Apple Stores' Buttonless Elevators

Here we have another literally unpressable button - this time, it's unpressable because... it doesn't exist. Apparently, multi-story Apple Stores have elevators with no buttons at all - they simply go up and down, stopping at every floor. This certainly helps accomplish a clean visual design, and is a bold battle won in Steve Jobs' war against buttons.

But what does it do for usability? It could be frustrating, since the user will start by looking for a button that will never be found. Then once the reality is understood, it may take a bit longer to get where you're going than in a button-studded version. But, Apple Stores are places to browse and explore in the first place - something which is in the interest of both the consumer and the retailer. If you stop on a floor you never would have discovered otherwise, and end up finding something you like... well, this no-button thing might not be such a pain after all.

Cereal Bowl Features Slow-Release Milk

There were some people who objected to a previously-posted baking pan design promising all-edge brownies - okay, that's fair, some folks like the center ones. But who likes soggy cereal?? Didn't think so. That's why I expect this design, the EatMeCrunchy cereal bowl, will be a bit more popular. A separate chamber keeps the milk away from the cereal except for a small "mixing area," so you just soak a biteful at a time. Very, very, very nice. [via Gizmodo]

Phone Fingers - Shameless opportunism made even uglier...

The iPhone is a hot product these days, no doubt about it. So what's the best way to obliterate the cool-cred gained by having the sweetest pocket rig on the market? Phone Fingers should do it. Basically, small condoms for your digits (yes, you even "unroll" them onto your unlucky fingers), these supposedly prevent fingerprints and smudges from accumulating on your iPhone screen. Hmm. Here are the first of maaany problems I can see:

1. Smudging isn't that much of a problem on the iPhone - it's something that had been worried about prior to its release, but which turned out to really be a non-issue.

2. Latex will tend to have a "grippy" friction against the iPhone's screen, which will impede important interactions such as sliding, scrolling, dragging, and pinching.

3. The product defeats itself: it exists to keep your iPhone looking good, but in fact only makes you, your iPhone, and everything it touches horribly, painfully uncool.

So, why do these things even exist? It's shameless opportunism, riding on the hype of a true phenomenon: if it says "iPhone," these days somebody is gonna buy it!

Uglification to Deter Theft: Functional, but less satisfying?

Make Magazine has an interesting method to deter bike theft: uglify it! They offer step-by-step instructions for how to make a bike look decrepit but still work like new.

But here's where we witness the blurred line between form and function: though it make work fine in every functional way, an ugly bike just isn't as satisfying. You can't show it off; you don't get that "wow" feeling when you yourself look at it. Much like the previously-posted scratched putter, it messes with your mood and your overall state of mind. Sure, it won't get stolen - but it might not steal your heart anymore, either!

Nose-Notched Wine Glasses - Underdelivering on hype...

Sometimes a small design feature masquerades as a World-Changing Innovation - and I think we've got a case of such a delusion of grandeur in Silhouette wine glasses (via Gizmodo). A simple recess in the rim of the glass allows the oenophilic schnoz to get closer to the wine - and yeah, that's about it. Is this a problem in need of a solution, or a solution searching desperately for a problem? My money's on the latter.

And speaking of money, $54 per glass? No doubt another case of the product trying to bill itself as high-end. (Of course, the "regular" price is $78... sheesh.) Finally, check out the website URL; I'm afraid it's a stretch to claim that a nose-notch makes this the "greatestwineglass.com" of all...

"Photoshoot In Progress" - Making the best of it...

Passing the Restoration Hardware store in Palo Alto a few weeks back, I noticed this sign. Pretty simple, but also fairly ingenious - and here's why:

The store has to be closed for the photoshoot, that's a given. A basic sign would just inform potential customer that the store is "temporarily closed" - leaving them disappointed, even frustrated. But this sign actually adds value by pointing out that "this location has been selected as a model," and to "enjoy the preview" of how all stores will look for the upcoming season! Magically, those potential customers no longer feel inconvenienced - they feel lucky to have access to such a special Restoration Hardware location. And if the sign has really done its job, they can't wait to come back...

Mouse Cursors and Text - How the tiniest things matter...

The very smallest details of a user's experience can add up to make a significant difference in the effectiveness of (or satisfaction with) any product. Here, we'll look at the eensy weensy issue of the mouse cursor while typing. In many cases, a computer user will have clicked a location where he intends to begin typing; the problem is that this leaves the cursor hanging out and blocking a clear view of the text right in the area where he's typing. That little text-bracket cursor, especially with a snazzy drop-shadow effect, can definitely block out a letter or two. The impact? The user takes the additional second or two to reach over to the mouse, send the cursor packing, and return his hands to the keyboard. Sure, it's a tiny bit of time, but many times throughout the day, and they add up! Also, it's possible that that little interruption can throw the mental train off track - especially when the "working" state of mind is particularly fragile and vulnerable to distractions.

