Flickr is full of all sorts of things, but I was surprised to find an entire pool of pictures devoted to nuns going about their lives. No, it’s not a joke and it’s quite safe for work.

iTunes Defect

Originally uploaded by Richard M Marshall

iTunes fails to redraw the screen when brought to the front on my Dell Vista machine. Does this happen for anybody else? Seems like a very elementary defect! The black bits remain black until something files them in - for example the track listing there started out black, and when I plugged in the iPod it filled in the iPod element on the left.

Having done a breakdown on the iPod Touch UI, I though it worth while looking at the Nokia N95 S60 Series 3 interface.

The overall comment is that there are far too many layers between you and what you want to do. An extra menu, and extra option that you’ve forgotten to select. However the good side of that is you can find, eventually, what you are looking for by trawling through the menus. There’s no guessing involved, or at least not if you have a methodical mind. Affordance is generally good and it’s all very consistent.

An example of the “always another option” problem is placing calls - if you don’t just press the green button, but choose to go through the menu you are always asked if you want Voice or Video, and if I get to a bit that Vodafone haven’t limited, there’s Internet call option too. Similar thing on messaging, and in common with Sony Ericcson, you’re asked if you want to send text, multimedia, e-mail, carrier pigeon, or deliver it by hand. Enough options already!

I have the front screen configured to have all the things I want at easy reach, which makes it very efficient for me to use. However setting that up was a real power-user process. I doubt if many people go to that effort.

There are no modes, and everything switches cleanly from landscape to portrait when you slide the front back and forth. Sometimes too easily, but that’s more a hardware issue than the software.

Too much reliance on special buttons. In fact too many hardware buttons in general, and many of them too small for many people, me included, to click cleanly. That said, the buttons I do use regularly fall exactly where my fingers go.

I sent an e-mail from the iPod Touch today, first time. Typing was a bit of a pain. However, I came across by accident (how else?) a neat little magnifier came up under my thum letting me see the text enormously magnified.  You can drag it around the screen.

Unfortunately the only place I’ve been able to find this magnifier is in the e-mail composing window. Why isn’t this on everything? The graphics were gorgeous, and the magnifier would be really useful  in the web browser to avoid constant zooming.

First action is to setup itunes on my newish laptop, then plug in the iPod Touch. It went through the usual firmware upgrades and the like. All very painless.

Setting up the wifi was next, and it would be easier if those slidey things were less pernicky about where you stop sliding them. For those unfamiliar with these software switches, you drag them with your finger to the end of the track where they then change state. Most times. With irritating frequency they slide back to the start again.

The Belkin wifi router/access point won’t play with the iPod any more than it will with Macs, identical behaviour. Very annoying. So I’ve bought a Netgear access point and it works fine. The initial connection is fast and switching from office to home is seamless. Much, much better than the MacOS version of the Wifi I was using before.

As I mentioned below in hardware, I was impressed that I could slot it onto my cradle thing at home and play through the hifi.

Syncing contacts was very good - once you know you can do it. I’ve downloaded all the Outlook contacts to the iPod, a process that works via iTunes. However I only found out I could do this by accident.

So much gushing has been written about the iPhone interface that it seems to have washed away any serious analysis. I’ve not seen anybody do a real breakdown of it. Perhaps they’re scared of the reaction. Well, here goes.

Yes, I’m going to pick at this icon of design. Design but not usability. And I’m going to pick at it because it could be utterly brillaint if the sharp edges were taken away.

At first site the screen is very pretty - lots of bright colours on a very dark background. Once you’ve found out that you have to press that anonymous button at the bottom to switch it on. (I’ve decided it’s a Panic Button as you use it when you start to Panic that you’ve lost where you are.) And once you’ve managed to slide that slidey thing across. Given that you need to have a warm finger to operate the touch screen, why does it need that unlock function?

