RantsAndStuff

1Maag
June 15th, 2009 @ 12:43 am

Love this post! Attention to detail in design and the resultant quality are both peeves of mine. I will say, however, wow you really scrutinize the add photos.
I am a big fan of the Zune and most of the stuff Microsoft plagerizes for my use. If the worste thing about this is a backwards 3 for an E I can deal, but if this is indicative of the thought put into the OS/features of the new Zune….well you know.
Good point though….and yeah why aren’t there more windows in the building?

Ed

2Brad
June 15th, 2009 @ 9:24 am

I think it’s worse than a backwords 3 for an E, it’s a cutoff lowercase e. Like I said, it’s nitpicking but Microsoft has to realize that there are a few companies now that can really challenge their dominance, cheif among them is Apple, especially in the media player department. And seriously, this is a software issue, and Microsoft is a software company. I mean come on.

3Paul
August 13th, 2009 @ 3:03 pm

2 other problems
1 Why sacrifice that space at the top of the screen and cut off menu items at the bottom. I’m well in to the creative use of space in design but not when it means an extra gesture or click.
2 WTF is that micro text doing on there below the main headings. It’s not designed to be read with my eyes.
You can see what happened. Microsoft thought ‘ooh the iPod Touch is all roundy and well designed, we’ll do the exact opposite. No-one can accuse us of copying Apple now.’
/rant
 
 

4scottm4321
August 13th, 2009 @ 3:25 pm

M$ is skating to where the puck was, not where it will be.

5Tom Ross
August 13th, 2009 @ 3:40 pm

You don’t seem to realize that this is by design. The Zune UI works a lot with cut, zoomed, tiny and oversized type. The type is the navigation. Just watch the videos on Youtube and you will get a feeling for it (unless you just enjoy poo-pooing on Microsoft). In a way it is more pretentious than iPhone OS (but also less button-y) and will obviously give app developers a hard time trying to follow a common style guide, but I think as is it looks cool and I would like to try it out in a store somewhere, should it ever make its way across the pond.

6Mister Snitch
August 13th, 2009 @ 3:41 pm

It’s not nitpicking. You’re RIGHT, dammit.

7untitled
August 13th, 2009 @ 3:52 pm

Looks like a design choice to me.

8Well...
August 13th, 2009 @ 3:57 pm

“Oh man that e is cut off I can’t use this trash welp back to fellating apple mmmmmmmmmm”

9Will
August 13th, 2009 @ 4:44 pm

From watching the video on engadget, I also think this is a design choice. Lots of the other screens have enlarged, stylized text chopped off the side of the screen.
I actually quite like it.

10Jon
August 13th, 2009 @ 5:33 pm

But how do I make a phone call on it!?!?!?

Look at 1m on that engadget video, that is not by design. Even IF it is, it is a poor design.

11Gilles
August 13th, 2009 @ 7:10 pm

Also, visible screws (on the back panel) look amateur and I bet they’ll gather grime very quickly .

12e
August 13th, 2009 @ 7:36 pm

errrrrr. it’s deliberate – obviously a designer thought it’s edgy to cut off portions of text off screen – the other parts of the GUI display the same characteristic.

13Scott Magoon
August 13th, 2009 @ 8:38 pm

I think it’s intentional. It’s part of the UI design aesthetic which includes horizontally scrolling menus. You can see in videos of the device found elsewhere that there are side-scrolling menus. You drag left or right to scroll, then click a selection. Having a word extend partially off-screen in this fashion it consistent with that UI choice. For example, in the Music player, the “Music” header floats up offscreen so the word if partially showing.

14Jay Levitt
August 13th, 2009 @ 9:30 pm

Yep.. I hate to say it, and I’m covering my iPhone’s ears, but: MS may actually have an innovative design here. That too-small-to-read type tells us “That music section you’re about to click? It has sections of its own”. Not critical to know, but OK, thanks for the heads-up.
Ah, but then when we dive deep into the artists lists, we see part of the subheads visible, in proportionally larger type, till we get back to the main Music heading.
If the type’s too small, no need to read it; it’s just foreshadowing.  If it’s too big for the screen, no worries; it’s just a bread crumb to get you home.
Could catch on.

15Jon
August 13th, 2009 @ 10:30 pm

I never… I mean never, want my UI to cut off any part of the interface. If it IS a design choice, the designer is an idiot.

16Hamranhansenhansen
August 13th, 2009 @ 10:31 pm

> Love this post! Attention to detail in design
> and the resultant quality are both peeves of
> mine. I will say, however, wow you really
> scrutinize the add photos.
> I am a big fan of the Zune and most of the
> stuff Microsoft plagerizes for my use
 
I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you think this cut-off e is nit-picky and you are a big fan of Microsoft products then you do not have an eye for attention to detail in design. A cut-off e like this would earn you an F even in a basic design course. I mean, you can’t pass desktop publishing 101 with this kind of work. There are email newsletters that have higher production standards than this. The device has a set number of pixels in its width … you can’t use more pixels than that to show “Marketplace”, you have to use less. But you can show that word in any arbitrary number of pixels. There is science for shrinking the word down. It’s basic! This is not esoteric stuff we’re talking about here. You could even just call it “Market”, but there is no need for that. Shrink it by 4% horizontally.
 
