Sony Reader

This weekend I got to play with a Sony Reader at Borders. Most reviewers will complain about the price. This seems to be a market where we will need the blades to help pay for the razor. But this is the first version so maybe this one is all about early adopters.

I loved the screen resolution! Wow. The demo book was a comic with pretty small lettering!

I do wish that the background was even a little more white. This will probably come if this technology is allowed to advance.

My complaints really, as usual, will have more to do with the UI. Let me make a list;

1. Why the bevels? Like the Microsoft with the Zune (see my previous post), Sony is adding gratuitous frames. Ironically, books, which is what we are trying to ape, or improve upon here, do a wonderful job of not adding frames to content. The edge of the page is all you need.
2. Next and previous page buttons seem to have been designed by the same people who do stove top ranges and frequently place controls so as not to map to the job they are going to do. Why not have the buttons on either side of the device which would reinforce the direction they will take you. This would also nicely handle texts that read left to right.
3. The text zoom button is a little spot on the side, which steps through three sizes in rotation. I guess you can figure this out once you use it. But why not do this across the top with a ramp design over it. Or even better use a wheel for this (like setting volume on a walkman). You don't need to support all intermediate sizes to use a wheel to control it. Something that offer a satisfying click could do.
4. One of the two big controllers is merely redundant with the next and previous buttons (see #2) and doesn't do a much better job. Though at least the go next button is to the right of the go previous button. But not strictly to the right. Designers sometimes go out of their way to make things weird.
5. The mark button. Did their user testing tell them to put such a small button right there? Shouldn't this be a bigger target? The choice of what parts of the interface to have at the top level is always an interesting one. A case can be made that every function should be at or near the surface. But is mark as important as find?
   
6. The page number "x of y" is in reverse video at the bottom of the screen. Page numbers are an interesting kind of meta information. Everyone who reads has learned about footers and headers. Putting reference to the content on the same part of the system that tells me about the battery life feels like a category mistake. Why not leave it as black on white? It calls too much attention to itself this way. Alternatively let me have the screen real estate back for my text and make it easy to invoke this information when I use the book mark feature or as I turn pages. Or show it in the upper left or lower right.
7. A row of numbered keys. Now, what I think a good UI designer would like is a series of touch sensitive buttons on either side of the screen. Do some user testing to make sure they are wide enough so that people don't miss or that people with big hands can unambiguously click one at a time. Now with these buttons in place you could imagine all kinds of control (including next and previous pages and menu manipulation). The bank ATM and store debit card checkout people seem to have done some good work in this area. In this device we don't have that. Instead we have one of those strange vertical to horizontal mappings that are tied to each other via an abstract correspondence, 1 goes with 1, 2 with 2, and so forth. This means scanning back and forth. Why not just put the buttons where you want to click?!
8. The menu pad. Too bad Apple has the iPod scroll wheel locked up. You can see how that could help here. The four direction arrows plus the enter button will remind people of a DVD handheld controller and so all the things that people complain about there should be the starting point here. In future people will come up with touch sensitive screens but really with this kind of device you want people's fingerprints off the screen. So I would encourage Sony to reinvestigate the possibilities of the edges of the device.
9. The missing lid. You can buy a book like jacket in red, green or leather. Every user will want one if they have to throw this in their back pack. So why not add some control elements to this jacket? When the price comes down maybe we will have an ePaper book that opens at a spine (like a book) with content on both pages, ... hmmm....
   

I am very happy to see ePaper make its appearance in a real device with great resolution and fabulous battery life. The business guys will find a price point and a model. The risk here is that like cell phones this device will never be allowed to mature as a book reader before people find they want to add an MP3 player, a camera, a phone, wireless and internet connectivity, and and and... already the main competition may come from the tablet PCs. (It is weird that a device like this doesn't sport a calculator and a handsome(!) clock, you know it has the capability on the inside.)

The Sony Reader does allow you to read your own PDFs, text and Word docs. And this could lead to a time when we "print to ePaper" and take that with us on the commuter rail or plane. But laptops can and will step into that area too.

A final reason to rejoice is that you can read this in bright light and it turns on quickly and has great battery life. This should all put some creative pressure on laptop designers.

I love to read, and imagine a time when I could sit in a quiet (or not so quiet) place with whole book shelves squeezed into and gorgeously rendered in a magic book in my lap.