A Bad Design

Monday, January 21, 2008 13:45

This is a Sony Ericsson W710i. It is a rather rare clamshell, flip-top phone that I find appeals to me a lot more than the everyday “open-top” mobile phones. It is advertised as the phone for the actively mobile, complete with music, communications, imaging and all the essential active accessories.

With all the friends I know that own a mobile phone (that is basically everyone), I have yet to find one that has the exact same model as me. In fact, I know only one other friend who owns the close relative of the W710i, that is the SE Z610i. All my other friends use the more traditional “open-top” mobile phones, or the Nokia “push-up” type of phones like the 5300. It intrigues me as to why the clamshell design has never been exactly very popular, partly suggested by the fact that there are not many clamshell designs in the market in the first place.

And so I went to gather some thoughts and reactions about my clamshell phone.

1. “Why is it purple?”
To which I answered, “Because they ran out of orange.” Which is true, as the phone is only offered in two colors – purple and orange. Orange was my first choice.

2. “It looks cute and compact!”
Yes it does.

3. “It’s quite troublesome to have to flip open the top everytime to use the phone.”
Which is entirely untrue. On a practical step-by-step level, it takes the same number of steps to answer a call or respond to an SMS as it would take on an “open-top” phone. That number of steps is actually only ONE. Instead of having to flip open the phone, one has to unlock the phone before anything else can be done. However, it can be argued that flipping the phone requires more effort than pushing some buttons.

4. “I have to use two hands to flip the top.”
While I can demonstrate that the top is easily flipped with just one hand, this friend did have a point.

5. “I’m just afraid someday the hinge might get loose after opening and closing too many times.”
A valid fear. It does make me wonder if opening and closing the phone until the hinge loosens is part of the phone’s QA test.

It was hard for me to get a more functional kind of criticism since nobody has used my phone model before. It seemed to me that as far as phone criticism goes, most of my friends go only for the looks and durability, but not the functions.

For me, I think the design of the phone is perfectly fine, despite some of my friends’ comments, until somebody actually called me while the phone was still closed. It started ringing and vibrating when I was in the middle of a meeting and to my horror, there was no way to immediately reject the call while in “clam” mode. All 7 buttons on the shell, and none of them rejected the call. It just kept ringing and vibrating until the caller decided to hang up.

It then happened again, when I took it out running and listening to music (this being a sports and music phone), when the phone started ringing and vibrating again as I was running along the Kallang River. Again, there was no way to stop the call other than to answer it or just wait for the caller’s patience to run out.

After yet even more incidences of this occurring, I believe this to be quite a severe oversight of the designers, that while it is advertised to be a phone for the active and mobile, it has apparently missed out on one of the very basic functions of rejecting a phone call. All the elements of accessing my music files are on the shell, yet not one of them lets me reject a call without having to flip open my phone.

I cite this as a bad design even when it may not be obviously so, as simple comments from my friends show. One might not realize something is a bad design until using something for a period of time.  I feel that nowadays, designs get to be so simple and shallow that some may just entirely miss its basic function. While design does seem to be swinging now from the “technical-orientation” to “user-orientation”, I believe there needs to be more of a balance instead of just simply making things simple and stylistic. Of course, if designs could be simple, stylish and yet function as they are supposed to, then that would be an absolute winner.

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