iPad Bezel too wide?

[macboy4]

I've heard the criticism that the iPad bezel is too wide, but something occurred to me. Given the way it will be handled, the wide bezel is perfectly appropriate. Simply put, you need a place for your fingers/hands to hold the thing without unintended screen input.

With a laptop you want a narrow bezel for aesthetics, but you don't hold the screen. Ditto for the iPhone, but you wrap your hand around the back (not really possible on the iPad).

It seems to me that the wide bezel may actually be a good thing... I'm just sayin'.

 

[Roy Hobbs]

I've heard the criticism that the iPad bezel is too wide, but something occurred to me. Given the way it will be handled, the wide bezel is perfectly appropriate. Simply put, you need a place for your fingers/hands to hold the thing without unintended screen input.

With a laptop you want a narrow bezel for aesthetics, but you don't hold the screen. Ditto for the iPhone, but you wrap your hand around the back (not really possible on the iPad).

It seems to me that the wide bezel may actually be a good thing... I'm just sayin'.

There are numerous posts about this already

 

[rtabdo]

I've heard the criticism that the iPad bezel is too wide, but something occurred to me. Given the way it will be handled, the wide bezel is perfectly appropriate. Simply put, you need a place for your fingers/hands to hold the thing without unintended screen input.

With a laptop you want a narrow bezel for aesthetics, but you don't hold the screen. Ditto for the iPhone, but you wrap your hand around the back (not really possible on the iPad).

It seems to me that the wide bezel may actually be a good thing... I'm just sayin'.

You know at first a lot of people said it was ugly. But I think its partially about function. None of us have held this device yet, but I think its partially "wide" so that you can have a good grip on this thing without your fingers getting in the way of content. All the reviews so far say things like "this thing disappears in your hand" so I'm gonna take their word for it and see how I like it come saturday

 

[ThE.MeSsEnGeR]

I've heard the criticism that the iPad bezel is too wide, but something occurred to me. Given the way it will be handled, the wide bezel is perfectly appropriate. Simply put, you need a place for your fingers/hands to hold the thing without unintended screen input.

With a laptop you want a narrow bezel for aesthetics, but you don't hold the screen. Ditto for the iPhone, but you wrap your hand around the back (not really possible on the iPad).

It seems to me that the wide bezel may actually be a good thing... I'm just sayin'.

don't you think you're a bit late? I'm just sayin'.

 

[ss957916]

The fact that the icons are about four miles apart from each other also adds to the ugly, rather stupid, look.

 

[vini-vidi-vici]

The fact that the icons are about four miles apart from each other also adds to the ugly, rather stupid, look.

I'm sure this was by design, not by accident. I think if you had a screen with too many app icons, it'd look like a complex mess. I think this has a lot to do with how our brains operate... it's not pleasing to most minds to be presented with too many visual entities at once - it actually slows us down. I think they've played with different numbers and settled on the amount they have because it works best. Plus, more icons would cover the background image.

I would like a way to stack similar icons into a folder though, so you could have a games folder, productivity folder, etc... and you could open them just like you do with photos (pinch to open/close). It'd clean things up... but might get away from the simplicity concept.

 

[dave1812dave]

I'm sure this was by design, not by accident. I think if you had a screen with too many app icons, it'd look like a complex mess. I think this has a lot to do with how our brains operate... it's not pleasing to most minds to be presented with too many visual entities at once - it actually slows us down. I think they've played with different numbers and settled on the amount they have because it works best. Plus, more icons would cover the background image.

I would like a way to stack similar icons into a folder though, so you could have a games folder, productivity folder, etc... and you could open them just like you do with photos (pinch to open/close). It'd clean things up... but might get away from the simplicity concept.

so what u are saying is that the background image is more important than the unrealized functionality of having immediate access to more icons? I have a Storm2 which has icons arranged onscreen with no space (ie no space between them to view the background image) between them--each icon has as rectangular space around it's image and text. That rectangle is the "clickable element" to launch the app. I find that superbly useful, ergonomic, functional, and logical. Why would I want to give up the number of icons, just to see a background? If I wanted to see a background instead of icons, I'd print it out and hang it on the wall...

 

[Maaz]

so what u are saying is that the background image is more important than the unrealized functionality of having immediate access to more icons? I have a Storm2 which has icons arranged onscreen with no space (ie no space between them to view the background image) between them--each icon has as rectangular space around it's image and text. That rectangle is the "clickable element" to launch the app. I find that superbly useful, ergonomic, functional, and logical. Why would I want to give up the number of icons, just to see a background? If I wanted to see a background instead of icons, I'd print it out and hang it on the wall...

