The Lost Art Of Buttons

As part of the pantomime which is the Emergency Services Network (ESN)– the new system to replace all the police, fire, ambulance and coastguard radios with mobile phones – Samsung has built a new handset.

Unlike mainstream mobile phones it has hard buttons for the core  Android features. This comes as feedback from the police forces who will be the customers. Building a special handset for the ESN negates much of the cost-saving rationale for switching the ESN, but the process which allows the customer to specify physical buttons is interesting.

One of the phones I use day to day is a Doro 8040, designed for older people and to be easy to use, again this has proper buttons for the core Android functions. Yet the most advanced phones such as the iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9 have gone buttonless. This is a mistake. The key to usability is The Right Number Of Buttons.

The bible on mobile phone usability is Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone  written by Christian Lindholm, Turkka Keinonen and others at Nokia over a decade ago. Christian is the guru’s guru on interface design and has since gone on to grow the consultancy Fjord from 28 people in two offices to 200 in eight offices.

The book talks about the “Usability Knee”, how making a device simple means having a few buttons, this is mainly aimed at phones with ten number keys a star, a hash and send and end keys. Two soft keys opens up the control for phone books, messaging and the like. It’s the model for Nokia’s Series 30 which is the benchmark for both ease of use and flexibility.

Having more and more functions on a single button adds complexity until there is a level which makes the device too hard to use, the solution to this is more buttons, perhaps an up and down button or a four way control. With each step of adding buttons you make the initial what-to-press  more complex but using the more involved features easier. The extra cognitive effort to work out what the button is going to do is known as button loading. Getting it right between overloaded and choc-a-bloc buttons is the key to usability.

The move to remove all buttons means the controls are taken to the same level as the icons, and we went past the level of cognitive overload on icons a long time ago.

At the launch of the Galaxy S9, Samsung made a big play of phones not being for phone calls anymore, the phone app has become just another icon. The device formerly known as the cellphone is no longer a phone. Taking something which is a core part of a device and reducing it’s user interface presence to the same level as the app you once used for splitting a restaurant bill or to get a free offer fails the consumer.

The design decision to remove all buttons from the front of the phone can be explained. It’s all about The Look. A long time ago phones became fashion items where what you were seen with mattered more than what it does or how you used it. Having a clean, button-free front appeals to the design departments. But now that all phones look pretty much the same there is little merit in that.

At 54 I’m only just at the bottom age bracket for a Doro phone and I’m not a police officer but having a phone with buttons makes the device so much more usable. In particular when I’m running Strava as I cycle, and particularly when I’m wearing gloves.

It will be a brave handset manufacturer which kicks back against the trend of button removal, but it’s often said that fortune favours the brave.