Steve Jobs Hates Buttons

ElvaWSJ writes "While many technology companies load their products up with buttons, Steve Jobs treats them as blemishes that add complexity and hinder their clean aesthetics. The iPhone is Steve Jobs's attempt to crack a juicy new market for Apple Inc. But it's also part of a decades-long campaign by Mr. Jobs against a much broader target: buttons. The new Apple cellphone famously does without the keypads that adorn its rivals. Instead, it offers a touch-sensing screen for making phone calls and tapping out emails. The resulting look is one of the sparest ever for Apple, a company known for minimalist gadgets. "

Comments

Problem is....

[Lumpy]

Buttons are intuitive.

I design high end interfaces for home theaters (where the remote it's self costs around $2500.00US or more.) and the number one thing my customers like is not the fancy graphics, cool animations or nicely laid out controls on the touchscreen.. but the VOLUME CONTROL HARD BUTTONS built into the side edge. They like being able to without looking press volume up or down or mute instead of having to look at the screen and press a non tactile feedback graphical button.

Buttons have their use, you cant get rid of them.

Re:Problem is....

[Aladrin]

I agree. There's a saying for it already: 'There's a time and place for everything.' Buttons, like everything else, have proper uses and can be abused. It's up to the designer to design it properly.

I just checked with my friend who has an iPhone, and it -does- have hard buttons for volume on the side. So as much as he hates them, he didn't go crazy.

Re:Problem is....

[CaptDeuce]

Buttons are intuitive

The iPhone, just like the Mac, has plenty of buttons.

There are just not many hardware buttons. Really. Bear with me...

Compare the number of buttons in MS-DOS (or other CLI) interfaces against those on the Mac. The "menus" of a CLI interfacer are like menus at Chinese restaurant. Except, of course, with a CLI you can't point and say "I want this."

But wait! There's more! A standard Microsoft alert dialog box -- Windows and Mac OS -- typically has a longwinded description of the problem and the same two buttons to respond with: No and Yes. I have an example right here from MS Word for Mac OS X:

Continue with Save?

This document may contain formating or password
protection which will be lost when save in Text Only
format. To preserve the original document, click No, and
then save the document in Word format before converting.

No Yes

The line "Continue with Save" in itself is rather vague; the user must plow through a lengthly bit of prose (for a GUI) to ascertain just what is going to happen. I'm convinced that Microsoft if using FUD to bully the user to always save their documents in Word format. Changing from any other format to Word format never generates a scary warning.

Contrast Microsoft buttons to Mac buttons using TextEdit. Changing an RTF document to text the dialog reads:

Convert this document to plain text?

If you convert this document, you will lose all text
styles (such as fonts and colors) and document
properties.

Cancel OK

The differences are striking:

• The buttons Cancel and OK are used throughout the Mac interface and the meaning is always clear: OK means go and Cancel means stop.
  
  The meaning of Yes and No are only clear within context. In many, if not most, Microsoft applications, if you choose No, it may not stop, it may go on and do something different. I find most everybody tends to stop and read that lengthly prose to make sure what is going to happen if it's something they haven't done in a while; there's just too much information to gather in at a glance.
• "Continue with save?" What's that going to do exactly? (This is one of the clearer Microsoft title question so it's not the best example).
  
  "Convert this document to plain text?" Ah, it's going to... well, the answer is in the question.

Buttons? It's not how many that's important, it's how soft and clear they are.

Buttons as Features

[martyb]

FTFS:

While many technology companies load their products up with buttons, Steve Jobs treats them as blemishes [CC] that add complexity and hinder their clean aesthetics.

I see his point, but OTOH, there are times when buttons ARE preferable. I can text a message on my cellphone without looking at the phone because there is a tactile reference to where each key is located. This is quite handy (pun intended!) Try texting a message inconspicuously at your next boring meeting.

Re:How is the buttonless iphone to use

[smitty97]

I hit the wrong buttons all the time. The beauty is, the iPhone corrects me. As long as you type real words, not abbreviations like wtf, omg, brb, and c u l8r, the software will get my sentence right. Don't stop to correct your mistakes. Don't even look at the typed words, look at the keyboard. Just keep typing, and you can be very fast. Use the force.

Re:Buttons!?

[Hijacked Public]

By the time products like iPhone become ubiquitous for the general public it will probably be illegal to use a mobile phone while driving, nearly everywhere.

As for your texting with the phone in your pocket.....I'm not one to question the habits of others but that is a new one on me.

You'd think so...

[SatanicPuppy]

You'd think so, but ask any woman who has breastfed a newborn baby, and she'll tell you that you have to teach them to get it right...It's just that it's a...hem..."one button" interface, so it's pretty easy to learn.

Pretty much every interface is a learned interface, but the simpler the interface, the easier it is to learn.

Re:Seemed fast for me--here's why

[soft_guy]

It doesn't fix bad spelling. It fixes imprecise typing. These are two VERY different things. For example, if I am typing the word "example" and I'm a bad speller and I think it is spelled "exampal" the iPhone doesn't fix this - I get "exampal". However, if I know how to spell it correctly and I press down in the exact same spot for the p and l, I get "p" and then "l". In fact, when I tried typing this word in a very sloppy way, it was hard to get the iPhone to not recognize it correctly. I even intentionally missed the x by typing c instead and by the end of the word it had auto-corrected it. So, no, the iPhone doesn't ruin (or fix) your spelling.

Re:Buttons!?

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

>...those of us who are able to drive and talk safely...

scientific studies have proven that talking on a phone while driving is dangerous even when completely hands free. even more so than a real life conversation because the lower quality signal requires more concentration to process.

these are scientifically proven facts. I notice that you, on the other hand, only seem to offer the fact that you haven't killed anyone yet as evidence of your super-human brain functions.

Re:Yea, We Need More Thinking Like This...

[syphax]

Check this out:

These data demonstrate that the phone conversation itself resulted in significant slowing in the response to simulated traffic signals, as well as an increase in the likelihood of missing these signals. Moreover, the fact that hand-held and hands-free cell phones resulted in equivalent dual-task deficits indicates that the interference was not due to peripheral factors such as holding the phone while conversing. These findings also rule out interpretations that attribute the deficits associated with a cell phone conversation to simply attending to verbal material, because dual-task deficits were not observed in the book-on-tape control. Active engagement in the cell phone conversation appears to be necessary to produce the observed dual-task interference.

The principal findings for this experiment are that: (a) SPs that engaged in cell phone conversations missed twice as many simulated traffic signals as when they were not talking on the cell phone, (b) SPs took longer to react to those signals that they did detect, and (c) these deficits were equivalent for both hand-held and hands-free cell phone users.

In sum, we found that conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell phone led to significant decrements in simulated driving performance. We suggest that the cellular phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.

Our data suggest that legislative initiatives that restrict hand-held devices but permit hands-free devices are not likely to reduce interference from the phone conversation, because the interference is, in this case, due to central attentional processes.