12 August 2008
Video of new iriver SPINN UI – Complicated and slow
The spanking new iriver SPINN
I’m not talking about just GUI (Graphical User Interface) but of UI as a whole or HMI even, which involves more than just tapping the screen. Just look at how many times the user has to reposition his hands while using the brand-spanking-new wheel/roll thing. The movement is so limited that with one spin you can scroll only couple of menu items.
Check out the video from followup.
Related posts on Mint Usability
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You wont take comments on the Mac OS X usability’s article – hopefully because you realized that others are going to call you on it – since there are numerous errors and misrepresentations – but why should I bother correcting YOU!
I read this paragraph and the complete incorrectness of it made it clear that there was no point telling you anything since you cant even figure out obvious stuff:
“Or something simpler and more mundane: The traffic lights on the corner of your window. Their metaphor suggest that they control the execution of the program. Sure enough, red light stops it.. Or does it? It does kill every (except the teeny weeny pathetic triangle below the icon at the dock) visible clue that the application is still running, however it just closes the windows or visible clues, hence telling the user that he has succesfully stopped the application, even though the application is still on the background, munching on happily. How about yellow and green light? The yellow light makes the window bigger while green makes the visible clue of the application disappear? Hardly an “Effective and appropriate metaphor”.
For God’s Sake – anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of Mac OS X knows that if the red button simply closes the Window – Yellow minimizes it and Green maximizes the size to a preset size. This has nothing to do with the Application itself – if you cant even take the time to understand this – everything else you write is pure drivel.
Vino
I don’t actually know why the WordPress decided to turn off the comments from that post, they are on now, however.
Yes, I just remembered the functions of the buttons wrong, haven’t got Mac here and for some reason I remembered it that way. But that is past the point.
And yes. Just like everyone knows how those buttons work in say Vista, that however is not the case that I am making. It’s about approproate metaphors. To see how a metaphor works you have to figure out what is it that a picture/icon/etc. brings to mind, and in this case red, green and yellow circles remind of traffic lights and as such I was comparing their functionality to the approproate metaphor.
And yes, it does have everything to do with the application. If you close the window with the red button, it just gets rid of the window, the application (say word, is still there. That’s why there are teeny weeny black triangles at the dock, beneath the icons) is still around, even though you just removed all the visible clues of it.