Full episode transcript below
Geoff and Guy find that there's technology and communication standards for most parts inside our devices, but why isn't there a standard for all of the digital or physical buttons we use? Whilst skeuomorphic digital toggles might work the same, every other product seems to work differently…
Buttons, buttons, buttons everywhere.
Originally recorded on 14 Dec 2020.
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Episode Transcript
Geoff Wilson [00:00:05] Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Experiences Podcast, where we uncover potential design improvements in the world around us by exploring one frustrating experience at a time. I'm your host and Chief Observer, Geoff Wilson, based out of Auckland. And joining me today is Guy Thompson, a Kiwi based in Melbourne.
Guy Thompson [00:00:21] Hi, Geoff. Nice to join you again, uhh, virtually haha.
Geoff Wilson [00:00:24] Yes, yes. And you know, I want to get straight to it. Guy, you've been thinking about the past episodes we've done, right?
Guy Thompson [00:00:30] Yes. We've talked about these real experiences that you have before and literally everyday experiences. And now I think this is a great way to connect it to the digital world around the fact that we all say every interface that we've used for many, many years, from operating systems to to phones and all these kinds of different devices, they all have buttons either physically on the outside of the device or on the interface. And they sort of talk to us in a way that we're familiar with because of buttons in the real world. So the question I want to ask you, Jeff, was around. You are really observant and you often detecting and noticing. Thank you. And observing these things on a daily basis. So what is it about buttons that you notice in the real world that really fascinates you? What's sort of what some you keep going back to when you say them?
Geoff Wilson [00:01:14] Or fascination is all about annoyance more than anything else. It's when you press something and you can't tell what's actually happened. It's when you can't find what you're trying to look for, like you're trying to exit a door, but you can't find the one button that exists to open that door to unlock it. So it's not fascinating between most things instead of it, just this frustration, which is like the whole basis of this podcast. But then it is the same frustrations do exist in the digital world. They exist that same way of can I find the unsubscribe button and the click, can I find whatever it is I'm trying to actually do and just diving into that aspect of it all. Did you go to the office today, by any chance?
Guy Thompson [00:01:53] I did, yes. Very modern offices so that all those sorts of interface elements where, you know, you've got to press the keypad before you get into the elevator and all those sorts of things as well.
Geoff Wilson [00:02:01] But then by the time you walk there, you forget which elevator you might have been waiting for. So you have to walk back, press the button again.
Guy Thompson [00:02:07] I've had that same experience before. We are in a really modern office environment and you're dealing with these very new elevators which have these digital touchscreen panels for you to plan which floor you want to go to, and then it tells you which of the elevators going to arrive. And then there's like three elevators arrive at once and I've forgotten which one is mine. And so you sort of jump in and you look at the panel and see if the numbers there. And occasionally you'll accidentally get sort of stuck in the wrong elevator. And you can tell when you get in with other people as well, because it's only going to two floors and it's like three people and none of them know each other. So it's kind of getting caught out around that. Those new digital systems where there's a you know, there's a system before you get in the elevator, whereas normally you can interact with the elevator on the inside. I've noticed a lot of these a lot of the newer ones, once you're in, you're stuck in a digital display telling you going what floor you're on and which floors it's going to stop. But there's no other buttons inside it to go anywhere except ground. So you can you can exit, but you can't go anywhere else.
Geoff Wilson [00:03:04] But actually, I would love that. And this is kind of what we talked about last hour. Men, I guess, was two episodes ago. And who knows what really sort of these come out and when usability falls off a cliff. And that's one of those instances, I think, because like recently, I was trying to leave the office at 5pm. I got an elevator press ground on the keypad outside. They told me to get in C got in C, and then they picked me up, pick somebody else up. And for one look, that's fine. She's probably going down. But then we skipped ground and went straight to basement one. I was like, well, OK, how do I get back to ground? So I walked out, pressed the button again. It's an elevator. Silly that. Oh that's weird. I'll get back in it. Maybe it'll take me to ground some of the basement now and it starts going back up and all of a sudden we're back at four two. I'm like it just it's skipping over it and it's like I keep pressing this button. It keeps telling me which one to get on and it keeps skipping the floor. And so there's not even a way for me to go around. I just want ground. I want an emergency override. Just get me to ground that exists.
Guy Thompson [00:03:55] So the emergency override when you're stuck and it's one of those tricky everyday experiences, which is just all about living and working in these and these very, very new buildings. But this is one of the exciting things that I think is going to be interesting to cover in this episode. You know what real buttons in the real world are translated to when they appear in digital forms, but also the kinds of things that are happening in the digital world that are starting to come into the real world as well, that we can get getting. Are we getting this cross pollination of design elements going in both directions around? What would a buttons mean? What's easy to enter and to interface with, what's easy to interact with? And what do we assume something does before we touch it? You know, we can say about nature and we got to it and we interact with it. But, of course, now that we all all over the world are less inclined to be touching physical buttons in a real space surrounded by the people, are you is this button down, elbow activated button or a you know, do you touch it with your key fob if your building? There's lots of different ways to interact with buttons now, and I think would be an interesting discussion to have about what what is button interaction look like both in the real world and digital as well.