So there’s all these bright icons and some special icons across the bottom. But special to someone else. I don’t have any videos or photos loaded on mine, so that’s two high-value real estate buttons that I can’t use. Well, despite what you might read, you can move them around, although you can’t get rid of them. I don’t know if this is different from the iPhone, because I’ve read people bemoaning the lack of configurability. Clearly they’ve not been tactile enough - ya just gotta try stuff here as the affordance is real low.

Moving icons involves holding your finger on one until they all start jiggling about to some hidden techno beat. Then you can drag them about as you wish. To get rid of ones you don’t want the only option is to drag them, still jiggling, onto a second or even third screen where you don’t normally see them. Of course you have to look this up on the web as it’s not at all obvious and there is no on-device help that I’ve found. Nor does anybody tell you have to press the Panic Button at the bottom to stop the icons dancing about.

Looking at the icons, they look like they’re live, so the weather looks like it’s telling me that the current weather is sunny and 23C. But it isn’t, nor is it permanently 10.15 on the dot. These icons are too concrete - go read Scot McLoud to understand how they should be more abstract, just like Safari’s compass. Talking of which, how’s yer average user supposed to know that Safari’s a web browser?

Most people buy iPod Touches for two purposes: browsing websites when they’re wandering about their home, and listening to music. I’d add that reading e-mail is likely to be a third, as the e-mail program is quite good for browsing. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to touch-screen type in an e-mail. Nor would you want to use the contacts list often. Why? Because the only option that I’ve found of locating a contact is stabbing at the alphabet and then lots and lots of scrolling. My fingers are way too big to select an item accurately off that alphabet.

And now that I’m in Contacts, how do I get to the Music? Not obvious! Just a small [::] button top left would solve that, but no, we have to press the Panic Button at the bottom which takes you back to the main menu. This strikes me as a weakness in the whole design - why does this buttonless interface make you go to the one button it’s not suppose to have so often?

Lots of people have raved about the browser and the zoomy effects. Well, it works, even smoothly, but the frequency of zooming is quite tiring on the fingers spreading and squishing. I also found that the act of touching the screen to zoom quite often clicks a link, and boom, you’re off somewhere else.

But the real doozie in the UI is the rotation not being ubiquitous. I’m browsing in portrait orientation, click into a field, and I cant type easily in the tiny buttons. So I rotate the device to go to landscape. Except it doesn’t, cause the keyboard is open. Duh! You press the Panic Button, and yo, it’s all the little icons are on their side! Hey, my Nokia N95 swaps everything when you go from portrait to landscape. It shouldn’t be that hard.

This modality afflicts the entire interface, and I think is part of the reason for the Panic Button.

This same modality applies to the music player as well, where the interface changes suddenly and completely when you rotate the device, offering different functions depending on orientation. Clever, yes, but not friendly.

Here’s a question for the fanboys: how do you put a track on repeat?

I had to look it up on the web - absolutely zero affordance.

People have gushed about coverflow, but it doesn’t work for me. This might be because a large part of my music doesn’t have cover art. Maybe people with more mainstream material would find it useful. The artist and track lists are more or less unusable because of the same problem as contacts - stab, scroll, scroll, scroll, ooops, over shot, scroll back.

And how do I move from function to function? Via the Panic Button of course. I repeatedly found myself getting sort of lost between the multiple presentations of the same information. It’s all a bit like a committee off UI people all came up with different ways of accessing music, and instead of picking the best, they put all of them in.

Email, on the other hand, has but one option. The long scroll. Yet it’s quite a nice little e-mail browsing tool when you are just looking at a small number of messages. It has it’s own poor affordance feature, though, which I found accidentally by dragging my finger across the screen, right to left. A big red Delete button appears! Wow. How are you supposed to find that one?

The rendering of e-mail is certainly very good, but in this case it’s the lack of rotation that causes problems. With wide messages in HTML they would be rendered better in landscape. Why not?

Conclusion: huge potential as a browsing device, sadly mared by some strange decisions, or maybe it just wasn’t ready in time for release. Sure this isn’t by design.

How would I improve things?

1) Make rotation work absolutely everywhere.

