Why buttons are still relevant on iPods

Posted on Dec 21, 2008 in Design | 0 comments

When I purchased my MacBook Pro (my PowerBook’s video card scrambled after 5 years of faithful service), I received a “free” first-generation iPod Touch. Simply put, it is an amazing machine. Having eschewed the iPhone for its high total cost of ownership, I was glad to finally have a device that allowed access the App Store, e-mail on the go, games, a browser, etc.

Despite the other features, the iPod was still primarily about playing music. When I’m sitting at my desk at work listening to music, I want to be able to easily control that music. That’s when I realized my new iPod, for all its glossy, touchy gloriousness, lacked something its older siblings had.

Physical buttons.

For those without an iPod Touch, let me be clear. It has two physical buttons: the “home” button at the bottom and a “power” button, for lack of a better term, at the top (this button toggles between wake and sleep modes.) Previous iPods had the unmistakable “clickwheel,” which was a combination of four “buttons” (top, bottom, left, and right) arrayed within a touch-sensitive circle. Another “select” button occupies the middle of the circle.

You can see from the image at the right that these physical buttons are mapped to commands: menu, skip back, skip forward, and play/pause. While it can be argued that an interface composed entirely of “soft buttons” like the iPod Touch is more advanced, usability of such interfaces suffers in the context of the device’s primary purpose: playing music.

Let’s examine a use case: me, sitting at my desk working with one earbud plugged in so I can rock out and not be totally oblivious to what’s going on around me. A song comes on—whether from a Genius playlist, one of my own, or just a random track while shuffling—that I want to skip; a very common occurrence for me and probably everyone else.

As you can see, it takes four times as many actions (swipes, drags, presses, etc.) to accomplish the same goal on an iPod Touch (and holds true for iPhones) as it does on a clickwheel-based iPod. And, the same is true of adjusting the volume, an equally common task.

In addition to the scenario described above, there is the issue of making adjustments only by feel. Tactile response to the shapes of buttons and orientation of the iPod in your pocket allows you to skip tracks, etc. without looking at the iPod itself. Doing so with an iPod Touch is impossible.

Luckily the second-generation iPod Touch addresses one of these issues: physical buttons for volume control. You can see the buttons in this image from Engadget. That improvement alone resolves half of the problems I described here. And I certainly won’t be giving up my iPod Touch, with its array of games, cool apps, wi-fi, web browser, etc. But I hope that these considerations are given some thought by Apple for future generations of iPods. That, or a third-party manufacturer like Griffin or Belkin will whip up a $15 accessory to add music- and volume-control buttons to iPod Touches via the dock connector. How’s that for a good idea? Please send royalties.

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