Yeah. I would much rather have it spaced out. Rather have it all crammed on the homescreen.

 

[Alan Taylor]

so what u are saying is that the background image is more important than the unrealized functionality of having immediate access to more icons? I have a Storm2 which has icons arranged onscreen with no space (ie no space between them to view the background image) between them--each icon has as rectangular space around it's image and text. That rectangle is the "clickable element" to launch the app. I find that superbly useful, ergonomic, functional, and logical. Why would I want to give up the number of icons, just to see a background? If I wanted to see a background instead of icons, I'd print it out and hang it on the wall...

That is not what he is saying, you are taking a throw-away comment in the middle of the quote and basing your opinion on that.

Re-read what he said. This is about ease of use. If there were 70 icons on the screen the large majority of people would struggle to find what they are looking for.

Watch people who don't touch type. They hunt and peck for keys. It would be the same for people opening apps.

 

[WLS]

Has anyone considered that in order to get the thinness they may have opted to put the circuits along the edge and the screen and battery in the center?

 

[dave1812dave]

That is not what he is saying, you are taking a throw-away comment in the middle of the quote and basing your opinion on that.

Re-read what he said. This is about ease of use. If there were 70 icons on the screen the large majority of people would struggle to find what they are looking for.

Watch people who don't touch type. They hunt and peck for keys. It would be the same for people opening apps.

The search feature on my ipod touch can find apps instantly....

 

[wingnut8]

The search feature on my ipod touch can find apps instantly....

NO WAY!?

 

[eawmp1]

The search feature on my ipod touch can find apps instantly....

And by having to use search you are adding 2 steps to opening an app (opening search and typing name). Hopefully the design team at Apple doesn't hire you.

 

[dave1812dave]

And by having to use search you are adding 2 steps to opening an app (opening search and typing name). Hopefully the design team at Apple doesn't hire you.

my POINT was anyone unable to quickly locate an app amongst MANY that they have downloaded to their device can use the FUNCTION that APPLE provided. sheesh! maybe u would prefer that apple remove that function from the search feature????

 

[vini-vidi-vici]

so what u are saying is that the background image is more important than the unrealized functionality of having immediate access to more icons? I have a Storm2 which has icons arranged onscreen with no space (ie no space between them to view the background image) between them--each icon has as rectangular space around it's image and text. That rectangle is the "clickable element" to launch the app. I find that superbly useful, ergonomic, functional, and logical. Why would I want to give up the number of icons, just to see a background? If I wanted to see a background instead of icons, I'd print it out and hang it on the wall...

Aesthetics is important... perhaps not to you, but it is to most people (the same reason that people fix their bed each morning, only to mess it up each night). But that wasn't the main reason I cited.

The main reason has to do with the ergonomics of how people consume information. If you present more than a certain number of icons to a user on one screen "all at once", it's "too much info", and becomes less useful. It's the concept of "less is more". People often joke about that statement, but there is a lot of truth to it.

Think of it this way - if there were a hundred icons crammed onto the home page, would you think that's too many? How about a thousand? how would you find anything? perhaps your threshhold is more than the 16 or 20 that are on the iPad screen, but I'm sure they looked at this, and made a very deliberate decision to do it like they did.

This design concept is true with a lot of things. Take a look at the google home page. They could cram it full of links and info, but it'd be worse if they did that. In fact, look at the apple home page. It's one giant picture, and a few links at top... and it works really well. Sure, it's not the only way to do things (look at craigslist or yahoo for a successful alternative), but it does make for a refreshing user experience.

 

[dave1812dave]

Aesthetics is important... perhaps not to you, but it is to most people (the same reason that people fix their bed each morning, only to mess it up each night). But that wasn't the main reason I cited.

The main reason has to do with the ergonomics of how people consume information. If you present more than a certain number of icons to a user on one screen "all at once", it's "too much info", and becomes less useful. It's the concept of "less is more". People often joke about that statement, but there is a lot of truth to it.

Think of it this way - if there were a hundred icons crammed onto the home page, would you think that's too many? How about a thousand? how would you find anything? perhaps your threshhold is more than the 16 or 20 that are on the iPad screen, but I'm sure they looked at this, and made a very deliberate decision to do it like they did.

