Is it a good thing when designers start nit picking? I think it is. Steve Jobs was a designer who liked to make sure that everything that his company ever designed was perfect. He commanded his team of designers like a battleship captain and it paid off extremely well for him and Apple. I guess there really is no price for perfection as today Apple can afford to charge exorbitant amounts for ordinary devices. The Japanese do this just as well as Apple. This can clearly be seen from their huge market share in the automotive industry as well as the fact that they are able to charge more than other companies who make similar products.
I guess this perfection in design can be traced back to the quality movement in the 60's and 70's when after making shabby and badly designed products for decades, Japan decided to put product quality at the top of their list. Another industry that this worked out really well for the Japanese was the home appliance industry. Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic are all companies founded and based in Japan.
One of the products produced by this revolution that affects me directly is the laptop and one of the design intricacies that I personally enjoy is the back-lit keyboard. Perfect for finding keys when you are lost on a keyboard, the back-lit keyboard has changed the game forever. No more hunting for keys in the dark, no more pressing backspace when you actually wanted to press enter, a back-lit keyboard can be any computer user's best friend. One of the flaws however is that the computers do not take external lighting conditions into consideration. Computers today should be able to use their cameras to look at the environment's light setting and be able to adjust the brightness of the back-lit keyboard automatically.
While keyboard backlights are a nice feature, manufacturers tend to exploit the visual appeal in order to raise the price on lower-end devices. It’s pretty common to see keyboards with beautiful backlights fail in terms of sophistication and durability. Here is a great example:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823175006
This “Mad Catz” keyboard looks awesome in the listing, but if you read the user comments, the key functionality breaks within a few years. I’m willing to bet the cheap backlighting alone raises the price on the device by at least $20-30.
I always shop for keyboards in terms of comfort and endurance. Mechanical keyboards are especially strong in both of those categories—I’ll probably write my next blog post on them for a full explanation.