What came first the gloves or the touch screen?
Posted in Design, Technology and tagged with iphone on 10/24/2008 11:13 am by uxmelinaThe fall is here, the leaves are changing colour, nights are cooler and snow is around the corner. As I walked to my night class, I reached in my purse to turn on some music, I pressed the one physical button on my ipod touch followed by a quick touch of the music icon on the touch screen, as I had done so many times before. Only this time, the task was a FAIL. My gloves acted as insulators and the ipod could no longer take advantage of human capacitance.
Which design is flawed?
The iPod clearly didn’t account for people wearing gloves. In my case, I slipped off my gloves and set the music, put the glove back on, and began listening, however skipping a song, or adjusting volume would be a real pain each time. What if it were really cold out? Would there be a situation where I would choose the warmth of my hand over the music? What if it was an iPhone and I needed to answer a call quickly?
On the other hand (pun intended!), the glove design didn’t consider its environment of use, as the iPhone grows in popularity people need their actual figure tips available for use. This also applies to big thick gloves and use with any tech devise with small buttons. I was actually shopping for leather gloves earlier in the day, I saw ones that had a small leather flap over the thumb figure tip attached with Velcro, it almost look like a leather Band-Aid over your glove (they were really ugly). In hindsight they do meet a key design requirement, now if someone could just make a stylish version of them….
Two clear solutions to my problem are to change the input method of the ipod or the material/design of the gloves; can anyone think of any other solutions? More importantly, should the use case even be considered in the design? Please comment!
October 26th, 2008 at 7:26 am
The gloves issue definitely sounds like a bug by design! I wonder whether it’s a known issue for Apple or not.
About gloves, there may be room for a new niche of gloves that’s cellphone and touchscreen friendly. Maybe soon enough we’ll be seeing Apple iGloves!?
Another solution would be providing an alternative means to perform such common actions as turning the music back on and answering phone calls, like a few big buttons to do just that. Maybe not everything needs to be on the touchscreen and a combination of real buttons with screen buttons may work.
Or maybe the iPhone just doesn’t suit your requirements of being able to handle the phone/MP3 player using gloves out in the cold.
November 19th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Make gloves with slightly capacitive finger tips. A capacitive fiber weave?
Use of capacitance is a better method than piezoelectricity, IMHO.
I just stick to my BlackBerry as I prefer full tactile/mechanical feedback.
November 20th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Gloves definitely came first.
However, that doesn’t mean that they can’t change to work alongside newer technology. It’s fairly reasonable to assume that the same touch technology which is used on the new iPods and the iPhone (as well as a bunch of copies) will become pretty pervasive. On that basis, it’s worth looking at modifications to the humble glove which makes it possible to use the technology while staying warm.
After all, I have a pair of gloves which are modified for rope work when mountaineering. They have special grippy bits and are flexible enough to let me safely tie ropes in the ice. They also have - yuk - a nose wipe pad on the right thumb. That’s such a simple thing, but a godsend believe me! So design away! Let’s have a change to the gloves because the multi touch technology works pretty well otherwise.
One other thought - does the cold effect the battery life of the player? Usually cold batteries work less well, but I’m assuming that the player is probably in a warm pocket?