a spiral.
</math-envy>
Since the word has changed meaning, we need a new one. Usability has a different meaning again.
USB 3.1 over a MagSafe-like reversible connector would be ideal.
I disagree. It seems obvioous to me that smartphones are optimized for easy insertion into and retrieval from tight front pockets in pants. That’s why they are shaped the way they are. It’s also partly why the headphone jack had to go. Wired headphones are a pain in the ass when you have to route the wires through layers of clothes and into a pocket or a handbag.
Is 6.5" or 7" a phone such as the Galaxy Note, to be used with one hand?
Or is it a Nexus 7, to be used with two hands?
If you buy a tablet or phablet — a device larger than 5" — you'll have to expext that you'll have to use it with two hands.
You can always buy a smaller device if you prefer to use something else.
This is where solid design comes into play, Tinder's ease of motion and placement of control buttons makes it easy to use with a single hand which means increased usage, thus creating a habit-forming loop, this is critical to Tinder's success.
Any phone above 4.5, maybe 5" device diagonal (not screen diagonal) is basically unusable single-handed.
And this means that on such devices, people interact entirely different with UI. Which results in different UI paradigms.
I’d have to either compromise my UI for users of smaller devices, or for users of larger devices. But in either case, users of larger devices will never get a truly awesome UI, as that’s simply not possible. (Either you waste space, or parts of the UI are just not reachable).
The problem with these phones is the insistence to push UI elements to the corners on touch screens even though original the UX motivation for putting important things in corners was that they're the easiest mouse targets.
The usable space on a screen doesn’t grow much between a 4" and a 6" phone, because you hold your thumb further over the screen, and more parts are unreachable.
And while one could move the content into the top-left or top-right (depending on handedness of the user), the result is so ugly users preferred a UI with less real estate over it in tests.
With a 4" phone, the best reachable areas are the top and the left. Which is why Android 4.0 – which was right around the time when 4-5" phones became popular – moved all these actions into the top and left edges with the Action Bar and Navigation Drawer.
With a 6" phone, those areas are unreachable, the bottom and the right are obscured by your hand, and the only area left for controls is the center – but you can’t really break up content around the controls either.
The only solution that works partially are gestures, but those are very limited in what you can do, and are very inaccurate.
If you have a better solution for a chat client in which a user might have 400+ channels open than using a navigation drawer (with search) on the left, content in the middle, and input at the bottom, then please present some.
But currently, only for a small handful of apps the 6" problem is solved, and I believe that for many apps, it might never be solved.
If I'm holding it in my right hand, about the only part I can't reach with my thumb is the top-left and the very top. Which is about the opposite of what you describe. I'm really confused about just about any statements you made following that, can you explain?
Also, how do you imagine the hand obscuring any parts of the screen without firing touch events all over the place? Placing your hand on the screen will make any app go haywire (yea and we should fix that, challenging but not impossible).
BTW I'm not talking about text-input, just about accessing larger elements of a touch UI. I have kind of shaky hands, I've tried a lot of different ways to hold it and I think that I just can't do the two-thumb typing cause I'm unable to hold it steady in that position, or at least not in a way that's healthy to keep your hands in for frequent stretches.
Also, what is your background in UX? I don't mean a formal education, but any introductory background reading? I often wonder this in discussions like these. Similar to -say- typography, it's not a really hard topic to grasp the basics of. But just reading some intro stuff about it will provide you with: terminology, fundamental concepts, and a few rules of thumb (hahaha did you get that I'm hilarious). Things that you won't be able to intuit or figure out by just being smart-thinking and opinionated.
I'm asking because not only do you not point out any potential solutions, you even assume these might never be solved by anyone else either, for no good reason (and yet write a rather long and authorative-sounding post about it).
I’m studying compsci, took several classes on the topic, and have previously also participated in courses outside of university where we did UX work more practically.
> what are you talking about? I have a Samsung S4, which the sort of "4-5 inch" (translation: 10-13 cm) phone you're talking about, yes?
Scott Hurf made this helpful graphic: http://scotthurff.com/images/posts/thumb-zone-2/thumb-zones-...