To address this tiny problem, there's some tiny software: MouseAway (via Lifehacker), shown in action in the animation above. It's the kind of third-party fix that operating system designers should look to for inspiration for their future versions - to make them just a tiny bit better.

And hey, we've hit a milestone - this is Unpressable Buttons' 100th Post! Coming soon, a rant on the problems I (may have) had with the design of champagne bottles and corks...?

Side-Filling Water Bottle - Compatible with sinks everywhere...

Solving a problem many of us have experienced but few have realized can be solved, the Binibottle is the brainchild of Swedish 15-year-old design contest entrant Anna Axelsson. Not bad for such a young designer - but I've always believed that with a little thought such observations should be within the reach of any user out there who has a pet peeeve involving a product shortcoming. This one has a powerful "why didn't I think of that?" factor - so everyone, look at the problems you see out there and do think of the next no-duh design!

The long, wild path this news took to get here: from Smart Stuff, to OhGizmo, to BoingBoing, to Gizmodo!

Taken Too Far: The Ramen Fan...

Something fun for Friday! There are always limits, and sometimes it takes a cautionary example to show what it looks like to cross them. From Chinatown shops in every city (and via a 10-year anniversary post in Gizmodo), this monstrosity is the Ramen Fan. It may make sense when looking at the needs of ramen eaters (air flow to cool them down) and the tools already in use in the situation (chopsticks) - but that's where it stops being useful and starts being ridiculous. Though the only obvious drawback is the extra weight on and physical interference with the operation of the 'sticks, the intangibles are much worse: toolishness, laughingstock factor, and guffaw-ability.

There are always limits. And for this product, those limits are a distant blur in the rearview mirror.

Wiimote Buttons - A little relocation, a big difference...

One of the taglines of this blog is "The little things that matter." And to demonstrate just how little things can make a big difference, here's gaming guru N'Gai Croal's suggested redesign of the Wii gaming system's remote controller - aka "Wiimote." It simply moves two buttons frequently used in a certain fast-paced, twitchy first-person-shooter game to a place where they can be more comfortably and nimbly reached by the thumb. That's it.

Something this small can be difficult to appreciate (did anyone reading this just shriek "GENIUS!"?), until time is spent actually living with the design. But the impact can be great once that time is spent: the player won't feel the game experience is hindered by poor button placement, and his or her thumbs won't break off at a startlingly young age from repetitive stress injury. All from a couple little buttons, made the slightest bit more pressable.

Funnels as Dispensers: Improvised solutions becoming products...

It's a well-known phenomenon in the product design world that many of the best products have been very well developed by users who have improvised them before they they were ever offered as purchasable commodities. This is especially true for products that are very specifically suited for a particular activity or trade - when passionate users need something that works perfectly for a particular task, they'll make it themselves.

The use of funnels to dispense twine, ribbon, yarn, or other balled-or-rolled stringy stuff seems to be such a case. It reportedly came from Martha Stewart (according the post on Curbly, via Lifehacker), who certainly qualifies as a passionate, experienced practitioner of home convenience and crafts. Without question, this improvised solution is itself clever - especially for the niche subset of people who (1) use many different kinds of stringy stuff (2) very often, and (3) have a dedicated space in the home for those kinds of crafts. And lo and behold, it's become a product - thanks to IKEA, who now offers the specialized funnels shown on the right of the image for exactly this purpose. Improvised solutions by passionate users can definitely lead to great products - even at the risk of putting detached product designers out of work!

Fast-Food Menu Ergonomics - Ow, that crick in my neck...

...Actually, in the photo at left, that's my lovely fiancee whose neck is suffering the aforementioned crick. This is our local Pickup Stix faux-Chinese fast-food joint, where the overhead menus are just a bit too... overhead. Standing back from the counter too far to order, as shown, customers still need to work a pretty good body-lean and head-tilt combo to see the options - and once they're at the counter, forget about it, they better have their order memorized!

The obvious solution: put the menus behind the front-counter employees, like the vast majority of fast-food chains. However, since that probably involves more architectural rework cost than corporations like to write off for customers' comfort, the easier solution is a smaller but otherwise identical version of the menu laminated to the counter surface. That "identical" requirement is important - for the sake of avoiding frustration and maintaining fast-food efficiency, nobody wants customers searching for their choices all over again once they reach the hotseat!

