Photo [mikelao26 via Flickr]

Modern interface designers hate you. With few exceptions, the modern gadget is as impossible to navigate as were the seas before the sextant and the marine chronometer. The reason? The internal functions bear no relationship to anything we might encounter in the real world, so arbitrary abstractions are needed to bridge the gap between microchip and brain. Add to this the fact that the UI is often an afterthought in most devices and you end up with something like the RAZR, hated far and wide for its labyrinthine control layout.

It wasn’t always this way. Perhaps if today’s designers payed a little attention to the past they might come up with something a little easier to love, and a little less frustrating to use.

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Manual Cameras

Say what you like about the differences between digital and film (and Lord knows, I have), an old manual camera has a superbly intuitive interface. Sure, they didn’t have to control things like white balance or histogram displays, but the basic functions of exposure and focus were, once learned, almost invisible in use.

Take the Holy Trinity of exposure: Shutter speed, aperture and film speed. To change the size of the hole in the lens, you twist a ring on the lens. Ditto shutter speed – a dial around the shutter release. And while ISO was usually only set once per film, it was, again, a simple dial. Muscle memory meant that these could be grabbed and used with the eye to the viewfinder, and the layout of the controls quashed any ambiguity as to their purpose.

Compare that to the multibutton, menu-driven crap on the modern digicam. Canon at least put a real ISO dial on the G9, but why can’t we have an aperture ring and a shutter speed dial. Pretty please?

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Mouse

The mouse, whether invented by Xerox, Apple, Stanford Research Institute or Walt Disney, changed computing. The mouse, and a menu-driven, window-based desktop metaphor made it easy for anybody to work with a computer. Point, click, drag instead of typing out arcane command lines onto a screen. The mouse successfully bridged the gap between box and brain and also ushered in the since-abused layer of abstraction now found everywhere. It enabled people to use complex functions without knowing how the magic happened: The computer did the translation.

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Record Player

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Simple, and offering exquisite feedback, the record turntable is still an example of almost perfect interface design. As the tone-arm moves across the vinyl, you know exactly where in the record you are, even from across the room (no squinting at an LED readout). The tracks themselves are separated by lighter stripes, and muting is a matter of just lifting the needle.

Ask a DJ what is the appeal of vinyl and he won’t say it’s warm sound or the 12" of hot album art, but the fingertip control. Lining up a track, mixing and scratching all require precision, and that’s a lot easier with a spinning disk than with buttons and switches.

Photo [Gmnonic via Flickr]

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Manual Transmission Car

Perhaps the ultimate muscle-memory interface. Hideously difficult to learn, but once you’ve done so, you can drive a car as if it were an extension of your own body.

Everything makes sense. The wheel controls, well, the wheels; the clutch, which needs less finessing than the other foot pedals, is controlled with the usually less accurate left foot. The other two pedals, the brake and accelerator, are never used at the same time and need a delicate touch. Thus both are assigned to the right foot. If you doubt this, try using your left foot on the brake (a technique used in rally driving but not recommended on the road. If you attempt it, make sure you’re in a safe, private area).

Even the gear lever, although not the most obvious design to decode at first, neatly translates the needs of the gearbox into a human understandable pattern.

And if you thought that cars were always so well designed, take a look at these instructions for operating a Model T Ford (taken from Wikipedia)

The Model T’s transmission was controlled with three foot pedals and a lever that was mounted to the road side of the driver’s seat. The throttle was controlled with a lever on the steering wheel. The left pedal was used to engage the gear.When pressed and held forward the car entered low gear. When held in an intermediate position the car was in neutral, a state that could also be achieved by pulling the floor-mounted lever to an upright position. If the lever was pushed forward and the driver took his foot off the left pedal, the Model T entered high gear. The car could thus cruise without the driver having to press any of the pedals. There was no separate clutch pedal. The middle pedal was used to engage reverse gear, and the right pedal operated the engine brake. The floor lever also controlled the parking brake, which was activated by pulling the lever all the way back. This doubled as an emergency brake.

Photo [Gatekiller via Flickr]

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The Knob

Almost unparalleled in its versatility, the humble knob shows up everywhere. It can be continuous or discrete (a volume knob or a selector switch), analog or digital (volume again, or on/off). It can be finely graded with a scale, used to control water flow through a faucet, shuttle through movie footage, open a door and, if it’s Griffin’s Powermate, it can do just about anything else. Even the iPod’s clickwheel is just an evolution of the knob, one which revolutionized portable music players through simplicity coupled with power.

Its strength is its simplicity. Once you have twisted one knob, you know how every other knob works. If it is marked, its position provides visual feedback. If not, our brains easily associate the amount of twist with the level of the knob’s effect. And best of all, it’s the only controller we know of which can go up to 11.

Photo [Shawnbot via Flickr]

As usual, it's your turn to mock me, point out my mistakes or just tell me I missed something. You can even offer heartfelt praise. The place? The comments.