Thoughts on Interaction Design

I finally got myself an iPhone, …. and it is reeeaaally nice! Perhaps not the best phone on the market but using it is a real joy. One of the great things about it is that the interaction feels so smooth and sweet. It made me wonder what makes it so nice. One of the things I want to show you in this article is how this actually works in practice and what makes it such a good user experience. Have a look at this small video that shows what happens when you delete an email:

It is just a simple function that any email application has, but what is so special about the way it has been implemented on the iPhone? You have to look at the details of the interaction to understand it.

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Recently a colleague of mine who owns an iPhone showed me how you set an alarm on the iPhone. He was really liking it and so did I at first sight. I pulled out my own Nokia phone and compared it with the iPhone. My feeling was that the iPhone solution ‘felt’ better but that the Nokia solution may actually be better in terms of usability and effectiveness. Nonetheless, the iPhone seems to be a nice compromise between usability and fun that makes the end-result still interesting or even better than the Nokia solution. So is it a good thing to sacrifice usability over fun? Is that what ‘User Experience’ is all about?

Here are the two interfaces:

Let’s examine this case a bit further… (more…)