This design concept is true with a lot of things. Take a look at the google home page. They could cram it full of links and info, but it'd be worse if they did that. In fact, look at the apple home page. It's one giant picture, and a few links at top... and it works really well. Sure, it's not the only way to do things (look at craigslist or yahoo for a successful alternative), but it does make for a refreshing user experience.

one way to avoid icon overload is not load the maximum number of apps that the product will allow. I've had my touch for over 18 months and have just 6 "pages" of apps. some people complain to apple that it didn't allow for "enough" applications. with the ability to place as many apps as one would like, on each page, app cram can be kept to a minimum.

 

[eawmp1]

one way to avoid icon overload is not load the maximum number of apps that the product will allow. I've had my touch for over 18 months and have just 6 "pages" of apps. some people complain to apple that it didn't allow for "enough" applications. with the ability to place as many apps as one would like, on each page, app cram can be kept to a minimum.

But would you like all 6 pages of apps on 1 screen?

 

[Arnia]

so what u are saying is that the background image is more important than the unrealized functionality of having immediate access to more icons? I have a Storm2 which has icons arranged onscreen with no space (ie no space between them to view the background image) between them--each icon has as rectangular space around it's image and text. That rectangle is the "clickable element" to launch the app. I find that superbly useful, ergonomic, functional, and logical. Why would I want to give up the number of icons, just to see a background? If I wanted to see a background instead of icons, I'd print it out and hang it on the wall...

Unfortunately, with large numbers of active elements to choose from you start running into cognitive loading problems. Now, this isn't as hard-and-fast a rule as some make out; but it is the case that the more items you have to choose from, the harder it becomes for someone to make a choice. This is particularly the case for 'maximisers' who seek the choice with the highest overall utility.

From anecdotal evidence (I'm afraid I haven't seen any experiments on this), people who would be considered to be 'geeks' have higher loading limits; this might be because they use a different search-space reduction strategy, or they have higher short-term memory capacity, or even that they tend not to be optimality-seeking maximisers (which I suppose is just a specific case of the first point). For those with higher loading limits, it is important to bear in mind just how hard most people find choice amongst many options if you wish to sell a good experience to most people.

EDIT: To clarify, my point is that there isn't a simple correlation between numbers of options and utility/functionality. Beyond a certain, person-dependent but generally quite low, point adding more choices at any given point makes things less useful rather than more. What good is functionality, if it makes you exhausted and frustrated to use?

 

[dave1812dave]

Hopefully the design team at Apple doesn't hire you.

I don't want to work for apple, so that's a ridiculous statement.

 

[dave1812dave]

Unfortunately, with large numbers of active elements to choose from you start running into cognitive loading problems. Now, this isn't as hard-and-fast a rule as some make out; but it is the case that the more items you have to choose from, the harder it becomes for someone to make a choice. This is particularly the case for 'maximisers' who seek the choice with the highest overall utility.

From anecdotal evidence (I'm afraid I haven't seen any experiments on this), people who would be considered to be 'geeks' have higher loading limits; this might be because they use a different search-space reduction strategy, or they have higher short-term memory capacity, or even that they tend not to be optimality-seeking maximisers (which I suppose is just a specific case of the first point). For those with higher loading limits, it is important to bear in mind just how hard most people find choice amongst many options if you wish to sell a good experience to most people.

I try to arrange my touch icons by TYPE of APPLICATION--each type goes on a page, as much as is practical. The biggest bugaboo with multiple pages of apps is simply getting to the last few pages. Since color is the thing that most people notice before shape or design, icons start out with a huge liability in being quickly identified because in my experience in using icon driven interfaces, many icons tend to be grouped into a small number of relatively similar color, when viewed at a glance. Individual graphic elements of an icon unfortunately take a back seat to the overall impression one gets of the color of an icon.

ie my Touch icons are "purple--itunes, yahoo"; "black"-bing, LA times, solitare; tons of "blue" icons--safari, mail, stocks, weather, amazon, dexknows, aroundme, google, weather channel, restaurants, dictionary, videos, amazon, usa today, aol radio, ps mobile, stitcher. see my point?

icons, by their nature, are difficult to distinguish by appearance, IMO, when glanced at. LOCATION of the icon seems to be my best method of "finding" an icon onscreen. When I rearrange my icons it becomes a PITA to find them in the near future. That's why I like that Apple provided a search feature on the Touch.