> I'm asking because not only do you not point out any potential solutions, you even assume these might never be solved by anyone else either, for no good reason
I’m saying it’s very problematic to solve this, because the real estate that is reachable and therefore usable for controls on modern devices has significantly shifted to an area where it’s hard to place controls.
The unreachable zone at the top is the reason why Google has started moving all their controls to the bottom of the screen, with bottom navigation and bottom search bar – except, now you get into the bottom-right problematic zone.
Of course you can solve it – but, as I mentioned above, with current UI paradigms you’d need to waste more space. And by the time we might have solved our current UX problem, our phones will have changed already again, so the solution is irrelevant. Just like today’s top bar and left navigation started to become popular right before today’s oversized phones got popular.
Which makes it pretty much impossible to use _in_ your right hand while manipulating UI elements with your thumb.
I have relatively small hands, but here’s a few photos: https://imgur.com/a/YIRAj – 100% of the screen is reachable, and on all below 4.9" also with a firm grip.
In contrast, on the 5.2" Nexus 5X, only with a loose grip is the left or upper part reachable, and the action bar’s up button is generally unreachable while holding the phone in a firm grip.
On larger devices, such as the Nexus 6P (currently none here, so I can’t take photos), it gets far worse.
Phone UI is designed for 4-5" devices, if you use larger, you have to live with that, but that’s your decision.
They also happen to have no active UI elements on the screen. Or visual feedback.If you'd switch it on, on that photo you you'd be long-pressing the (bottom-right) "back" key, and possibly generating word salad in any focused text input field.
Almost nobody has issues holding a phone with the active display switched off.
But notice the Moto G (2014) in the album, which is on, and doesn’t show interference.
Or,look at this helpful graphic Scott Hurf made http://scotthurff.com/images/posts/thumb-zone-2/thumb-zones-...
I'd love to. One-handed phones have gotten thin on the ground.
I have seen a rotary phone in a thrift store with plastic bits chipped off from a fall, and I imagine there are other phones which never made it to the thrift store because their mechanisms broke after falling. I suspect that given equivalent falls the modern high-end smartphones will withstand them better on average than old Bell phones (especially if you drop the full phone and not just the handset). It would be an interesting test though.
But telephone falls weren’t too common 40–100 years ago because they were enormous, attached by a robust cord, and didn’t get carried around in a pocket or purse all the time, held across the fingers while being manipulated with a thumb, or used to take selfies.
The best way to make smartphones more robust without compromising other essential attributes is to use stronger materials and a slightly grippier surface finish. The newer Apple phones have reportedly improved along these lines (the one I have is a few years old, so who knows..). For a customer who cares deeply about protection from falls, it’s always possible to wrap one of these things in a thick rubber shell.
Extra physical protrusions etc. are discarded from smartphones because they make them much less pleasant to hold in a pocket.
wait that's 1.80 metres, right? if you drop 10 modern smartphones from that height, making sure they hit with the corner on a stone tile floor outside, I'd be very surprised if more than one of them would show no more damage than a scratch or a dent in the side.
I've seen displays shattered dropped ~30 cm by sliding from an armchair, hitting merely the side and back on stone tiles (certainly the corners are most vulnerable, no?).
My phone has actually survived worse, but having witnessed the brittleness of other people's phones, I think I'm just oddly lucky.
I don't see many cracked screens when I'm out, but when I do, it's always in a case. I've wondered if some of these cases actually exacerbate the problem.
They're leaving a lot on the table.
For that matter, a toy phone made out of a block of wood is much better at surviving the expected hazards of its intended environment than either of them, but it’s hardly a reasonable substitute.
I bet if you attached a smartphone to a desk with an elastic cord it would survive a very long time.
Even though it never broke when I let it slip, I don’t miss my old blackberry. I can so do so much more with my iPhone today that I am ok with it being less sturdy.
