Shaun R. Haber

While on the iPod theme, I figured I’d share this fun video which shows how Microsoft could theoretically ‘enhance’ the iPod packaging box. (Thanks to Ethan for finding it.)

On a side note, the music for this is freakin’ great… and rightly so because it’s Danny Elfman (from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure). Man I’d really love to meet him.

Anyway, this video is a great example of ‘less is more’. It may exaggerate how Microsoft packages its products, but it also shows something I really like about Apple. They keep it simple. The iPod box contains plenty of empty space, giving the product breathing room to speak for itself.

It is understood that a difference between a mediocre musician and an advanced musician is that the mediocre musician has a tendency to overplay. That is, during a guitar solo for example, the mediocre guitarist will play too many notes and basically try to do too much to impress the audience. Frank Zappa had a way of describing these types: they like to masturbate on their guitar (it’s somewhere in his book ‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’).

A matured musician is comfortable with playing only the right notes, and does not overburden the listener by overplaying.

Our eyes need the same blessed treatment. Good design is not about cramming as many features, text, etc. as possible into a spatial region. Good design is marked by natural intuitiveness and usability.

It is ironic that I linked to my myspace profile above. I really hate myspace.
It grew way too large and fast for its own good. Its interface is horrible and unintuitive. Worst yet, it encourages users to modify their profiles (despite lacking valid xhtml/css markup), which yields in god-awful themes that resemble the web in 1996: tiled background images, badly colored text, animated images, etc. It seems the only difference now is that we can download these crappy pages quicker.

Facebook is the other big social site, and I wish it could be bigger (its only for students). Its interface is much more intuitive than myspace, and it’s not afraid of white space. The profile pages maintain a consistent feel, and they are easy and fun to read.

Now back to the iPod box. I think the video was made by a Microsoft employee? I’m not sure about that, but if so, I would assume it was done as a tongue-in-cheek joke. I honestly don’t think Microsoft could butcher the packaging that badly (but who knows?). Regardless, the difference between the two companies remains pretty distinctive.

Other examples of Apple’s ’simplicity’:

One-button mouse - I remember reading that the main reason for this was to encourage developers not to cram too much functionality into a right-click context window. Apple forced its developers to ‘think differently’ in finding other ways to add functionality to an application by integrating it with the user interface. (Of course, macs have supported the right-click since at least OS9 anyway…)

6-button remote control - Steve Jobs made a point of this during the keynote last year. He compared the new Apple remote with one from Sony (or another big brand?). A typical remote control may have 30-40 buttons (for a tv,dvd,etc.), but Apple kept it simple and went with only 6. I’m not sure how well this works since I have yet to try it out in person (with Front Row).