Before you make ‘Clean’ and ‘Minimal’ design for future products.
Recently, Xiaomi released a prototype of a smartphone namely Mi Mix Alpha which is very ‘futuristic’ and has ‘clean’ and ‘minimal’ design. It has 180% screen with 20% for its cameras or you can say it’s an only display smartphone. Pretty cool right? but wait read this and maybe your point of view might change.
This is not a smartphone review article so I am not gonna cover every feature or specification. Let’s talk about design. Basically, this smartphone has display in front, both sides and even at the back! There are no bezels, no selfie camera and not even a notification bar at the top. So you get an only display right in front of you. Pretty ‘clean’ and ‘minimal’, right? Let’s dive more deeply into this ‘futuristic’ smartphone.
As I said earlier there is the only screen in front and the notifications displayed at the side of the smartphone and the other side has status bar displaying battery percentage, network strength, etc with 3 virtual buttons. These are 2 volume buttons and a power button. These are NOT PHYSICAL buttons. You also get a physical power button at the top which is hard to reach in normal usage. You might ask what does screen at back do? So, it’s for clicking selfies and to access some quick widgets. There no microphone for your calls. Don’t panic, the cutting edge technology got you covered. The screen of the smartphone vibrates to produce the sound.
At this point, you might say, what’s the problem? Let’s talk about them then. The main area of focus of this smartphone is the display, right? This where the whole problem starts. If we break down the display in smaller chunks, there are 4 displays. One in front two at sides and one at back. But the problem is we are humans and we can see one display at a time! Suppose you are reading this article on your smartphone and to check the battery percentage you have to turn your phone to the sideways and to check the notification you have to turn to the other side. The struggle would be real, trust me and I would prefer to press the home button for widgets rather than turn my phone completely around. Few people who have used it, basically the tech reviewers have found the calls are not clear and even the virtual buttons are not accurate. Cheery to the cake, it’s even heavier than a normal smartphone.
We as designers must ask ourselves, are we inclining so much towards the ‘modern’, ‘minimal’, ‘clean’ designs that we are ready to trade off the basic design principles? The physical buttons replaced by virtual buttons would mess up if you tapped or pressed at the wrong place. There is not even a comparison between the affordances of these two. That is one of the basic principles of good design. In this case we are challenging the user’s mental model. And if the user holds it in another way and taps at the wrong place and volume doesn’t go up or down. Does this mean it is a mistake of the user? No, because the user is never wrong! The 4 screens, the weight, and the virtual buttons. Do these features make it usable? The usability is also a basic principle and an important pillar on which design stands. Even the voice is not clear, that defies the whole purpose of a phone as it is phone before a ‘smart’ phone.
So the whole point of this article is that before designing any solution for the future, we must stay close to our deep roots i.e basic design principles. We must have empathy towards our users and make them look smart, not stupid. We must make our designs more usable and account for errors as well. As in this case, If a user drops this phone that has a screen on every side. I’m pretty sure that a heartbeat is gonna skip in spite you assure them that it is protected by gorilla glass.Wait there’s more , Rumors are that it would be over 2000 USD. Would you buy this smartphone for this amount?
Some people may argue that this is a prototype, not a live product. But I just wanna say that this is a prototype for HUMANS and they see future in this , that’s the whole purpose of a prototype. I hope we don’t get too far in technology or idea of clean and modern design that we forget about what the user actually wants because clean and minimal doesn’t mean unusable and non empathetic products.
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