Saturday, January 24, 2009

Exercise Four - Wendy

THE LOVE

Despite the fact that every other person I know has this phone now, I loved it ever since I bought it. It's the Sony Ericsson W580i, and mine is in urban grey in particular.

I think that the mapping on this phone is good because the buttons are directly underneath what you want to select on the screen. Also, because this is a slider phone, the main interface has more room than other phones (keeping with the general size of cell phones these days) for the screen and buttons, which means I actually get a physical constraint of two separate buttons for the walkman and "running applications". No accidentally turning on the walkman for me!

In terms of affordances, the sloping of the phone at the bottom encourages a place where the thumb can rest, and also push upwards to reveal the keypad. The icons on the main menu are a constant in all the Sony Ericsson phones I've come across, and are easy to figure out what they're used for (ie: wrench and screwdriver icon for Settings, an envelope for Messages).

The only complaint I have is that the phone sometimes randomly stops reading my memory card, and there is no visible feedback when this happens...or why this happens.

THE HATE

My family recently bought a LCD TV on Boxing Day, and it's the Samsung LN32A450. Screen quality aside (which isn't amazing anyway), the buttons on the side of the TV confuse me every single time I decide to use them. My instinct tells me to turn the TV on by pressing the button closest to me (while standing), which is the top button, but the actual ON button is the bottom one.

This wouldn't be so terrible if the TV actually turned on right away. On the off-chance I get it right and press the bottom button, the TV takes about six seconds to turn on, and during that time I begin questioning my technical intellect. The power indicator light does not change either. So the next natural thing I do is grab the remote control and press the big red power button at the top, again and again, wondering why the TV won't turn on -- simply because I'm actually turning it off before it fully turns on.

On the subject of the remote control, the mapping is horrid. Despite the length of the control, they're trying to fit too much onto a single remote. Most users like myself won't even touch half the buttons on it, yet merely trying to find the button to switch to the DVD player took much too long.

This television and remote control are not instinctual, and they force users to consult the manual thoroughly. The visibility of the labels are not clear at all, and sometimes users end up using trial and error to learn what each button is for.

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