An object I love is my Bowers & Wilkins PX Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones. This love is due to the pure exhilaration and joy I get from listening to music with these headphones. The sound is incredibly crisp and well rounded, creating an immersive experience similar to a concert venue. My absolute favorite feature of these headphones are the ear pads.
Affordances for these headphones are subtle, to the point where signifiers would be helpful. The ear pads cup my ears perfectly, creating a comfortable gap between my ears and the headphone’s drivers. The drivers are angled so that they create a 3d sound effect within the ear pads. Another benefit from these drivers are that if you put these headphones on the wrong ears, the angled drivers dig into your ears. This physical constraint helps you put the headphones on correctly.
On the right ear pad, the controls are located on the back of the headphones. Volume up, pause, and volume down are grouped together and have unique ridges to differentiate from one another. The physical mapping allows me to control the headphones without having to take them off. The only confusion caused by the physical mapping is that there are hidden controls based on how many times you hit pause consecutively (double click is skip forward and triple click is to go backwards).
An object I hate and loathe is the Spigen® Car Mount Holder. At first, it seemed like an incredibly simple solution to attach my phone to my dashboard. After attaching the enclosed metal plate to my phone, the car mount magnetically attaches to the phone. Based on the way the car mount is designed, the affordance shows that it fits through the grates of your air conditioning vents.
The problem with this car mount holder is that as smart phones have grown larger, the more difficult it is to see where the car mount attaches to the metal plate. The phone becomes a barrier (physical constraint) to actually attach to the car mount holder.
The one thing I hated most about this car mount holder is also the breakdowns to this product. As I said before, smart phones keep getting larger and heavier. The prongs that I believed were a great affordance actually broke down from the weight of the phone. The prongs would no longer grip onto my air conditioning vent and broke shortly after a week of use. It was definitely the biggest waste of money in recent memory.