[by Jemima Kiss] Gus Desbarats of industrial design consultants Alloy said it’s unthinkable that designers would produce a shampoo bottle and then complain when users couldn’t work out how to use it. Alloy asked users what they thought about the trial Sky TV service through Vodafone. The tester says it’s an interesting idea and is keen on watching snippets of mobile TV in his down time. But a few minutes later after some very sketchy images: “Oh. That’s not good. It’s like when you get on one of those dodgy porn sites and try and download stuff. Huh. If that’s what streaming is then I’ll never even think about getting it, let alone paying for it.” He’s been hoarding insights from users on their mobile services, like why a portrait-format screen would be taken up with so much menu clutter that it actually becomes a small landscape screen, like where users actually put a handset if they are watching video on it, and headsets – people hate them. Headphones with an iPod are different because the user chooses when to plug in, but users can’t choose when they will get an incoming call. All these observations and definitions “power the design of the device”. Again, users often refer back to the usability of their PCs where the hardware often goes unnoticed – the focus is on interaction through the screen.
Alloy’s prototype is a clam-shell twin-screen model. Users don’t like the main screen to be combined with a touchscreen pad because “you get grubby marks all over the TV you’re watching” but the big advantage is that the touch screen menu can change according to the mode the phone is in. “Mechanical keypads offer significant restraints in the context of multimedia environments,” he said. So the controls change from video mode to the camera function to the phone. It looks like a conventional phone but has other pleasing touches: the phone sits on its side with a 5 degree tilt to make it easier to view in TV mode, and it’s also designed to sit comfortably in two hands unlike smaller handsets which bring the user’s elbows too close together. (I hadn’t thought about that before, but try it!). This design is modest but really impressive. Desbarats doesn’t want this to be called a blue sky project because that “becomes about the designer’s vision. This shouldn’t look crazy to people – I want them to say ‘OK, right – I get it’.”
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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