Understand that most of the time on an Apple system, if the text you’re working with can’t fit in the width, you will see it automatically wrap or shrink horizontally. And I’m talking about live end-user input, not the main home screen of the device. For example, type a very long phone number into iPhone and you’ll see it shrink horizontally as you go above 10 numbers.
 
There is a core problem here that you see in other Microsoft products. They do not do any design or layout, they start with engineering. There are a million problems that come from this. Just aligning all of the interface elements on a grid can make an interface go from chaotic to easy. Instead, Microsoft just pukes them out. All of their products are like forests, not trees. And they have awful internal leadership, they don’t work together as teams at all. So you see these kinds of mistakes that could be fixed by one person being shipped to the world, because in their own internal process, a number of people each individually may have tried to fix this, but could not actually get it done because there is no internal process for it. It’s like Toyota invented the method where any assembly line worker can stop the assembly line to pull a problem vehicle off it, but other companies would just let problems go and rely on a later QA process to rediscover that problem, which leads to shipping bad products. Microsoft is doing the latter in a big way. Their solution to a lot of problems is even that a 3rd party will fix it, so it’s not really even broken.
 
Just incredibly bad work. The websites I visit have more thoughtfully-designed, intuitive, and professional interfaces. But then those people used design tools as well as engineering tools and so they got something out that has both good design and good engineering in it. And they reused available software like Apache so that they don’t reinvent the wheel each time, they focus on adding real value to their own project. Incredible that Microsoft can’t get this going when they have been me-tooing Apple for 25 years.
 
 
 
 
 
 

17Bensawsome
August 13th, 2009 @ 11:47 pm

What else do you expect… it’s Microsoft…

18Zune HD Available on September 15 | reabilita.me
August 14th, 2009 @ 12:45 am

[...] original and wholly un-Apple-like. But isn’t it odd that the word “marketplace” doesn’t quite fit on the screen in the Zune’s main [...]

19dete
August 14th, 2009 @ 2:01 am

I’m a total Apple fanboy, and can’t imagine I’ll ever buy a Zune.
With that said: The cut off “e” is totally a design choice, and I like it!  It’s the perfect counterpoint to Apple, too: Apple is clean cut, everything in it’s place and don’t you dare put that fork in the wrong spot.
This Zune design — angular back, exposed screws, cut off text — is casual and unpretentious.  It’s an affected casualness, which I suppose could be argued to be all the more pretentious, but if you don’t over think it (which most consumers won’t!), it’s the ideal anti-iPod.
Folks: This is Microsoft getting it, at least in the design department.  They’re not trying to copy the iPod’s design, they’re creating its counterpoint.  If you like the iPod, you’re going to buy an iPod and they can’t change that, but for folks who find the iPod too “neat” and dare-I-say “anal”, it’s exactly what’s needed.

20Well
August 14th, 2009 @ 2:54 am

Well, add me to the list of people that do like the design. And design, it is – the “marketplace” is supposed to look like that and is part of the overall look and feel.

21Jonk
August 14th, 2009 @ 4:00 am

I’ll bet that during the development of this interface, the marketing team were arguing about the name for the Zune app store, and after a thousand focus groups came up with Marketplace. By which time the interface label sizes were all locked in and built, and a ten character word just wouldn’t fit. I expect there is some serious late night work going on at Redmond, redoing the entire interface about 2 points smaller.

22Tom Ross
August 14th, 2009 @ 8:07 am

The iPhone has problems with too long words in menus everywhere. For one, if you switch from English to another language, the words will often get longer (e.g. in French or German) and may not fit into the space that the Apple UI designer reserved for them anymore. They may reach over the button edges or even over other words. Another issue is app names. On the iPhone springboard, an app’s name can only have about 12 characters, otherwise it will be dot-dot-dotted. This forces app developers to mangle their app’s names, e.g. leaving out spaces, using abbreviations or completely dropping their brand name and just using a generic term that describes the app. There are compromises to be made on a small screen, and the iPhone is no exception.

23I guess that worked… » Lack of attention to the detail
August 14th, 2009 @ 8:49 am

[...] Check out this post. [...]

24Well
August 15th, 2009 @ 9:04 am

@Jonk: No. The Zune “marketplace” has existed for several years, and the Xbox 360 uses the same moniker (“Game Marketplace”, “Video Marketplace” etc.).

25mafoo
August 18th, 2009 @ 10:05 am

What about that useless inch of black at the top of the screen causing the ‘More’ to get chopped in half as well. Equally if not more crimnal.

26Magysian
September 7th, 2009 @ 12:13 pm

Those cut-off elements look to me like an invitation to scroll…
If that was the design intent, I think they succeeded.
It looks like an iPod-like creature, but differentiated enough. I think Microsoft did right, if “un-iPod” was their design brief.
This is from an iPhone-loving Mac user, btw.
 

27Refurbished Blackberry
November 16th, 2009 @ 8:01 am

Between me and my husband we’ve owned more MP3 players over the years than I can count, including Sansas, iRivers, iPods (classic & touch), the Ibiza Rhapsody, etc. But, the last few years I’ve settled down to one line of players. Why? Because I was happy to discover how well-designed and fun to use the underappreciated (and widely mocked) Zunes are.