Caps Lock - Now literally an unpressable button...

It's rare but fun when the title of this blog actually applies directly, without metaphor or an unreasonable stretch, to a design feature! But that seems to be the case here, as Jonathan Rentzsch has discovered and measured an "anti-caps-lock bias" built into the new iMac keyboards.

The quick story: the caps lock only engages with a quarter-second-long press, longer than accidental "brushes" would press it. However, it disengages with even the quickest flick. This jives with real usage scenarios, where it's easy to believe that with its prime placement and rare intended use, the caps lock is more frequently pressed accidentally than intentionally. So, a button makes itself unpressable - or less pressable - to save users from themselves. Not to mention saving the rest of us from the few remaining ALL-CAPS SHOUTING WRITERS THESE DAYS...

Replug: Protecting gadgets from cable-yank...

Via Engadget, Replug is an aftermarket accessory designed to protect the audio jacks on your laptop, iPod, or anything with a standard stereo socket: it easily breaks away from itself, rather than ripping out your gadget's innards. This is the same function as Apple's Magsafe design, which keeps the power cord from yanking laptops to the ground by using a magnetic rather than mechanical attachment. The nice thing here is that a third-party, aftermarket solution can compensate for products which didn't build this protection into their own designs - even if it is just a bit of an eyesore. But a fugly dongle still looks better than a busted gadget...

Processes as Products Part 2: Productivity chain...

Continuing with the notion that processes can be products, the "Seinfeldian Chain" is a productivity secret made famous by the comedian as related to software engineer and casual comic Brad Isaac (and to us via Lifehacker). In this process, the user (it's a product, remember!) determines a goal to be accomplished every day - "work on ___ for 10 minutes," or "write a blog post," for example. For each day that it's done, plant a big ol' "X" on that day on a wall calendar. After a few days of completed tasks, there will be a chain of X's - and secret is, don't break the chain.

Much like the previously discussed LeechBlock, the user has created the illusion that he has granted power, or control, to another entity - in this case, the chain. (In LeechBlock, it's the software that blocks access to time-wasting sites during certain times of day.) In reality, the user is in complete control - but the illusion serves the purpose of protecting us from our own laziness. Not only that but the Seinfeldian Chain harnesses another psychological quirk - the compulsion to keep that chain connected! One doesn't need to be obsessive-compulsive to want to maintain the chain, getting that fix of positive reinforcement from marking those big red X's and seeing the chain grow - but it sure doesn't hurt!

Yahoo Mail Notifier - Conflicting messages imply a broken system...

Yahoo recently added some fancy new bells and whistles to its homepage, meant to notify users of new email, IMs, and other info at a glance. However, it's not quite ready for primetime - and having the at-a-glance notifier in the upper left report "2 new" emails only to find that the roll-over expansion claims "no messages" is not a good way to inspire confidence in the system!

Email has become something most of us depend on in the same way as running water, electricity, and internet access itself - and like those, losing it (or even your faith in it) comes with a horrible, crippling, even sickening feeling. Sure, Yahoo, add bells and whistles if you want - but not at the expense of the user's confidence in the system!

Mygo - Steering cane for the blind...

The march (so to speak) of smartified products continues with the Mygo cane for the blind, a concept by German design student Sebastian Ritzler featured in the 2007 IDEA awards by BusinessWeek. In the descriptions available for the product, the cane is said to use a "sensor-camera combo to measure the ground below it and give the user real-time feedback via a wireless headset." [Gizmodo]

This is a good start - but it seems that the Mygo is just on the verge of offering an even more useful behavior for its user. Instead of relaying audio feedback to a headset (requiring conscious processing of a phrase like "turn left," and appropriate corrective action), the cane could simply steer its own wheel to avoid obstacles. Add a basic GPS system, and the cane can guide the user to a destination in addition to dodging those obstacles. Hmm... I kinda wish I had one of those, myself!

Human-Checking Test: Useful in more ways than one...

Anyone who's spent much time on the internet has encountered "human-checking" at some point - usually typing in a series of letters seen twisted, faded, grainy, and crazy in a barely-readable image. Machines aren't very good at this kind of thing (or at least there a little worse that humans), so these tests can prove that a user is a real person and not a spam-bot. It's effective, if a bit annoying.

Fortunately, a great way to wash away the foul aftertaste of annoyance is with a sweet swig of inspiration. Enter ReCAPTCHA (via Gizmodo), which feeds images of words scanned from books that the automatic scanner couldn't quite read. Now, by verifying your humanity, you're also helping humanity by contributing to the accurate digitization of the world's libraries. Not only that, but rather than typing the random strings of characters which made the old version of the task even more irksome, you're typing in real words! Of course, you just might be too inspired by the cause to even notice.

