VIA Interaction

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Puzzling (out) interaction

Years before I was an interaction designer, the imperative to consider hedonic effects along with plain usability was just a sparkle in my eye.

I purchased my first CD player in 1985, an overpriced Yamaha that not only looked great, it had this great remote control that included a puzzling capability: You could open and close the CD drawer with the touch of a button.

Now I liked the button, but it made no sense. You couldn't do anything useful with it. I mean, once the drawer was open, you had to be within an arm's length to be able to remove the CD and replace it with another (never mind that for some time, I had only one CD). And if you were within an arm's length, there was a much bigger open/close button on the beautiful matte black face of the CD player.

Fast forward twenty-some years and I was reminded of that in a New York Times review of a book documenting the effects of digital music on the music industry:

The labels came around [to CDs] because they could jack up prices. (LPs at the time sold for about $9; most CDs went for almost twice that. ) Labels could also renegotiate contracts with artists and force customers to buy entire new album collections. According to [Author Steve] Knopper, executives also thought it was cool watching “that little drawer open and close” on CD players.

Anyone who has ever played a CD on a boom box with a strictly mechanical disk tray knows the disappointment, the missing little surge of joy that comes when the CD drawer robotically skeezhes open.

Maybe Yamaha knew what it was doing with that useless little remote button.

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/07/2009 07:14:00 AM

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