Cisco IP Phone UI

Matt — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:48:08 +0000

This is the Cisco IP Phone I have in my office. Would you know what button to push to be able to access missed calls? I only figured it out the other day… it’s inexplicably the “directories” button?!

Perhaps the designer didn’t want to add any more buttons to the bottom right panel (and rightly so). However, there are so many other options that would have made more sense. They could have placed the missed calls under one of the two available buttons on the screen. Or they could have paired it with the messages button and written “missed calls / messages” for the label. You’d think a commonly used function would have had a little more thought put into it.

Navbar in Zite’s iPhone app

Matt — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:20:39 +0000

Zite, my favorite app on the iPad, has recently released on the iPhone, following in Flipboard’s footsteps. One thing I believed the designers overlooked was the navigation bar (as shown below on left) for the following reasons:

crams account/sections settings along with the section list, which someone may not discover if they don’t swipe left
can only view a handful of sections at once
swiping to a section more than a couple sections away requires the user to stop at an intermediate step before reaching their desired choice

One way to fix these issues would be to implement a menu design that has been popping up in other iOS apps such as Facebook (below) and Path. This would allow Zite to list more categories at once in a vertical fashion, and separate the news categories from the account settings by placing them in their own subsections.

One downside is that it would require two taps (or a swipe left and tap) to switch a category, as opposed to possibly only one swipe in the current UI. However on average, I believe you would reach your desired category faster with a vertical layout, tucked away off the screen and having the UI focused on the article list contents itself.

Tech/Design Musings

Cisco IP Phone UI

Navbar in Zite’s iPhone app