http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/gadgets/?p=100

and re the iPhone…interesting how quickly the iTouch followed the iPhone. among my first feelings upon cradling the iPhone in my hand was ‘damn, this is cool.’ followed by ‘the last thing i think of doing with this thing is talking into it.’

I will say that the idea of a back button is both good (it conforms with the “undo” principle of computer UI), and bad (it probably means the UI was designed with multiple modal / hierarchical layers, i.e. you can’t jump from any menu to any menu).

Modal user interfaces frustrate the user. The idea that you can ‘cancel out’ of an action, or put that action on hold while you do something else, is key to desktop computer UIs today, but phones and other devices are still stuck in a ‘you can’t get there from here’ paradigm. The iPhone goes some way to mitigating this (allowing for smart transitions from music to phone calls when you receive one, etc.), but ultimately it too is a ‘menu tree structure’ modal interface.

The interesting thing is, with its unique touch UI, the iPhone may make users _feel_ they’re more in control of the experience. User studies show that even if a task takes longer to do, if the user felt they were in control of the experience throughout, it “feels” faster.

To truly be ‘master’ of the technology, then this printer would either have a big, full-screen interface (too expensive), or it would purposely leave off such a cryptic multifunction interface in favour of well-labelled dedicated buttons, such as CHANGE CARTRIDGE, PRINT TEST PAGE and CLEAN INKJETS.

Or better still, have no interface at all, and be remotely managed with a proper full-screen interface on your PC (or via a Web browser). The makers of wireless Internet routers have been embedding web pages in their products for years; it’s the cheapest way to give a small box a rich user experience.

Stephen Clark, prof of philosophy at University of Liverpool (UK), has argued that we have just left a unique period in human history. This period, which lasted about 100 years from the 1880s to the 1980s, was one in which most people (in the West) had a good idea about how most technical things worked. Before mass education in the late 19th century, most people did not know much about science and technology. And now, although we have mass education, our world uses too many technologies, which are too complex and too interconnected, for most of us to know, even vaguely, how they work.

There may be deep marketing, sociological and even political ramifications of this new period of mass-techno-ignorance that we are now entering. We will have to take lots of things on trust, since much we are told is not verifiable, not even in principle, by us ordinary people (eg, the effects of climate change; the safety of GM foods; the dependencies in the world financial system; etc).