2) Get rid of the Panic Button and design app-to-app navigation into the user experience.

3) Make navigation through long lists easier, probably by grouping letters so that they can be reasonably clicked by someone with my size of fingers.

I bought the smallest (8Gb) iPod Touch in duty free while travelling back from London, getting it at about £160. Immediately the salesdroid wanted to cross sell me a leather case for £25 which covered the entire thing with a flap on the front. I inclined, but did buy one of these silicone covers which cling to the case. He also tried to sell me some screen protectors, which appear to be bits of cling film at exhorbitant prices. Presumably invented by the same people who do the ink jet cartridges, the most expensive fluid you can buy. Putting aside the natural inclination to sell high-margin accessories, this acceptance of cases tells you something about the hardware - it’s perceived as being fragile or scratchable or something. Which is strange, because it clearly isn’t.

So I take out my little box - it is tiny but beautiful, like a perfume box rather than an electronics product.

Opening the box, out comes a sliver of glass and chromed something. It’s much thinner than an iPhone, in fact it’s skinny. It’s slightly too thin for its width, I’d say. Curiously my first reaction was that it looks like a very small flat-panel TV!

Next observation is that the edge of the frame into which the mineral glass on the front sits is quite rough. It’s not smooth all round, which was surprising. You can grate your finger on it.

Clearly the form factor has been determined by the iPhone as you could clip a good centimetre off the top without affecting useful screen size. And it’s wide. I’ve tried holding it like I would hold a phone, and it’s too wide.

Next curiousity is the black corner on the back of the case. That’s odd, since it breaks the smooth chromed finish.

Then I was pleased to see what looks like an on/off switch at the top. As I’ve said before, the absence of some way of turning off the iPod has always perturbed me. Well, I was pleased to find this power switch until I discovered that it appears to turn just the screen on and off. This is the first of many bits of mystery meat affordance that spoils the user experience. More of that part 2 on the software. No doubt the fan boys will say “ah yes, that’s the dingleflibber, you must know what that was for.” Well, I didn’t, and I don’t mind admitting it. Make it obvious or label it.

Working down the way, the mineral glass screen radiates solidity and antiscratchiness, great job.

Then there’s this strange button recesssed into the surface. It has a small square on it. What’s that do?

And finally, a couple of sensible sockets in the bottom. It plugged directly into my iPod-to-hifi stand, and headphones plug straight in, no silliness with non-standard connectors.

What’s curious is that almost everyone I’ve seen with one thinks that their iPod Touch looks gorgeous - it does - but immediately feel compelled to put it in some kind of cover. I find it easier to hold in the silicone thing, and find myself nervously slipping it back on after use in the stand where it doesn’t fit when covered.

This rush to cover the iPod is irrational, but I think it comes from the fact that the screen is flush with the surface. My Nokia N95’s screen is slightly recessed, and I have no concerns about damaging it. Maybe the desire to cover it is because both the glass and the chromed case show finger marks very easily, but they don’t interfere with viewing. Whatever the cause, it’s a source of curiosity.

This interesting piece of research has found that the most gadgets US consumers are prepared to carry is three devices, and that’s only 18% of the sample.  39% were prepared to carry two, devices, leaving a minority prefering complete convergence.

Interestingly this compares well with Rubicon research that shows that a third of iPhone users carry a regular phone for making calls.

Great article about how “Mactards” (great word) can’t stand anybody writing even mild criticisms of Apple products.

The back of the envelope in which my Vodafone bill arrived lists the top ten mobile internet sites visited in December 2007 by Vodafone users. Not clear if that is from the phone or broadband, but it’s interesting either way, and even more interesting that they are promoting this so clearly. Here they are, in order:

1. Facebook
2. Sky
3. Google
4. BBC
5. MSN
6. MySpace
7. Bebo
8. Yahoo!
9. Nokia
10. Sony Ericsson

Don’t know whether Vodafone Live! was excluded from this list of features below 10, presumably the later as most people will hit the front page before moving elsewhere.