For instance, I don't believe that durability and large screens are mutually exclusive. Consider a popular phone accessory that is a rubber case. I've been using one to protect my (then) $800 glass piece, and it's totally fine after many drops. In fact, I don't know of people who use such cases and have problems with screen damages. All because it adds an extra impact-absorbing bevel on each side, including above the screen (so the screen isn't hitting the floor even if the phone falls face-first). What's the problem for manufacturers to add such a padding layer? Everyone is dropping battery replaceability anyway.
(Also: rubber cases improve grip, so the phone won't slip out of your hand or your pocket that easily.)
I feel it's like there is some influential person in the industry who strongly believes that what the customers really want is to get intimate with their phones, to caress their glass surface - that's why there should be no bevel, and if you can't make it all from glass, then make the rest from aluminium. Well, I for one don't want to get touchy-feely with my phone, I want it to stand a decent chance of not breaking when it hits something.
There exist phones with fat rubberized shells. They sell terribly and have mostly been driven out of the market.
And no, devices like the Cat S60 don't really count. They are abandoned basically the moment they leave the factory. It's questionable if you'll see a software update on that device, like ever.
Some of us would like a bulky rubber phone when we're hiking along a rocky stream and a svelte phone when it's in our pocket every day. I can add a protective case to a thin phone much more easily than I can disassemble a bulky phone.
My pet peeve is casual usage at home. I want to admire my phone's design sometimes without risking to shatter it on my tiled floor. <sighs>
Guess every one of us has that "spoiled consumer" part in them.
Customization! Users can customize the color of the padding layer. Personally, I do not see any advantage of phone manufacturers providing it over users buying it from third party manufacturers. Most of the shops (in US at least) would also stock the cases along with the phones.
> I want it to stand a decent chance of not breaking when it hits something. Very simple. Get a case.
Sooooo many people whose display gets wrecked or walk around for years with ever increasing shattered lines and therefore severely decreased robustness and lifetime, just because they didn't get the rubber thing in the first week after they got it[0]. As long as you got yours, right?
I mean, really you should be arguing the disadvantage of the manufacturer including a €1 piece of molded rubber with a €600 purchase. They also put a plastic screen protector on it, right? (at least my S4 came with one, already applied, just below another more loose sticky packaging foil that came off after a day or two).
Make it boring black, just for protection until someone picks their cute custom case.
A great analogy is another fragile fashion item worn daily are glasses. Ignoring the cheaper below-€100 models (nothing wrong with those, just not for this example), but if you get a model over, say, €350 (let alone approaching the price of a smartphone), you expect it to come with a damn case. I might honestly get up and leave if they had the nerve to charge me for it (boy, do I ever hate upselling) And glasses don't even break if you drop them (because they're not made of glass, in case those of you blessed with perfect eyesight were wondering).
I also find it weird how most laptops don't come with a basic reinforced cloth+zipper bag.
One time it didn't make sense was a small frying pan that came with a cloth bag. Still not sure what was the point of that. But if a manufacturer of €40 frying pans can do it, even if there's no real reason for it ...
Seriously, benefit of the doubt is over.
They do all of this because don't want smartphones to last very long and try their hardest to put the blame on the owner (which they want to be "consumers", but you don't "consume" cooking utensils and eyewear either), trying to hide that they're manufactured this way.
It's wasteful and frankly I have heard enough of the idea that buyers don't want to pay for quality. Because the non-quality is overpriced and the quality is unavailable to choose for. Why wouldn't I pay 3x the price for something that lasts 4x as long (or usually much better even), and the nerve to push that on the consumer instead of the manufacturer even daring to offer this planned obsolescence shit.
[0] I tend to default to "no" if someone tries to upsell to me after an large purchase. Because my smart-decision-making juice is usually depleted for the day and I'm out of spoons. The times I give in, I end up with suboptimal useless crap. Even the smartphone case I got the very same day turned out to be all manners of "just wrong".
If anyone knows a smartphone with that style of physical keyboard, rugged style, and good battery please tell me.
I'll trash my cheap, thin piece of plastic and buy one instantly!
Point us to a design principle (or anything), that proves these two are mutually exclusive. Defeatist attitude brings nothing to this discussion. What are you looking for, commiseration?
Making keys green instead of black don't change the way they operate.
