tim walter

during the last weeks i have been working as an interface designer for the designgruppe flath & frank and thereby dealt with the prospects of user interfaces.

with the iphone and the ipod touch, or in general with touchscreens, new graphical elements were established that could actually be touched and therefore directly manipulated with the finger. theses elements use most of the time the metaphor of existing analog control elements with real physical mechanisms and their natural feedback, which is besides much more important than the actual photorealistic picture of the switch or the button.

due to this usage of intelligent bouncing, falling, bending, shaking, swinging, accelerating or decelerating objects, less graphical feedback is needed, and therefore more important informations and a more efficient information design remains on the user interface.

for this reason the most important archievement of iphone or the ipod touch are the graphical elements that behave like analog sliders, switches or reels. these give you an intuitive feeling of adjusting values like for example the timer in the clock settings or the general on/off buttons on the iphone.

in my opinion this is not just a nice and good looking feature but in fact an basic necessity for a quick and successful dialog between the device and the user.

as a matter of fact apple used this kind of feedback earlier by using a pulsating light to indicate the sleeping state of the computer.