Last week I declared the Kindle, Amazon's pricey ebook reader, a complete failure. I have never handled one, and the limited information I did have included a not-too-negative Salon review and a few small images. How did I think I knew?
First, I looked at the picture and came to an immediate conclusion:
iBookReader this is not. I'm not an Apple fanboy and I don't necessarily think that Apple has a stranglehold on quality interface design, but take a (virtual) page out of their success book, why don't you? It seems fairly clear to me that in this day and age of excessive technology, people want slick, simple, easy, and quick. People don't want a bunch of small buttons and scroll tabs that get in the way. Come on, this isn't rocket science. Secondly, did anyone use this thing before its release?? At a minimum, two words:
user studies! Would that be so hard? There is talk that the device smells of a rushed release but I'm not sure why, other than perhaps the upcoming holiday season. Oh well, Bezos, this one is a bust - even if it has already sold out.
Now, after having read a few books on the thing, famous technorati
Robert Scoble has generally bad things to say about the Kindle as well. A couple of big points:
- Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
- UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
the guys: philogynist jaime tony - the gals:raymi raspil
