On the button

It’s little surprise that so much of the talk about the iPhone’s interface discusses the multi-touch screen. After all it’s innovative and it’s flashy, and those are two things we love. We’ve had hardware buttons for ages after all: there’s nothing new there.

But it’s worth taking a look at the physical buttons that Apple did put on the phone, if only because of the attention to design and detail that they paid to those elements.

At this point, some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking: “Seriously, you’re going to talk about buttons?” That’s right. I’m going to talk about buttons.

For those who came to the iPhone from a conventional cellphone, you'll notice something missing on the iPhone: the so-called "soft" buttons. These were usually a couple of buttons near the top of your keypad which had features that could be designated by the user, and which changed functions depending on what application you were in.

And here's the crux of Apple's button design on the iPhone: every button has just one function.

In that sense, the iPhone is very much the product of something Apple started with the iPod: features that are tied to the form of the product. Yes, the iPod's next track button doubles as a "fast forward" button if you hold it down, but a) pushing and holding are distinct enough actions that they don't run into mental interference (unlike say, pushing once and pushing twice) and b) they're analogous. There was never a behavior in which pushing the "forward" button would make you go, say, backwards, or raise the volume.

With the iPhone, that design principle has been taken to the extreme. The Home button, for example, always takes you home. That's all it does. If you hold it down, it force quits the app you're in, but the effect is the same—you end up back at the home screen. But it never does anything else—it never launches an application, or reloads a web page, or dials a phone number. It just takes you home.

The volume buttons on the side raise and lower the volume. Period. No matter if you're listening to music in the iPod or talking on a phone call. They never scroll through lists or adjust ringer functions. Volume. That's it.

The ringer/silent button toggles between those two modes. You can specify what those modes entail in the Settings, but it doesn't change what that button does: ring or silent.

Aside from the home button, the sleep/wake button is the only other multi-purpose button on the phone: and again, like the iPod's "next" button, all of its functions are analogous: they all are operations that involve turning the iPhone on and off in some capacity. Push once and the phone sleeps or wakes. Hold, and the phone turns off or on. And, in the only multi-button function on the iPhone, if you hold it down along with the Home button, it forces a reboot.

The sleep/wake button does have oneexception, and that's in the condition of a call: you can press the button once to silence the ringer, or twice to send the call to voicemail. You can also, of course, decline a call by pressing a button on the screen, but this lets you do it if the phone is in your pocket and it means you don't have to dig around to find where on the screen you need to press.

Early on, people marveled at the idea of a "one button phone," and of course the iPhone isn't a one button phone: it's at least a four button phone. But the reason nobody focuses on that is because the rest of the buttons are so self-explanatory: you can work the phone perfectly fine with only a cursory glance at the manual.

Category: Hardware, Musings

Posted by Dan Moren on Jul 12 2007, 3:20 PM ET

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