By Design

I've been using iPads quite a bit lately at work and though I've never really been much of an "Apple guy" I find that the hardware is quite nice and overall I like the touch interface.  Some of the times products have tiny features that you don't really notice until they're missing, or working incorrectly.  One nice little touch I like on the iPad has to do with the volume button.  Now remember I'm not an Apple guy so this may have been around for a while and other products probably have done it first.

The tiny thing I noticed is that when I'm pressing and holding the up button on the volume it will go up one notch at a time.  However when I'm holding down it will go down a couple notches and then automatically go to zero, muting it.  Tiny, tiny feature, but I really appreciated the thought that went into it.  If someone is holding down the volume button for over a second they probably do want to mute the iPad and this gives them a nice shortcut.  However sometimes a feature is actually pretty great, but unfortunately is most noticeable when it doesn't work.

On my new Android phone I attempt to type too fast.  Most of the time the autocorrection feature fixes my fat fingering mistakes and automatically gives me the word I want, but when it fails I notice it right away and it annoys me.  I've thought about it and I'm quite sure it's a net gain, but the human brain seems to remember the few bad times and forget about the 90% of the time that it does work.  Unfortunately for me this means I need to double check my messages and if I don't I can say some silly things.  For example goos corrects to goosebumps and not good??  Fortunately there's a way to add your own custom corrections!

One final design feature that I have a love hate relationship with is when holding the backspace button on my phone to delete something it will start deleting words very quickly after about a second.  Similar to the iPad's volume button but it's annoying when I delete more than I want to and feel like I have to be careful or I'll delete all of the text!

Semi-coherent rant aside, it's interesting to think about all of the micro-design decisions that are made in software and hardware.  Presumably it all goes through some sort of usability testing before being released to the general public (thought it doesn't always seem that way).  Making the right decisions is important no matter how small, and when added together can make a product feel polished or clumsy.