Nice rant on knobs
The puppy-blender has a
great rant on the use of knobs and their disappearance in today's equipment:
Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital
Sometimes you just want to reach out and touch something. But product designers don't always want to let you.
Not so long ago, if I wanted to adjust the heat in my car, or the volume on my car radio, I could grab a nice, simple knob. Turn it to the right, and the car got warmer, or the radio got louder. Turn it the other way, and the opposite occurred. I could always sense how far I was adjusting things — without ever taking my eyes off the road — because millions of years of evolution have produced a neurological feedback mechanism that lets me know just how much I'm turning my wrist.
Easy, effective, intuitive. That's simply good design, right? You'd think. But in most late-model cars, making those kinds of adjustments requires pushing buttons multiple times, or navigating menus within menus, and — almost always — taking your eyes off the road.
That's the trouble with buttons: Instead of working in a continuous analog motion the way knobs do, they only operate in discrete digital steps. And, since there's no tactile feedback, the only way to tell what the button is doing is to squint at an LCD readout.
So what do product designers have against knobs? Several things. First of all, most designers like a smooth, uncluttered look. Tiny buttons blend in better than a bunch of big knobs. (Of course, blending in makes the buttons hard to see, which is part of the problem.) Second, the utility of a knob is precisely its main flaw: It does only one thing. If you have a lot of things to control, you need a lot of knobs. With nested menus and a few buttons, you can duplicate the functions of dozens of knobs in much less space. Trouble is, what's saved in space and clutter (and gained in elegance) is lost in terms of usability.
What he said -- I know that knobs are much more expensive to manufacture than push buttons and that, as Glen says, today's devices have much greater function set but still, some time needs to be given to usability and to put some thought into the layers and menus...
Posted by DaveH at March 31, 2007 8:14 PM