Geoff Wilson [00:05:00] So with that, what is your new favorite word? The word of whenever you. Take a physical object and translate it into the digital world. What is
Guy Thompson [00:05:06] that? I guess this would be skeuomorphism and of course, I got it wrong initially thinking anthropomorphism about humans interacting and becoming like like cartoon characters. But skeuomorphism is that process of taking something and and the real world and translating over to a digital interface of some kind on screen of a graphical user interface.
Geoff Wilson [00:05:27] And I realized, you know, the example I would always go to is the first iPhones or this first smartphones, where every notetaking, if you had looked like a notebook, like a spiral bound notebook with lines and actual metal spirals or calendars look like a flip calendar, all the icons represented the same thing. But now I realize also, depending on who's listening to this and how old people are, they might not have even been using those things at that time. So I really don't see those much. I guess now I don't or they don't pay attention to it as much as the ones I think that still might exist. Toggles are still quite close in some sense. You know, a light switch, you toggle up and down so they don't look exactly like the interfaces. They're more like slide toggles on. But it does come from that kind of design. It was a toggle that you use in the wall and it became something that we use in everyday designs. Now, on any kind of you ever use.
Guy Thompson [00:06:17] Early on when people were trying to design interfaces, there was sort of two schools of thought around this. Right? There was the process of just designing something that was really esthetically beautiful in terms of a design on screen, a graphical user interface. And there was a different school of thought. It was saying in order for this to be intuitive and people to know how to use it, I want to make it look like a real bus, a real thing. And of course, the extreme version of that that I would use is very early on for music production software. You would get plugins and apps and pieces of software, and the interface looked exactly like the real the real thing that would use like like a test can etowah like the real thing
Geoff Wilson [00:06:56] use
Guy Thompson [00:06:57] and the real world. Right. So and you'd have these racks and you'd plug them and literally plug them in with virtual cables to each other and they'd do that interact in different ways. And this was kind of a cool thing because it means that you could kind of have this digital music system as a portable kit and your laptop, of course, this laptop got more powerful back in the 90s. This was more of a thing that was just on your desktop. But even when I remember all the way back to, like Winamp, you'd have these differences as a way for you to say that right now it could look like an actual amplifier or some kind of cool, you know, desirable piece of equipment that's very expensive in the real world. And your digital version of it is much cheaper and much more accessible. And I think that's changed a little bit now because in the real world, a lot of those physical devices, those real kinds of pieces of equipment are far more understated that really kind of they almost feel like they've taken some of those design cues from a digital world and taken them into the physical world. If you look at really high end audio amplifiers and audio file kind of equipment, it's quite understated now compared to to what it was beforehand. So it's interesting to say those design influences going in both directions,
Geoff Wilson [00:08:04] one that was quite interesting that we were kind of chatting about beforehand and giving people the secrets of how this actually works. And we were talking about like what kind of ways would things not work the same? What kind of buttons don't exist the same way? And we started talking about buttons where you might have to flip open a cover like a protective thing. It wants to protect you from pressing a physical button like the nuclear launch button. Right. That you know, that idea. Maybe it's going to fire alarm. You have to lift up a lever or lift a flat before you press a button. Whereas this digital world that doesn't exist as much, you click it, the action happens and you expect it to happen within many milliseconds. We don't have those kind of safety guards as much because people expect digital things to work the second you press it. However, that calls into the importance of it's a little bit off track, but the idea of undo buttons. Right. That's or the undo functions. And that's why those things exist. It's one of Jacob Nielsen's ten heuristics for usability of like help users with error. So provide people a way to escape the thing they just did, especially if it's a nondestructive action, like let them go back, let them fix something. And that's why destructive actions such as do you want to delete this file? It usually ask you that question again. Are you sure you want to delete it?
Guy Thompson [00:09:16] I know it's not a button, but when you put it, if you're going to use diesel fuel, you've got to lift this thing and then pull this thing out. You've got to go through an extra couple of steps to make sure that you actually want to perform this action. And so we get that in a digital world that you are prompting the use it it just double check. Is this the the course of action you want to be taking? But I think there's probably another couple of things that could be changed in terms of user interface design to to make that little canceled or delayed or log out button a little bit harder to to get to to do that.
Geoff Wilson [00:09:49] Getting worried about this,
Guy Thompson [00:09:50] though, you know, I know that neither of us are actively designing user interfaces on a daily basis, but we're working with team members who will then take our ideas or change when making or something that we need to do within an interface with. To use a journey to get the result we want, so I think thinking about the ways that people are interfacing, interacting with these interfaces is important to work out that journey. And does everything make sense? Is it logical? And certainly I know when I was working full time as a designer, I wasn't always thinking about logic. I was just thinking about esthetics. So being involved in that conversation and saying, hey, is this the best way to do it and can we test it on different uses? That's definitely going to give you something that performs better than if you're just making it look pretty.
