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....

[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.

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.