 

[vini-vidi-vici]

I try to arrange my touch icons by TYPE of APPLICATION--each type goes on a page, as much as is practical.

how do you deal with the fact that you can't put blank spaces in-between apps? (although, they sometimes get there by accident). Your method would work fine if I had exactly 16 apps of each category, but that's not the case... maybe I'm just not aware of how to do this?

 

[Arnia]

I try to arrange my touch icons by TYPE of APPLICATION--each type goes on a page, as much as is practical. The biggest bugaboo with multiple pages of apps is simply getting to the last few pages. Since color is the thing that most people notice before shape or design, icons start out with a huge liability in being quickly identified because in my experience in using icon driven interfaces, many icons tend to be grouped into a small number of relatively similar color, when viewed at a glance. Individual graphic elements of an icon unfortunately take a back seat to the overall impression one gets of the color of an icon.

ie my Touch icons are "purple--itunes, yahoo"; "black"-bing, LA times, solitare; tons of "blue" icons--safari, mail, stocks, weather, amazon, dexknows, aroundme, google, weather channel, restaurants, dictionary, videos, amazon, usa today, aol radio, ps mobile, stitcher. see my point?

icons, by their nature, are difficult to distinguish by appearance, IMO, when glanced at. LOCATION of the icon seems to be my best method of "finding" an icon onscreen. When I rearrange my icons it becomes a PITA to find them in the near future. That's why I like that Apple provided a search feature on the Touch.

I honestly don't see how that is a rebuttal of my point. If anything, it corroborates my position on loading. A tight layout with lots more choices would be even harder in that case. Yes, people could have less options on a page, but people are poor introspectors and wouldn't realise the effect that cramming everything on one page would be having on their experience. Also, even if you only have the same number of icons per page as you do now to avoid the loading but with the tighter layout then the space merely ends up at the bottom producing a 'top-heavy' impression (unpleasant enough generally, but giving a very bad feeling in a device you're holding due to metaphoric transfer).

Do you have a solution that doesn't suffer these problems yet still has the tight layout you seem to prefer?

 

[dave1812dave]

how do you deal with the fact that you can't put blank spaces in-between apps? (although, they sometimes get there by accident). Your method would work fine if I had exactly 16 apps of each category, but that's not the case... maybe I'm just not aware of how to do this?

ah, I don't HAVE a REALLY GOOD way to deal with icon-driven interfaces! I deal with them as best I can. I hope that in the future, someone will come up with a radically different method for selecting applications. Having to recognize the subtle differences amongst many screen elements is a PITA, is it not? No matter how "artfully" they are arranged.

 

[dave1812dave]

I honestly don't see how that is a rebuttal of my point. If anything, it corroborates my position on loading. A tight layout with lots more choices would be even harder in that case. Yes, people could have less options on a page, but people are poor introspectors and wouldn't realise the effect that cramming everything on one page would be having on their experience. Also, even if you only have the same number of icons per page as you do now to avoid the loading but with the tighter layout then the space merely ends up at the bottom producing a 'top-heavy' impression (unpleasant enough generally, but giving a very bad feeling in a device you're holding due to metaphoric transfer).

Do you have a solution that doesn't suffer these problems yet still has the tight layout you seem to prefer?

No, like I said, I was initially responding to the apparent reference to aesthetics of viewing a background, to the arguably more important ways that application icons could/should be displayed. I don't think too many screen elements of any sort, be they icons or function buttons, make for a pleasing interface. Someone in the future, thinking out of the box, may come up with a more elegant solution. The one thing I do know is that I am not a fan of icons, in a general way. Like international roadsigns, sometimes they don't impart the information they were poorly designed to convey.

 

[4DThinker]

My opinion, nothing else: The bezel gives you a place to put your thumb when holding the iPad with one hand. A place that won't obscure the screen. Particularly when in landscape mode. A place to brace against the cantilever of the device off your hand. It could have been a little smaller for me, but some have fatter thumbs than I. Find a 1/2" thick book in your house about the same height and width of the iPad and see if you don't have to "hook" a thumb on the top edge when holding it in one hand. Simply balancing on on hand it possible, of course, but it doesn't allow your hand a good grip.

As for icons, Apple could have done much more research and done a better job of making the iPad UI unique and more ergonomic to use. If right handed, the ability to cluster an array of icons on the right side of the screen would have made them all easier to tap with less hand motion. Cloning the iPhone UI was a beginning point for sure.