Geoff Wilson [00:10:30] And because I was never good at esthetics and I never know what to put in, I was always the opposite. I was always that, like, I want to talk about the use cases and the flow and all of that stuff. You esthetics be damned because to me, I don't that's not what I care about. I want the content first. I want the flow of it first.
Guy Thompson [00:10:45] Exactly. Yeah. And that's exactly what I find myself thinking about now, because if I'm in a meeting and talking about, you know, the proximity to the log and cancel back button and the the confirmed submit button, I'm like, I want those as far apart from each other as possible. I don't care if it looks like I don't care if it's in the middle of screen or somewhere else. Make sure they're not close to each other because I want someone to read it by accident.
Geoff Wilson [00:11:06] Now, there is a ton of ways you could alternatively do that. You know, it's not just go with the first idea you've got in mind, Guy, but we won't get we'll let the actual UI designers yell at us for all those aspects.
Guy Thompson [00:11:17] Absolutely. Things that we assume that are going to work, you've got to sort of test them. But at the same time, you know, when you get a really good sense of like, this works really well this way, just go with it and then see how people are actually performing when they use it. Yes. One of the changes that I noticed that Google did a while ago was with the Chrome browser adding a function there that you have to hold down command or control. Q To quit the software, you couldn't just tap it and it would escape. You'd actually have to hold it down to make sure you definitely want to exit the browser because you can have so much stuff going on. Right. You can have all these multiple tabs and you've got your Google documents open, you've got your calendar, you've got all these different functions and you don't necessarily actually want to, you know, get out of your browser. You just want to put your machine to sleep or do something else. So this avoiding that accidental quitte through one keystroke is just adding a prompter as well.
Geoff Wilson [00:12:05] People also try to hide links and buttons often nowadays. If they don't want you to do something like Amazon, for example, doesn't want you to ever cancel a subscription to the Amazon. What does it video? I forgot. It's called the crime service.
Guy Thompson [00:12:18] Yeah. Yeah. So difficult to log and sign
Geoff Wilson [00:12:20] on so they don't want you to do those things. And so they'll kind of hide those links, though. They'll make them look like just text your unsubscribes in emails. I can't tell you the number of times that it's a link. It's kind of like a button, but the number of times that you see a block of text, but you have to search for the word unsubscribe because they don't underline it. They don't make it look like a button. They don't want you to actually click it. So it's kind of the dark pattern. They're trying to encourage you not to do something that they don't want you to do when that's really what you're looking for. But that also started making me think I can't think of any times of physical buttons where they really don't want you to do something that you would actually want to do, because it would be if I think about the comparison, if you're in the real world and you were trying to use a water fountain, but they like hid the put, but in that case, I could still take that out because that's a really stupid analogy. Makes no sense. I was like, well, what if they hit the button but then never can actually use it? So what's the point of that? OK, I'm making an analogy on the fly. Really failed there.
Guy Thompson [00:13:20] I think I think the point you're trying to make there, which spectacularly kind of went off track, is that there are certain things in the real world that you want people to do. For example, if you want them to exit a building quickly or you want them to get off the plane quickly, there's certain things that you want to be able to make that people can do very, very quickly. But of course, if you have the opportunity to cancel your subscription, cancel your membership, log out, and you you don't want that to be very easy for a user to do because they're not going to die if they still have that subscription. And of course, they can change the payment method. The payment method could expire. Their account can still be active. And that gives you a way to continue to communicate with them because, of course, the cost that goes into acquiring that new user is very, very high. So if you can do this little subtle changes to make it a little bit more difficult, there's a bit more friction in there in order to exert your numbers will drop in terms of how quickly people can actually exit the toll or log out of sign out or will quit the subscription. And it is definitely a weird feeling. I know I had that recently when I was trying to unsubscribe from a newspaper subscription and I was trying to find the absent scribe, cancel my membership thing and there's an 800 number. And immediately this the level of friction was gigantic because I was like, I'm going to have to call these people during business hours from like eight till 3:00 or whatever ridiculous time it was to catch them when, of course, I don't have to sit through the whole pattern for, like, you know, forty minutes. And of course, it means you just going to procrastinate and leave it. It's not. Whereas if it was immediately easy for me to click that button, I would have done it. So there is these things around. You know, you can you can modify things as you sit around that dark pattern. We can shape that user journey and to try and keep them in. Because next week they might just change their mind, they might use the the platform or the service or the application or the the content again and actually be really enjoying it. They might be a new addition to to their particular streaming provider or whatever it is. And they'll be like, oh, actually, I do want this thing.
Geoff Wilson [00:15:18] Hmm. This is where I'm like, no, no. If they want to cancel, let them cancel to be yourself like that. That carnival guy. Well, come on. Yes. You play the ring toss, but just one more try to stick around for a little bit longer. Throw another ring, another dollar. Another dollar. Yeah, that's what that's what I was getting from you. Now, is the business side coming out of like, well, if they stay they'll realize they like it.
