Objects, Part 1: Kathy Emsoff

An Object I Love: My Apple Airpods

They are so convenient to use and are completely wireless. I use them multiple times a day for business and personal tasks. The have a case for storing them that keeps them from getting lost, but also charges them. The visibility, feedback, and affordances all make this product truly functional and the physical design makes it delightful.

Visibility is a basic principle of interaction design and indicates a system’s status, actions that can be performed and the potential results of those actions.¹ Visibility is a fundamental feature for this product because people need to know how much battery life is left for their headphones. The AirPods provide multiple ways to have visibility to the battery life. If the case is opened near the phone, a window pops up that shows status, it’s available on the widget screen and the case itself has an led than can indicate the battery of the case or the headphones. The feedback works well too. When I put the AirPods in my ears and they connect to one of my devices, they play a sound that confirms they are connected. The case has a horizontal depression to indicate where to open it. When I pick up the case, I can just feel it with my thumb to know where to push to open it and I don’t recall ever really paying attention to this feature before, it seems like I just instinctively knew because the depression affords pushing.

The visibility, feedback, and affordances all work together to make this product very functional, but it goes beyond that because I really enjoy just interacting with this product. Norman² holds that technology should bring more to our lives than just performance and the AirPods do this successfully. The anthropomorphic shape of the AirPods is smooth and feels well thought out. The shape of the case is just the right size and the rounded corners make it comfortable in my pocket. The lid of the case closes with a magnet, so there is no latch or button to mess with. The magnet causes the lid to close with a snap that’s not too hard, but hard enough to where you feel satisfied that it’s closed and your AirPods are safe and secure inside and getting charged. The pop up window that show the battery life shows an image of the AirPods and the case and they have a nice animation where they both rotate in a circle. This animation doesn’t add anything to the functionality of the product, but it’s nice to watch and add to the overall richness and enjoyment.

Objects I Hate: The Light Switches in My House

I hate the light switches in my kitchen, well my whole house really, but I’m going to focus mostly on the kitchen for this post. There are three sets of switches total that control two sets of overhead lights and various other things. Two of the sets include a control for the pendant lights above the island and a single switch controls the recessed lights in the ceiling. Unlike Melissa and Tara, I’m fine with overhead lighting, but I am constantly going to the wrong switch to turn a light on or off because the mapping doesn’t make any sense.

Mapping is the relationship between the controls and the outcomes they cause and should reduce the user’s need to think about what a control effects or what the outcome will be.² The mapping of the switches in my kitchen are unnatural because the spatial relationship doesn’t indicate what switches control what lights. All of the lights are in the ceiling in basically the center of the room, but three different switches that control these central lights are spread out from each other. After I thought about why these switches are the way they are, I realized that the recessed lighting was added later and that’s why the switch is all by itself. There wasn’t enough room near then main set of switches to add another one. At least that’s my theory. So, sometimes when I’m in the kitchen and I want to turn on a certain set of lights, I fall back to this conceptual model that I’ve constructed and it works. The negative is that there’s a cognitive load associated with recalling that information since it’s in my head and not readily discoverable by looking around. The other annoying thing is that there are two controls on opposite sides of the room that control the pendant lights above the island. This means if someone goes to the far end of the kitchen and uses that switch to turn on the lights, then the switch at the more-trafficked end of the kitchen will be in the down position even when the light is on. If I want to turn on the recessed lights and I see this switch in the down position, I’ll walk over and switch it without even thinking about and then both sets of lights are off in the kitchen when I wanted them both on!

As if the functionality of these switches isn’t bad enough they are ugly and don’t match. Yes, I know this would something easy to fix, but we haven’t bothered to do it. The set by the back door is black and looks really old. The far right switch on that set turns off the outside light and we like to keep it on, so we’ve added a piece of scotch tape over it because it was inadvertently getting switched off, making it look even worse.

Around the house, some switches that are near doors have molding from the door around them, but some do not. Why? It’s inconsistent and weird. And, don’t even get me started on the bathroom light switches. There are two sets and we’ve had to add semantic mapping to even know what they control.