Form Hinders Function - But at least it's funny...

Would you feel comfortable using this hairdryer? Maybe you just woke up and you're still in a state of sleep-induced stupor, and you don't quite trust your judgment. Maybe it'd give you... pause. Maybe you'd just stop using it altogether. Just to be safe.

Yeah, best to just get that thing out of the house.

What were you thinking, anyway??

Ring Alarm Clock - Great start, not quite done...

From designer Meng Fandi (and via The Product Usability Weblog), the "Ring" alarm clock for couples is a great concept, but not quite fleshed out to a usable state. The basic idea is that instead of waking users with sound, it wakes them with a wireless vibrating ring worn on a finger during sleep. This not only allows couples to wake up one at a time without disturbing the other with a room-filling alarm sound, but also helps out deaf or hard-of-hearing users by working through a different sense than hearing. Even the form of the charging and time-setting base assists usability by taking the form of a bed, so each member of the couple knows to use the ring on the side of the bed they (usually) sleep on. Good stuff!

...But it's not quite done. Just a couple of issues come to mind. First, this design is a slave to button-reduced "clean-design," and as a result can only offer criminally inefficient setting of alarm times: a single up/down button pair take quite a while to reach an exact time that's, say, 12 hours away from the previously set time! (I've been waiting for a numeric keypad on an alarm clock for quite a while now - but it's too many buttons to please the eye, even if they would sooo please the hand...) Second, the mechanical feasibility of this concept, as it currently looks, strains credulity. It's sleek and beautiful, but there's no room for a battery, wireless transceiver, and vibrating motor in a ring that size. My engineering intuition is screaming here, accusing this design of writing a cosmetic check that it just can't cash. In the real-world product development cycle, this sleek look would bulge so much as to lose its cool, becoming a bastardization of its intended beauty. Instead, industrial designers should be starting with the constraints of reality and progressing to a beautiful solution based on what is actually feasible. Pushing the limits a bit is okay; claiming an impossible slimness is not!

Sneaky & Convenient Controls: Eye movement and teeth clenching...

Today we have a couple of very unpressable buttons, since these are buttons that, well, you don't press. Instead, they're two very usable (if a bit bizarre) new ways to control your products: teeth clenching and eye movement. The teeth-clenching control is being developed by researchers at Osaka University (and comes to us via Engadget), and the eye-movement by Stanford University (again through Engadget). In both cases, these controls require minimal effort - compared to reaching out to a button, either clenching your teeth or darting your eyes take less time and energy. It's like steering-wheel-mounted audio controls taken to the next level: instead of just bringing the control closer to where your hand is anyway, it makes the control something that your body is always ready to do. Nice!

In addition to the convenience, these each offer a increasingly valuable commodity in the information age: privacy! It's tougher to track (or even notice) teeth-clenching or eye-darting patterns than a finger punching in a PIN code. And the more low-key you can be about skipping to the next song on an iPod, the less likely you are to be caught not paying attention.

Next step, telepathic controls!

Ergonomics - Controls above the display...

I've heard two things from two different groups for the last few years:

1) Ergonomics people claim that on all of our little mobile devices - cell phones, iPods, all those critters - the buttons should be above the screen rather than below. The thumb is in a more natural position this way (it's true, try it!), and the screen actually isn't blocked in the way you think it might be.

2) Industrial designers insist that the controls have to be below the screens rather than above, or it just won't look good.

Of course, industrial designers are often willing to make exceptions when Bang & Olufsen does it. Score one for usability! [via Gizmodo]

Find Unused Clothing: Processes as products...

Many products are successful because they encourage us to change our behavior in some way, to act in a more productive, efficient, or otherwise desirable manner. (See these previous posts on preventing yourself from wasting time, being prompt, eating less, and conserving power.) It follows, then, that the "product" need not be a physical entity at all - it can be a process, to be taught, learned, and followed. And here's a fine example...

From Peter Walsh on 43 Folders (and through Lifehacker), this little trick is designed to help you identify clothes you never wear that are still taking up space in your closet. One day, simply turn all of your hangers around so they're backwards, with the open part of the hook facing you. When you use a piece of clothing, you'll naturally put the hanger back forwards, with the open part facing away. After a month or two, see which clothes are still on backwards hangers, and think about making a nice donation to Goodwill. The beauty is that, once started, this system works automatically with no discipline required - set it and forget it, which is something all busy users are very good at! Whenever a product - or a process - can turn laziness to your advantage, it's got a good thing going.