Guy Thompson [00:15:39] It's that's exactly my point, is that you can make it a very attractive maze that they get stuck in forever and they never want to leave it. It's great and it's wonderful. But then there's that tipping point where they they go bonkers and they definitely want to get out. And so you've got to support them through that through that exit process. But I think,
Geoff Wilson [00:15:56] you know, I said we're not designers. I really I'm really glad that we're not because I don't want you anywhere near it at this point. Yeah. Yeah.
Guy Thompson [00:16:03] We're involved in these decision making processes. We're going to be part of the process of kind of joining on to these discussions and influencing those people around us, around how does this thing work and how can we change it, how can we make it better or how can we make it more effective? And one of it's one of the things you want is to reduce your sign out or your cancelation, you know, a number. Then, of course, there's some little things you can do in it. But I think the balance is really important. You want to be doing it for the right reasons. You want to make sure that the the use of the customer can still find the information that they need. But if they accidently click the cancel button and they're like, oh, I didn't actually want to cancel, it's very difficult for them to get back and make time to re sign up again and go through the authorization process and put in the number from the mobile phone for the Two-Factor authentication. So much harder to get them on board. You don't want to make it easy for them to accidentally exit.
Geoff Wilson [00:16:54] But then again, I've actually some of the services of use recently are so like trying to keep me engaged that yes, they'll let me cancel easy. But immediately when I cancel, they actually have splash screens like, hey, did you really mean to cancel? You just click one button. So it actually is kind of nice in that sense that if I actually had made a mistake, which ninety nine percent of the time, I don't think I've ever, ever go, yes, I'm going to cancel all. No, you know what? I really like you guys. I want to come back. It really never actually happens like that. I might come back in a month or two time like when I want that service again, like I use a CSV tool, right. It helps me write CVS, but I'm not I'm not applying for jobs. Every month I get a job. I only need it every few years to update it like this podcast. I didn't go up my CV, so maybe I'll go pay for the subscription soon, but then I'm going to cancel it. But as soon as I do, they do have this prompt right after the fact. Hey, you know, did you mean to cancel? Also, here's a ten percent discount if you want to come back right now, like right now. So actually there's still got this marketing hooks in, but you've allowed people to do it. So you've actually allowed people to succeed in what they want to do. You're not just holding them down,
Guy Thompson [00:18:01] like holding them down and forcing the hand to press the button. Right. That's that's the live alert activity. OK, so
Geoff Wilson [00:18:09] you started moving your mouse and it starts moving your mouse back. You're like, wait a minute, what's you know, click be.
Guy Thompson [00:18:15] The thing that I think is worth thinking about is that when you design for a touch screen interface and mobile phone a tablet, you've got all these design libraries of the ways that buttons and sliders and switches work. And that's a very common language that people understand and they recognize and they know how to use it. But you're not creating a completely new interface for them. Whereas if you design a game or some kind of completely different user interface that has a totally different experience, people are still going to get up to speed with that as well. So it's about do you need to use it to know how to use it immediately, or is there a little bit of a learning curve associated with what you presented them with?
Geoff Wilson [00:18:52] So that is a good point for Jacobs Law. So Jacob Nielsen, again, I actually reference to usability heuristics earlier and jigaboos law paraphrasing. He was basically people how people have used another website. They'll expect your website to act the same way. So the same thing is a door, right? If you use a door handle, you expect the door handle to be a door handle. And that's that's again, the whole other issue of normal doors. And that idea of like, oh, well, you thought you were using handle the right way of pulling it. Oh, wait, no, actually there's a push door, but the same thing applies to buttons and everything else in the interface. So, you know, think about forms and stuff. You're filling out a form online like a credit card application if you're going to submit it. Generally, we, at least in English speaking countries, we read left to right. And so your submit your your OK button, whatever that is, that final confirmation thing, it's generally on the bottom right after you're done filling in. But if you had to hunt for that, you're going to possibly worst case, you're not going to fill in that application, which means you don't get the product you wanted, but also means the business doesn't get the sell they wanted.
Guy Thompson [00:19:53] That's a good point. I think for me, it was absolutely that dichotomy between one part of my brain really wanted to focus on the esthetics of just making it look different and innovative and. Interesting every single time and the other part of my brain just wanted to move it speed and just use the seats that were there and just create something that actually that actually functions. And that's definitely the way that I've moved now, is that I'm far more focused on the system and the process and the journey that a user takes. So every time I see an online form or any kind of interface where the back or cancel or start again or go to top button is in too close proximity to the one you actually want someone to press. They're all the same size. They might be in a row. They're all kind of clustered together. That, for me is always feels like a mistake because it's too easy for the user to accidentally press the wrong one to to sort of go back or restart. And the number of times I've done that by accident because maybe I'm just going to quite quickly and I haven't gone and berating the button before I'm clicking or am I just assuming that's the right one. And of course, now that we're starting to interact more with with touchscreen laptops and touch screens for for a desktop interface, like if you're using like a Microsoft Surface and that's a quite high resolution and you turn a tap like that, close or expand or minimize Batmen windows, it's impossible. You actually have to use the the pen in order to to do it. So I've always found don't
Geoff Wilson [00:21:10] you dare use a pen if I don't write that. That's for drawing a drawing only as far as I'm concerned.
