Thoughts on Interaction Design

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…)