There are some practical reasons for using certain colors, red grabs attention, orange is highly visible, white reflects light and black absorbs and radiates it. However most of it is just a matter of style.
Tell me about it. I realised this had gone too far when Volkswagen moved the headlight angle adjust and dashboard backlight controls to the touchscreen, about 3 levels deep, with a slider. If you are driving at dawn/dusk and suddenly the backlight seems too dim/bright, you need to pull over and do it via the touchscreen. Moronic
At that point I kinda lost all trust in those people having the faintest clue of what makes for a good UX.
I drop my phone all the time, and it hardly gets a scratch, and this is with no case at all. I personally think they are wonders of modern design.
As for design, maybe you have no feel for how far they have come in 10 years.
Just because some colors pop doesn't mean the opposite.
The simpler explanation is just that we aren't very good (as an industry) at hardware design look or functionality design right now. We need to get better at both.
But making an all-gray phone with no stylistic touches isn't going to re-prioritize functionality, promise you that. Different problem entirely.
I really don't get this. It's like everyone just forgot that when you're driving a car, you need to be looking through the windshield.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/10/19/we-know-suv-design-ki...
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15418832
To me, that speaks a timeless truth---expensive and ornate tools are often less functional than their inexpensive peers. Today, expensive smartphones break instantly, but inexpensive ones which thick bezel on 'cheap' glass is resistant to accidental impact.
[1]
As soon as we go back to renting our equipment from the telcos, we will get ugly handsets that last forever.
Cars, a complex machines that can easily hurt others, traditionally have controls designed in such a way that you can enter a car model that is totally new to you and comfortably operate it within minutes
You mean after you’ve received mandatory training and has been certified to operate them?
It's actually going the other direction. The fabric phone cover on the Google Daydream causes massive overheating problems. So this is a case of appearance over functionality.
I agree with most of your post, but I don't remember the last phone I had that didn't have a strap loop on it (and I use it). Maybe the iPhone 4?
https://youtu.be/n2wJLnNJRHI?t=2m12s
Probably not. The article praises the Google Home "flannel hockey puck," which Google had to remotely cripple because it would randomly wake up and send audio to Google.
And his essay, Ten Things I Have Learned, has valuable work advice: https://www.miltonglaser.com/milton/c:essays/#3
I think the world would be a better place if big companies making things that change the world like Google and Apple hired more artists.
Two things about this company:
It kinda was the Apple of the bureaucratic era. They had advertisement about how their furniture and machines would make work heaven on earth. All this for a bit of modular desks and drawers. Ok and nice electromechanical calculators. But the marketing speech is exactly the same as today. Buy our stuff so you feel you reached the top of the world of the year <insert any year>. [1]
Other thing, Olivetti invented a bunch of things in the days of early calculators, they were HP competitors. I remember the Olivetti living room TV computer and thought how come they missed the computer turn that much and died ? Well they didn't, capitalism pushed them into the grave. The Benedetti family, owner of Olivetti, did some stock acrobatics in the early 80s and failed massively, so they had to trickle down the loss just at the time Olivetti needed financial support to ramp up personal computer research and production. Bye
[1] computer chronicles demo of Windows 2 was the same idiocy. Now it can do backgrounds, and custom color so YOU can have YOUR own computer. Just like smartphones. It so much always the same it makes me physically sad. Chasing our own tails ...
http://www.italianways.com/the-olivetti-store-set-to-conquer...
We need to call Steve to ask about potential inspirations.
Sounds more like the Benedetti family pushed Olivetti into the grave than capitalism did...
Also Benedetti was influenced by French Alain Minc in that era.
It's part of the whole acquisition game hence my jab at capitalism.
At first you imply that forgoing capitalism would save (or help to save) Olivetti. Olivetti only exists because of capital markets, and in a world without capital markets there would be no Olivetti to save.
You then said that, in your opinion, "capitalism allows for the speculation game to occur", which is too vague to be interpreted consistently. "the speculation game" isn't a common or publicly defined term, and it hasn't been defined here. You provide no reasoning to support your idea that this undefined thing occurs as a result of capitalism. Because of that, I said that your statement doesn't mean anything.
