MP3 Player Controls: When small and clever become too small and too clever

I was out enjoying the nice weather with my flash-based iRiver MP3 player and came across an interesting discovery - the controls suck if you’re running.

Here’s what they look like:

Note the 5-way joystick which toggles left, right, up and down for volume and track changes (it also pushes in for selecting things in the menu system). Very neat and very minimalist, but there are two huge problems with this design.

1. When in use, the control orientation is wrong.
   
   In the picture I’ve shown the MP3 player sitting on its side, and the controls (up/down for volume and left/right for track selection) map well to the orientation.
   
   But the clip on the back runs the length of the player. Clipped onto a waistband, the controls actually turn sideways forcing you to push up for the previous track, down for the next track, forward for volume up, and back for volume down.
   
   
2. It’s hard to make precise motions while you’re running.
   
   The tiny joystick requires pinpoint precision to move, and it’s ridiculously easy to accidentally push down when you mean to push forward, or back when you mean up.
   

It would’ve taken about 10 minutes in testing with an actual runner to discover this, so it’s clear that iRiver didn’t consider (or chose to ignore) the likely scenarios where customers would use the product.

Never the devil’s advocate, I have a simple fix. Here’s the revised design:

So far it looks very similar to the original layout, so let’s discuss differences.

First, there are dedicated buttons for each action - volume up, volume down, next track, and previous track all have dedicated buttons to reduce likelihood of a selection error.

To further reduce errors and increase blind use, the volume buttons have ridges running along the width of the buttons, and the track buttons have ridges along the length. This allows an intermediate user (who has gotten used to the ridges) to differentiate between buttons by touch alone.

The final difference is in the ability to adapt to different orientations. In my design, the button control wheel can be rotated to accommodate the position of the MP3 player in relation to the body so that no matter where the player is worn, the control wheel can be rotated to map correctly (i.e. volume up will always be the “up” button).

I did some investigating into other flash-based, activity-oriented MP3 players to see if anyone had done a better job. Although some companies sell designs that avoid the clumsy joystick, almost none seem to have considered the intuitive mapping of controls to player orientation to the user.

jf