The hidden labyrinth of the iPod clickwheel
A picture's worth a thousand words. Reading through the rather rote arguments that form Mark Wilson's latest rant about how Apple needs to kill off the iPod clickwheel, I stifled a belch of bored ambivalence: he's probably right, but well... meh.
Then this diagram of the iPod Classic's labyrinthian clickwheel menu hit me square in the face. Holy cow. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure novel written by a slavering graphomaniac!
Okay, Mark. I concede. You have made me an enemy of the clickwheel.
the latest
latest episodes
To me, it seems to make navigating through really a complex set of options seem simple. Just because there's a lot of menu options doesn't mean that a given input device is worthless. Why would it?
I would think that the fact that you didn't realize the number of options available to you on an iPod classic points out that the click wheel is doing its job, and doing it well. It takes a set of menu options and reduces it to a series of sweeping finger movements. What input device would you replace it with? With buttons you would be tap tap tapping like mad to navigate up and down the menu. A touch screen is good, but the iPhone and iPod touch are in a different product category than the Classic and Nano.
Agree with the first two posts. It is evidence of effective design that such a complex set of options seems so simple to operate/navigate. Complexity is no problem when it is accompanied by logic. I have no issues with the click-wheel.
It's a labyrinthine image but that doesn't say anything about the iPod's menus. No-one who was trying to illustrate the iPod's menu hierarchy clearly would draw a diagram that badly.
Yeah, it's hard to see what this guy is on about.
In my experience the hierarchy strategy makes it pretty easy to get to what you want.
(worse than the menus, at least for n00bs, was the convention for going "back" and powering off, but I think people have gotten use to that)
The iPhone physical "home" button was an inspired bit of simplicity, showing the folly of Palm's "4 application buttons and a silkscreened "home")
And while we're randomly praising/grousing, it seems to odd to me that my clickwheel nano has a text search feature for music titles that my iPhone doesn't
You guys are all making excellent points. I might have just been wooed by the sultriness of the diagram. I will say, though, that the argument that a touchscreen would be simpler and more elegant still is undeniable... but there's no huge rush to get there.
fact is, most of those menu items are for settings, usually a one time operation. otherwise it's a click & rotate or two to get the tunes to play. the click wheel seems a reasonable solution; still now.
The diagram was pretty sweet.
This guy's complaint is a mix up up physical interface, software UI (come to think about it, I could navigate at least the main menus of the iPhone w/ a clickwheel) and device capabilities.
Is it a handwave not to limit the iPhone-side argument to the "iPod" app?
If he reframed the argument as "hey, the touch screen enables an iPod touch to do many things that would be impractical to do on a clickwheel-centric device" he might be right (though as a music and video player it seems pretty grand) but then he wouldn't have had an excuse to post such a sweet diagram.
I remember all the "what will the iPhone look like"? sketches that assumed the wheel was central to the "iPodness" of it all, but that turned out to be no more true than assuming it wouldn't be an iPod without a hard drive...
How DARE they add video and photos!