The Good:
Sony PlayStation Gold Wireless Headset

While visually stunning, the Sony PlayStation Gold Wireless Headset is a treasure trove of design on all counts. As soon as it is put on, one can see, hear, and feel the incredible amount of thought put into every aspect of the headset’s design. Similar to the magical regalia a player might don their character with, this headset provides a considerable boost to enjoyment and engagement when worn – you can definitely consider this loot to be god-tier.

 For starters, the visibility of controls and status is both simple and sleek, and just the right amount. A small light indicates whether you are live, muted, or connecting based on it’s color and whether it is solid or blinking. In terms of controls, they blend seamlessly into the material with just enough protrusion to be both visible and easily found by touch. Interacting with these controls is extremely easy, thanks to the system’s feedback mechanism and physical mapping. A press of the volume up or down button, for instance, not only follows our mental association of increase being up, and decrease being down, but you are given both haptic and on-screen indicators of what action has been taken. Similarly, pressing the mute button stops an ever-so-slight feedback of your own voice following a high-pitched beep, clearly indicating that something (in this case, your voice) is on hold. The last key feature of these headphones is their ability to weed-out unwanted background noise and mumbling. In this way, the habituation of a normal conversation is not put at odds with using this device, and we can converse with others as if we were there in person – no need to worry about possible distractions around you!

The Bad & Ugly:
Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar

Ok, so maybe it’s not ugly…until you open up anything on your desktop. While this technology could still prove to be fairly useful, the first few iterations of it have been absolutely terrible. And not just subjectively – the inherent concept behind it is flawed. By trying to eliminate the physical constraints of a keyboard, Apple created a customizable space in which users could fine-tune macros and functions and essentially create their own, personal keyboard. If only that’s what they ended up with! This space is supposed to be dynamic as well as reactive, reading not only the behavior of the user, but the context in which they are present. For instance, switching into a photo app will place the thumbnails of every photo in your library into this tiny space, so you may, allegedly, quickly sort through them. But what if I wanted to use that space for editing tools? I have to now double down on my own work just to have a functional space, in which function once existed (the F-keys).

Beyond this dissonance between app context and user context, this touch bar makes an already poorly physically-mapped keyboard even smaller, thus causing innumerable typing and input errors. And now that it’s missing F-keys, the burden is placed on the user to re-configure something that existed for years before, or find those functions within the menus of every application. Semantic mapping also gets thrown out the window now, as common labels and functions are simplified to an extreme purely for the sake of this flashy tool. Apple has forced us into iconography that is repetitive, confusing, and innumerable at best, rather than allowing its users to rely on their experience with similar tools. Our habituation of not only a keyboard, but the advanced functions held within, is completely disregarded by this ‘purposeful’ design choice.