It certainly doesn't mean anything to me, and that's not a reflection of your character, your personality, or your worth. I simply have no idea what you are talking about, because you have been excessively vague in your "aggression" (to use your standard) toward capitalism.
Apparently you like to be explained things, it means trading stuff for the sake of profit as much as possible, which is something detrimental if you don't only account for capital.
Also Olivetti didn't go out of business due to lack of demand, at all, they've been starved. So your previous comparison with Lada is unfit.
You may blame lax of regulation in this regard, which may be fair. But blaming capitalism in general is disingenuous
Google might be able to do it, but I don't think they're going to do it by imitating Olivetti style. Some incidental "homages" incarnated in a few design elements, sure, but there's a lot more to creating "object appeal" than reviving the past.
It's why the "new" VW Beetle was a breath of fresh air and got people excited. On the other hand, the Chrysler PT cruiser-- not so much. Design is a fickle, complicated thing.
If the narrative here was "a bunch of ex-google and motorola engineers have started a new hardware company. look at their adorable smart speakers" instead of "Google hired a bunch of ex motorola engineers and now is making hardware", these designs would be enough to get people excited. But because it's Google, it's not exciting.
Also Richard Sapper comes to mind.
Within tech there is still not so much "dare". A few exceptions are:
+ Spider routers: https://www.theverge.com/ces/2017/1/5/14182306/asus-rapture-...
+ These "smart" hairbrushes: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/4/14169564/ces-2017-beauty-t...
+ Power outlets: http://www.libbywilkiedesigns.com/2017/09/new-must-electric-...
+ Countless wearable thingies: https://iwastesomuchtime.com/95685
Maybe you have your own favorite hideous tech thing of last year. Would be fun to see. It says just as much about the time or even more than the top brands that just have to stick to their aesthetic style.
Software, OTOH, is also very conservative, this is because familiar design patterns ease users' learning curves(and conversion optimization in the case of commercial websites). However, there are some movements about creating non-mainstream websites such http://brutalistwebsites.com/ which I find interesting.
I wonder if the author thinks those antennas are purely decorative.
Similarly, there are a lot of ways to put antennae on a router, and this company chose one particular way that would have one particular (hideous) look.
Another touch stone of inspiration for me is Mid Century Modern Danish design. Consider this "Valet Chair" by the legendary Hans Wegner. It isn't just that the seat lifts up to form a rack for hanging your trousers. Or that the backing hides a jacket hanger in plain site. It's the final reveal: a mini compartment underneath the seat for "storing ones cufflinks and tie pins" ;)
The functionality of the chair is modelled upon the world it aspires to inhabit. It's a design for living.
Hans Wegner Designed Mid-Century Valet Chair
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/season/18/baton-rouge-la/ap...
It's a final project by a recent RCA graduate: http://leibal.com/products/indent/
[1] https://mecoffee.nl/ [2] https://www.ranciliogroup.com/1-Rancilio-Homeline--Silvia
There is a family run Italian restaurant with premises in a 1960s shopping block on a corner. They have used the strongly horizontal feel of the space and produced something that is calm, feels spacious (actually quite a lot of covers) and looks great.
Scooters are still popular with youth wearing parkas here in the UK.
The value is travelling but not perhaps in the way that was hoped for.
The bits of color actually humanize things a little for the caretaker and there are innovative design elements like water bottles accessible from the outside so they don't require the cage to be opened to replace them. I have worked with several caging systems and Tecniplast are the best.
but to be honest, it’s the Italian true spirit: a bit sleazy, servile, unwilling to take any risk to the point of being a hostile reactionary.
See Adriano Olivetti’s life and what came of his legacy.
Today's Google is very bad at this. Their every product is creepy, cold, dumbed-down and surveilance-based. Maybe they are trying to somewhat fix that by visual aesthetics? Their hardware surely look great, and UIs in Android look good too, but UIs in their web apps look dull and authoritarian.
