Project 366 2008 August 19 232/366
Filed under: Project 366 2008
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:02 pm. 1 comment
Impressive iPhone usability feature #374: Microphone button.
In call:
- Press once to answer a call
- Press twice to send the call to voice mail
- Press once to hang up a call
In call while second call coming in:
- Click once to switch to new call
- Hold to ignore new call
Out of call:
- Press once to play or pause song
- Press twice to skip to next song
Sad but true. Even today, there are still lots of people who would only look at the specs and additional features when they compare iPhone with the alternatives. The cost of running usability testing on this tiny button is way more than the adding another 10 Gig of memory. More features mean nothing if they aren’t made to stick.
That is indeed impressive. After reading your post, I was reminded that I also have earphones+mic. I took it out of the box (but still wrapped), looked and looked, but couldn’t find the mic. Until I saw this tiny thing without buttons. Wow.
The thing with Apple stuff is that we often get the thought of “Ah, that makes perfect sense!” or “That’s how I would design it”. It’s impressive when we get something new, and all we need to do is think to ourselves, “how should this work?” and think of a possible answer, often that turns out to be how Apple implemented it. It’s their foresight and no non-sense approach that earns my respect. They go that extra mile to let you know their engineers spent a lot of time polishing the user interface.