uxmelina

The 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!