Google Photos is just "we exfiltrate all your photos and use machine learning on them". Its UI is like designed for monkeys. Compare that to Flickr or their old Picasaweb. Few buttons, no functionality except "we get your photos now you can look on them". I have lots of photos dated in future (from old camera which had bad clock) and there's no way to fix it (except to edit date on each photo).
Google+ was so cold and dead and creepy. Modern Youtube is just a stupid TV. Most "account settings" pages look like I'm viewing them on giant phone. They are saying "you don't need desktop computer, just use phone, you need only play and pause buttons". Their design is highly political. It feels more like eastern bloc's high modernism, not like Olivetti.
Picasa and Flickr were more about photo sharing, and required way more involvement to use. Google Photos is about managing your collection of photos across all devices and the web, and it's amazing at it.
You've been able to batch edit timestamps for over a year.
https://plus.google.com/+GooglePhotos/posts/3ABHACR7QhA
Simple script would solve that but Google Photos has no public API because public APIs are so 2006. There's no way to reupload photos with fixed EXIFs too.
You lost me completely. The complaint about photo dates seems reasonable. The rest sounds like the description of a video game enemy and not software UI design.
Select the photos, click on the "more options" button (the three dots), then on Edit Date & Time. There you can change their dates, and even choose between setting a fixed datetime for all or keep the relative time differences between each other.
Aside from the always on listening for "ok google" crap that can (supposedly) be disabled, is there anything else you are referencing? Im genuinely curious.
How else do you build a home assistant? It's not sending your data to Google during this period. If it did record/transmit, that would be a fairly easy thing to detect, yet nobody has.
Alexa records everything after the wake word. You can see it in the alexa app.
Major reason why these Assistants are successful is operating them hands-free.
...yes? I mean, that's obvious. How else is it supposed to respond to you after you ask for something?
Truly, what more ui should a photos appo have? Any addition would just be clutter.
Compare to iOS photos ui- they’re very similar, but you wouldn’t call iOS photos authoritarian, because it’s not your goal!
Or maybe I’m missing something authoritarian about these uis
Google's new design also kinda reminds me of trends in the outdoor/sports apparel & footwear industry from about 2-3 years ago. Contrast stitching and zippers, muted tones with bright pastels, resurgence of 1970's bright colors and mountaineering styles. Patagonia's catalog from 2014 would be representative, as would lululemon around that time, and Nike and UnderArmour shoes and casual sport.
Tech is putting a new spin on it, but many of the themes are similar. I like it! The diversity and experimentation, with respectful nods to the past and adaptation for current trends is a great thing.
http://www.archiviograficaitaliana.com/
The point of Memphis was to create funky colour combinations in living spaces filled with extravagantly geometric objects, not to decorate utilitarian objects with odd colours because "design".
Memphis was a big influence on early-90s graphic design, which - ironically - gives these designs more than a hint of early-Internet "What is this company called Google?" nostalgia.
I'm not sure if that's deliberate - and if it is deliberate, I'm really not sure it's a good look to be aiming for in 2017.
Nope, Olivetti was not related to Memphis. Also, Memphis was later. In the 80s.
One of my pet peeves of late has been the ubiquity of black, grey, and white colour schemes.
Here in NZ and Australia, almost all new apartment buildings are some combination of those colours. It's not just new buildings - people are giving their houses the grey treatment when it comes time to repaint.
My own theory is that this has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from seeing houses as homes (and therefore as an extension of personal character) to now seeing houses as investments. No one seems willing to choose a colour scheme with character for fear of limiting the pool of potential buyers.
On top of that, new cars seem less likely to be any colour other than black, silver, or white. But maybe that's just my perception...
But there are hints that this is changing. And one of the leaders of this change is, somewhat improbably, Google.
It seems consistent with their logo. They've had a colourful, playful identity from the start.
These kinds of rubber membrane buttons were popular because they were incredibly cheap.
They also suck.
(At least, every example I’ve ever tried was functionally terrible compared to real switches; I’ve never tried the Olivetti originals, but I would expect them to also suck.)
If you want a phone that does nothing but make phone calls using numerical codes, nice physical buttons are surely better. If you want a “phone” that does 1000 other things, the physical buttons are untenable.
