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FiiO Gets User Interfaces Both Right and Wrong
Their Discman throwback misses the UI mark
Portable music product company FiiO makes this CP13, a throwback to the Walkman:
The device has been a hit on the market, prompting the company to design a Discman-inspired counterpart, their DM13:
Look at the buttons on the DM13, versus the buttons on the CP13:
I don't get it. Why would you give equal weight to all of the buttons on the DM13, with the barest of visual indications of function? It also seems bizarre to me that the "+", volume-up button is to the left of the "-", volume-down button. They got the UI right on the CP13, which is admittedly hard to screw up; but the DM13 reveals no consistency of design philosophy with its stablemate.
Sony's Discman, over the course of its life, made some effort to differentiate the buttons:
1984 Sony D-50. Image: Binarysequence, CC BY-SA 4.0
1995 Sony D-145. Image: MiNe, CC BY 2.0
2002 D-E330. Image: Lcarsdata, CC BY-SA 3.0
FiiO says they're rolling the $179 DM13 out in September. With any luck they'll get some user feedback and change the design before then.
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Comments
It looks like the "+" & "-" button issue was only in the rendering, in the photo they are in he correct position.
I bought the D-50 in Hong Kong in 1984 and modified it to work on US voltage. I should have kept it, as it is now probably a museum piece. I'm hanging onto my old H-P calculators, so as to not make the same mistake. My brother has his original H-P 35 and it still works. Once you got used to RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), it was obvious why it was better. Too bad it came out a little after my undergraduate year when I had to use a slide rule for all the damned error analysis in physics lab.
Back in the day, I had a department store player that was very much like the 1995 Discman.
I liked it a lot except for the fact that the buttons were on the top face, like the FiiO, had little travel (like the FiiO) and had nothing to stop them being pressed when the player was in my bag (let me see...).
A number of times I got to my destination to find the AA batteries were flat. In the end, I made a ledge around the play button to give it a recess and the problem was solved.
Haha, I like the inclusion of an ESP (electronic shock protection) switch... the player could easily contain gigabytes of solid state memory and simply rip the CD to a lossless format within 5 minutes of it being inserted.
Interesting, - on the left and + on the right makes perfect sense to me; I intuitively feel that volume goes from quiet to louder left to right, as with the L-R direction we read. Maybe I'm the one out of step here! The volume buttons on my tablet are laid out as you suggest, and they confuse me every time.
A cursory search for 'volume level icon' seems to favour quiet-loud L-R over R-L...
You're not out of step here Jim, almost all volume buttons are arranged so that leftwards is quieter and rightwards is louder... and this is indeed the direction your first finger would move in if you use your thumb and second finger to rotate a volume knob - clockwise is louder. As Aiden above has noted, one of the product renders had its volume buttons mislabelled, and Rain made a thing of it in the article.