Guy Thompson [00:21:15] So when they kind of you and I know some interfaces, if you switch to tablet mode, suddenly all those buttons get much, much bigger and much, much uglier. So it's easy to to touch them. But I think that's an interesting thing that still seems an operating system to be a little bit of resistance to, you know, making those things as easy as possible to interact with. Or do you just make them really esthetically nice and kind of minimized and you don't even know what they are until you roll over them, know you've actually got to, like, roll over it. That's actually what that button does. But it does become like muscle memory very quickly when you're using an interface like that regularly.
Geoff Wilson [00:21:45] And I do even on that note, I want to caution anybody listening that muscle memory is not an excuse for bad design. It's not like there's so often. Do you hear that kind of conversations? Oh, well, they'll figure out how to use this again, like you invent a new button. Well, they'll figure it out. But what's the chance you've lost in the very first time? How many people have you actually missed because they couldn't even do that thing? So if you're like if it is an app or website and you're tracking conversions and so you see, like, how many people enter the page and look, only 20 percent left the page. Well, some people might go, oh, well, my marketing needs to be better. I need better visuals. I need better whatever it is, I need better content. But maybe it's not that. Maybe it is, but maybe it's also that you've designed it in such a way that they don't know how to continue. And you can find the stuff on usability testing. It's one of the easiest things to do is you even even drawing it on paper to start with and just seeing can people actually figure out how to go to these next steps, just do that as a bare minimum.
Guy Thompson [00:22:40] Absolutely agree with that point.
Geoff Wilson [00:22:41] Another aspect of this is time, right? So generally, you don't want to be trying to consume as much as the time of your users as possible because you want them to get where they're going lest they decide that this is taking too long and I want to quit. So have you heard of Fitzloff? No. Tell me about Guetzloe. So Fitzloff reading the technical definition, the time it takes to acquire a target is a function of the distance too, and size of the target. So to try to make it a little easier, it's basically the bigger or smaller the button, the longer or shorter it might take to actually click it. And it depends on how far away it is as well. So you talked about trying to, you know, find this tiny little buttons and you're trying to click these tiny little things. Well, the more precise you have to be, the more time and therefore taking you even if it's in milliseconds, all that stuff adds up. That's all fatigue to the user in time. Let's say compare it to a crosswalk button. Right. Crosswalk button is quite big. It's this huge target. It's on a pole. They also might make noise, which is even better, but you can't really miss it. There's this giant button and it's got a lot of surface area. So whether it's your elbow, your wrist, your palm, your your fingers, whatever it is, your foot, you can kick it if you want it. I don't recommend it. I don't want to be touching your shoes on a button. But it I mean, who knows? People have done a lot worse in public, so. Yeah, we don't know where your hands have been exactly.
Guy Thompson [00:24:03] We're not going to get into the nitty gritty of an appropriate button touching.
Geoff Wilson [00:24:07] But I kind of like the title of this episode. Inappropriate Button Touch.
Guy Thompson [00:24:11] Don't touch my button.
Geoff Wilson [00:24:13] Oh man. That is the title that actually come out with this going to be way lamer than all this. But yeah, talking
Guy Thompson [00:24:18] about that sort of angle on Fitzloff is really interesting because one of the things that I find really fascinating that I found out about recently and I didn't know until I kind of went through a little bit of the history of Apple. So I was watching a couple of little short documentaries online and also started reading a book by Ken Kostina called Creative Selection, which is inside Apple's design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs and Ken Kesey. And it was on the design team that was working at the new interface for how to control the keyboard on the iPhone. So those two development teams at the time, one was essentially taking Mac OS X and trying to make it work on a very small device. And the other team was taking the iPod interface and trying to work out, can you use that? I put into face to interact with the phone and they could kind of do almost everything they needed to do with the input interface except dial a number, because when you were using that little on screen, that touch wheel, you had to rotate. And it pretty much became like a rotary phone and that just didn't work. Whereas the team that was developing the keyboard were really struggling because the the the screen at the time was so small, it was very, very difficult. And the one change that that kin's team did and they were the last team to present on the day. So it's actually quite a dramatic story if you want to look it up online. They went through, I think, 16 different teams and presented 16 different interfaces and they all failed jobs. None of these were were totally crap. This is going to be impossible. And the last team that Ken was driving demonstrated this interface and it worked. And everyone was blown away and they were like, how is this working? You can actually touch these tiny buttons on the screen and it's working. And the thing that they've done was that they changed the hit area so invisibly they were changing the size of the button based on predictive text. So if you were going to type the word the invisibly after you press the word t, the likelihood of you pressing H was very, very high. So invisibly on the screen, the hit area of the H became bigger, but you couldn't actually see it, but that your massive finger could actually touch H a lot easier than all the other cars that were around it. So you could actually kind of type quite quickly. And even now when we think we're really clever, like speed, touch, typing, I
Geoff Wilson [00:26:32] thought I was I thought it was like the world of two thumb typing.
