Posts Tagged ‘ipod touch’
iPhone Icon Confusion
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
This is actually a copy of a post from my personal blog http://simongriffiths.name. To be honest I think it is probably more relevant here.
I have recently updated my iPod touch with iPhone software 3.0, but to be honest I think that this is an issue that pre-dates the new software.
I have noticed that when I am going to play audio contents, which with me tends to be audiobooks or podcasts, my finger is never too sure what to do. It knows the icon is at the bottom of the screen but floats around not being sure what to hit.
Having thought about this for a while I think that it is a usability problem that relates to the icon definitions iTunes and Music.
When I go to play music or any audio content on my mac I always use iTunes. So the natural place for my finger to go is the iTunes logo. However I have found that if I am looking to play music I notice that there is a logo called music and that’s where I go. When you are looking for an audio book though you would not characterised this as falling under the music button and are more happy with it falling under the traditional iTunes description. This leads to the uncertainty and finger wavering that I often find myself doing.
In practical terms this is a simple mislabelling of icons. It would be relatively easy to have an icon that represented iTunes but label the button store (as it would be in the pc version).
The ‘music’ button is a bit more problematic. You could rename it ‘audio’ but would the average user know what that was? Instead of that, ‘listen’ might be a more appropriate label as this would be the action the user is trying to perform, and would cover everything from music and audio books through to podcasts.
It would be interesting to see if this relabelling did happen, would there would be an end to my finger wavering forever!
Tags: icons, iphone, ipod touch, usability
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