I think desktop computers should come with much better physical keyboards (ideally properly hand-shaped instead of stupid rectangular slabs) with nice buttons and many analog inputs (trackballs, sliders, jog wheels, ...), but for a pocket device forget it.
http://www.rapidkeypads.com/img/uniform-led-lighting/selecti...
They are popular primarily because they're as cheap as they can possibly get - they have no moving parts. It's a combination of worst aspects of physical buttons (non-reconfigurable) and touchscreens (no tactile feedback).
The "buttons" are hard to find and the only feedback is audio. And they can't be reconfigured like a phone screen.
The key surfaces are oddly small and spaced apart, and the entire keyboard is a protruding shelf above the desk surface with no wrist rest. I don't even know how you're supposed to comfortably use that abomination. It's a serious triumph of form over function.
I would gladly take a $10 Dell rubber dome keyboard lying flat on a desk over that any day of the week.
I’m not sure what kind of switches were on this typewriter.
Anyway, the rest of your comment is in my opinon quite misinformed about typing ergonomics. If you want to have an extended discussion about why offline, shoot me an email.
They effectively brought him on as an employee and let him create art that doubled as adverts for their products.
Does anyone else know of similar examples where companies supported art beyond the usual exhibition sponsorship and board room art?
The image results here give you an idea if how much closer to art than advert they were:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=giovanni+pintori
Those colorful buttons are real nice though.
http://www.johnwolff.id.au/calculators/Olivetti/D18/D18.htm
> Addition and subtraction operate in adding-machine fashion, with numbers being printed as they are entered into the register. C is a correction key which clears the whole of the current entry. The Total (T) key prints the result and clears the register; Sub-total (S) prints the contents and leaves the register unchanged. To encourage the habit of always pressing Total before starting a calculation, the D18 is made to power up with the error lamp lit, so that Total must be pressed before the machine can be used.
> Multiplication and division can be entered algebraically using the colour-coded legends printed on the keytops. For example, to multiply 2 by 3, use the white legends and press 2 X 3 =. For operators familiar with the "reverse Polish" entry of the earlier machines, using the moulded legends to the right of the keys will produce the same key sequence and the same result: 2 Enter 3 X . (There is only a single key switch under the Mult/Div/Enter button).
the manual doesn't seem to mention it: http://www.curtamania.com/curta/database/brand/olivetti/Oliv...
Personally, I've an aversion to anything that looks like it might've been designed with the focus on its appearance rather than its function.
I see the google products as a physical extension of the design language they've started with material design.
A slight nit-pick, but does anyone else shudder a little when people use the adjective of 'beautiful' as an objective description of a particular design?
All people who have passed a certain intellectual threshold recognize that when another person says "beautiful" or "lovely" or "right" without giving reasons, they're expressing a personal opinion, although perhaps one informed by years of experience in a particular field.
It's not necessary to preface every opinion with boilerplate signifying that the writer is a human being with a limited perspective and that the opinions they express aren't intended to be absolute pronouncements on the nature of objective reality. It's understood.
I'm not sure how one could extract this sentiment from my initial comment and progress to such a patronising and paternalistic dressing-down, save for a thoroughly uncharitable disposition.
It's hard to articulate why this feels objectionable. Perhaps I'm suspicious that emphasising beauty over functionality will lead to dumbed-down products that don't interest me. Perhaps I'm irked that beauty is valued by customers above functionality/reliability/etc, or that the sales/marketing teams feel that's so.
Do resources spent on beauty detract from resources expended on improved functionality, reliability, usability, security...?
Perhaps I'm concerned with the continuing march of users who can barely operate their many very expensive devices, and the security and support risks that come with this.
Then again... who am I to turn back the tide. Perhaps the role of the software developer is to predict "under the hood" problems that come from an emphasis of beauty, and fix them before they happen, to ensure the buttery-smooth experience users expect.
I'm sure the Cray-1 will be as iconic and beautiful 1000 years from now as it was when it was introduced.
Also, since we're nitpicking, I don't see the word 'objective' anywhere in TFA.
As per "father" of Braun style: https://www.vitsoe.com/eu/about/good-design