Guy Thompson [00:26:35] We are not actually touching those buttons. The buttons actually get bigger and we're actually getting a hit area that's invisible. That's based on a predictive text dictionary that's actually in the phone. So, of course, then they put that predictive text dictionary on screen. You could start typing those words and that was the interface breakthrough that pretty much changed everything about the way that we interface with digital devices. If that team hadn't cracked that code around, just make the button bigger, but don't make it bigger so you can see it. If they hadn't done that, we still would have been stuck with something. It might have taken them another year or two to actually get there, which I think was an amazing transformation.
Geoff Wilson [00:27:10] Yeah, I think I really will have to go, you know, edit my CV now and take off the whole world record holder for typing with two thumbs. The self-appointed title that I have to brag about at parties. But yeah, especially that I can type maybe 50 percent as fast as a regular keyboard, if not seventy five percent just because I've learned how to do it. But then with each phone, the slightest change in my keyboard height drastically alters the error rates that I have for how often and pressing the wrong button. And so it's like I've got to configure it just right for the expected area, that muscle memory. So it is muscle memory at that point.
Guy Thompson [00:27:43] It's interesting to overlay on that. The haptic feedback is something I wanted to do like this. Yes, I really would like the interface, the phone to kind of tap and do you effectively when it's when it's typing, I've I've switched it off. It sort of freaks me out. It's a bit weird, you know, so I think I hate it exactly. But it's interesting that and I'm still using like an iPhone seven. I haven't updated because I still like the home button. But I know now in this particular phone, it's not a physical button because it's also the it's also the thumbprint scanner. So they couldn't lift the button move. It had to be fixed, but they've included that little motor. Where's the buttons on the outside. Do you find the volume button up and down those buttons to still actually move and you get that real world depressed that you get, but the home doesn't give you that. And if you want to have the haptic turned on for other kinds of functions when you're typing or closing something or or popping an app open, you can program that if you really want to have it say that happening.
Geoff Wilson [00:28:38] Like one of the that's literally one of the first things I do with my new phones is I go into the settings and I start looking for all the ways to turn off almost all the sounds. I just because also this is a pet theory, I think the sounds slow me down and I don't know if I'm just waiting.
Guy Thompson [00:28:53] Yeah. Now you waiting for them. Yeah.
Geoff Wilson [00:28:54] Yeah. So if I am actually waiting I feel like it makes me slower and therefore I want to type fast. I want to be a faster typer. I started thinking of my Xbox controller that I've got and you know, there's triggers, those round buttons, there's directional arrows, all these things. But they all have their own kind of unique haptic feedback depending on what you're doing. So if it was a racing game and you're accelerating with a trigger, it might feel like your tires are spinning. If you're shooting a gun in my face like you're firing something. Yeah, I just I think it's always really interesting in that sense. And it's that it's now a true blend between the digital world or something you're doing on screen, but a physical thing that actually controlling.
Guy Thompson [00:29:30] We're essentially talking about buttons that you're not looking at while you're interacting with them. Right.
Geoff Wilson [00:29:34] So often I think we really hard to play a game if you're staring at the controller the entire time.
Guy Thompson [00:29:38] Exactly. And that's one of the things that I've noticed that's changed sort of more recently as well, is that if you're interacting with an operating system and you're moving your mouse to click a button, you're not really, like, pressing it right. You might get a little bit of visual feedback for what's happening. This is when you're using a touch screen interface and you're either getting that visual feedback for touching and holding or multi touch or, you know, 3D touch on. Screen and what happens next when you said Press', that is one thing I've noticed recently is that I'm and have been, I think for a while now is actually doing touch typing on my phone. And I'm not looking with my fingers are going I'm not trying to look at any and to interaction with the keyboard at all to see if I'm typing the right thing. I'm just looking where the words are going. And I've noticed that my typing has gotten worse. And I think it's because I'm not looking at all to get any confirmation from the keyboard. Am I even in the right direction? I'm just sort of staring and typing madly and I'm going, oh, wow, why is my typing got worse? It's an interesting transition around. Like, you know, we've got these buttons that we look at in the real world where we're looking for some kind of indication of what it does so we can invoke a command. Do we can actually action something, everything from, you know, touching the button when you got a door, you know, is that something now that's going to be like a light beam where you want to pass and through it without actually touching it? You know, maybe we'll get a few more interfaces that we can interact with without without touching them compared to a really complicated interface, which is might be like a crane or other other kind of piece of machinery or piece of military technology or something that you have to get in and learn how to pilot that thing and press these buttons. Different kinds of planes, Boeing versus versus Airbus, a totally different language. If all the buttons and commands and controls that you that you touch while you're not looking, you're really you're focused on what you're doing and you're doing everything by touch.
Geoff Wilson [00:31:23] Yes. So thinking of intuitive buttons in that sense, there's one other element of physical buttons that I can't think of any immediate example. In the digital world, it's the same, and that's hidden functionality of buttons. The first two examples that come to mind are, one, I've got a flashlight that if you press it once, it's a very high beam, high intensity light. If you press it and hold it the very first time you turn it on, this is more softer one. And then once it's on and you press and hold it again, it starts adjusting like the beam of light, like whether it's a big cone or really narrow. You would have never known those things unless you actually read the instructions. And so intuitive, wise, it's not theirs is hidden function.
Guy Thompson [00:31:58] There's clearly a business made in there which is around every time you add one more button to something in the physical, real world, it's very, very expensive. Yeah, I know for the average Bluetooth speaker, the next button will do a range of different things. Adelaida, you hold it down and the volume goes up the and once it skips, if you press it three times it goes backwards or something or there's all these different things. And the same is true with, you know, Bluetooth headphones as well, that if you tap the outside on one side, it does something one thing mutes the the other one, the volume goes up. The other thing, it turns it up. And you again, you've got to read the instructions that we haven't really established an exact language for exactly how to use those things and how they should function. And it's going to take a while to get there. I know on the headphones I'm using the old ones where you've got the down button and the button and the mute sort of function in between. And we kind of you get the hang of it because it comes out as a convention and everyone else starts to use it as sort of a standard that we have for a while. But I think for a lot of these smaller consumer electronics that lots of different companies have manufactured, they've all kind of come out at the same time and no one kind of agreed on what the format would be for what are all these buttons. So everything's different. So you'll be you know, someone will be playing some music on a speaker and you go up and you want to turn the volume up and you just accidentally skip the track or you turn the phone off or you've done something crazy because, yeah, it's not as intuitive as that would be nice if it was.
Geoff Wilson [00:33:23] I mean, I've got three different headsets and like the Google picks, the ones that I've got those require I think it's C I can't even remember without using it. I can't actually remember which one does what. One of them, if you tap it, it actually plays the track. And then I've got a Samsung headset that if you do one tap it skips the track. But the other like it's basically opposite one, a double tap palsies one, a single tap palsies. It's totally different. One you swipe like forward to change the volume, one you swipe up. So that gets in the whole Gestur controls and we won't really dove into that too much. But thinking of just buttons on headsets while we're here, I've got another over your headset right now. And as we were trying to set up this podcast, I'd like to get ready to record today. I try to turn on my noise canceling or I try to turn on the headset itself. And then I was trying to turn off Bluetooth because that button also controls noise canceling for whatever reason. And then all of a sudden it started trying to call people. It started trying to play music. And I'm just trying to turn off Bluetooth. But it's one button that has like, oh, well, if you press it for five seconds, it does this, but three seconds it does this and one second. It's a totally different thing. And in the end, it just shows a Bluetooth symbol. And I have no idea which one it is. I've been using these for seriously about five years now, and I still have no idea what controls are and what spot. It just makes no sense.
Guy Thompson [00:34:38] That's a fantastic point. And I think maybe we've we've uncovered something that is perhaps a thing that we can put out into the world, just maybe the one little thing that we'd like to influence, and that is standards for technology and the way that systems and platforms and communications equipment work are established years, if not, you know, five to ten years ahead of when you start to use them. So, you know, the streaming Kotick. Compression that handles 8-K video to your phone will be in development now, even though you can't get a cable on your phone yet, but that standard will be in development now. And the interesting thing about that is that's like a math problem to solve, right? That's the technology communications problem that developers work on. And you have these these associations that will get together and work out that standard. But there does seem to be a missing link there around interfaces. The company that's building that Bluetooth speaker, they're using the same Wi-Fi standard that's using the same Bluetooth standard by using all the same standards for everything inside the machine effectively, except for the touch interface on the top, they've kind of had to make it up. So if there's one thing that I'd like to see a change occur is that the associations that come up with all these communication standards can start to think about the communication standards that humans need to interface with four buttons and technology so that if they can start to bring that in, then it makes it so much easier for different companies to be using the same standard. But you think it's a pretty important problem that someone should solve and be like, yes, this thing does. That's on the side. You press it and does this thing, which is
Geoff Wilson [00:36:08] listed as a feature top this, this, this, and you just try to market these features you've got. It's the same thing, but you try to make it spin and make it sound different.
Guy Thompson [00:36:16] Exactly. And I think that's the biggest challenge, is that when when a team has to try and work out a solution on their own, sometimes they land on a great solution, other times they won't. But when you actually get that consensus beforehand and establish a standard, then everyone goes, OK, it's not quite as good as it could be, but at least we're all using the same one. As soon as you jump onto a different system, you can use it really, really simply and easily. And so maybe that's an an everyday improvement that we can hope that we could get one day.
Geoff Wilson [00:36:41] Unless you're Apple and then we'll go. No, we will make our own lightning cables. We can make our own things. Oh, fine. We'll use USB speci.
Guy Thompson [00:36:48] Yeah. And then the next thing you know, your phone no longer has any cables
Geoff Wilson [00:36:52] and then you're in trouble. So you don't want one less. One thing, because we've been talking about buttons, right. We've talked about physical buttons, digital buttons. What about shirt buttons only. I want to stick on this for just a few seconds, but shirt buttons. Right. We talked about that idea of you as you button things or as you use any kind of system, digital or physical, you expect it to start to work consistently between platforms. Well, how about just when you're buttoning your shirt? Most of them are vertical, kind of what do you call the slit like what do you call the things the buttons go into? I have no idea.
Guy Thompson [00:37:21] It is literally called a buttonhole
Geoff Wilson [00:37:24] or a buttonhole. So it sounds dirty, but the button hole, so there's all these vertical button holes, but then on some shirts is now a horizontal one on their very last buttonhole and that little thing. Right. You're buttoning, buttoning, buttoning. You're doing it without looking like we've talked about your button. You're not paying attention, you're doing it. And then there's this last one that throws you for a loop for a second because it won't go in. Oh, was because they changed the format. They changed the orientation of this thing. And that's not to mention between unisex male and female shirts and any of these, whether it's the zippers on the opposite side, buttons on the opposite side, depending on where you buy it, what you're buying, who it's made for, all of those things could drastically change that experience of just putting on shirt, putting on pants, zipping up a hoodie.
Guy Thompson [00:38:05] It's definitely one of those interface elements that you use kind of by touch and muscle memory. And you use your familiarity with that interface as soon as you, you know, put on that piece of clothing and you go, this is if it does not work, how I thought it was going to work and does that even close and does that thing have to dangle there? And is this this Velcro thing going to shut properly? Some quite like a really complicated jacket or something like a ski jacket is like, wow, this is totally different to just the normal jacket that I would wear. That's a lot more simple, really overengineered, complicated by the kinds of buttons that we interact with on a daily basis. Sometimes the things that we're very familiar with using with its muscle memory would head for a very, very long time. Our entire lives and other times it'll be a completely new interaction. And I think that's that's where that really interesting space is. We introducing a new way of interacting with something and people are going to be used to this. Are they going to use the baggage of how they usually interact with this kind of visual signifier and know how to press it? And I had to interact with it. And is that going to be a difficult thing? Are you creating more friction for the user the first time that presented with us, or is there something that they're familiar with and they're going to be really comfortable using?
Geoff Wilson [00:39:10] So so get about being comfortable. My wife had actually I've got to give her all the credit for this. I was asking right before we recorded, like, do you have any button thoughts? Like just anything about buttons. She's like, well, physical application could be physical. She's like clothing, it could be clothing. And she goes, Did you ever know or did you ever hear that there's some people that are actually afraid of buttons? No, I'm very intrigued to this point. She's yeah, there's people that are there's a phobia, apparently. And I looked it up. It's now again, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation. What is it called? Tell me. Come home. The phobia. Wow. It's it's like the ultimate Scrabble world. I don't think you could even possibly get that many Scrabble like characters and their board. It's a lot of. But basically it's it's kind of less of a fear, it looks like, but more of a texture thing and disgust. So I guess the way the buttons feel or the thought of how many like a German aspect to this as well, but possibly just people being. Usted by the buttons in the shirt and fun fact, we mentioned Steve Jobs earlier, allegedly, he might have had this phobia, he might not have liked buttons, the iPhone, they came out. It was the first phone that really didn't have a keyboard, a physical keyboard. It had one button or the iPod. Do you think his fear of buttons played into that? We may never know.
Guy Thompson [00:40:20] Interesting. He was trying to save the entire world from button based interfaces, and that's all just digital instead of real buttons.
Geoff Wilson [00:40:27] He succeeded, I guess.
Guy Thompson [00:40:29] But it must be really, really strange thing to sort of be surrounded by these buttons everyday and find that difficult.
Geoff Wilson [00:40:34] So it's really easy, especially if you don't especially if you don't know what's going to happen when you press the search button. And that's that's that's a new world. I'd love to hear about it. And with that, you know, we've covered buttons a quite a bit, but I have a sneaking suspicion this is not going to be the end of the buttons. I think this is going to be like buttons, part one, because now that we've talked about it again, we're going to go out and we're just going to start noticing these things more like I hope everybody listening does. And I'm sure we're going to start coming up with a million new examples. I mean, I know elevator buttons, UX designers in us, we love to pick on those because we've only briefly touched the surface in elevators today. But, yeah, there's a lot more to go into. So maybe in time buttons round two.
Guy Thompson [00:41:12] Exactly. And if I if I can work out how to press your buttons will be in a good position.
Geoff Wilson [00:41:17] Oh, Jesus. We're ending with the pun hahaha. And with that, folks, thank you for listening to this episode, and I hope that made you think of a few new things. If you'd like to continue this conversation or see examples of what we were talking about today, you can find and follow us on social media @EverydayExpPod or myself @geoffwilsonHCD. Please consider subscribing on your favourite podcasting app and leaving us a rating so we can keep this going. And just remember, you don't have to have a fancy job title to start noticing and improving the everyday experiences wherever you work. Thanks. And will be on the air again soon.
Post-credits
Geoff Wilson [00:42:19] I can't even keep up with where we're about now, I just see things in my phone and I just use it. I'm luckily out of that world where I have to care about which way of like... flat designs and shadows and stuff. I'm really happy I'm not in that anymore haha.
