Reddit’s Awful Volume Controls Teach Good Design
Over the past three weeks, the / r / ProgrammerHumor subreddit has reinvented the on-screen volume controller hundreds of times. Starting with one user’s side slider , users created fun volume controls based on laptop screen angle , spinners , battery power , latitude and longitude , and pi digits . You can view all of them here , but I’ve put together some of the highlights. Imagine how each of them sounds for maximum appreciation.
The first submission, PM_ME_YOUR_WATERMELO, violates expectations so much that it belongs to the UX tutorial:
The most popular work by BMJ user is familiar to fans of Angry Birds, Worms or Mario Golf:
The Photenth Smoke Volume Control is practically a survival game:
“The volume should be intuitive,” says kittens_from_space:
The most striking technique is Mienys’ simple graphical volume control :
The volume change request form from boxidea is depressingly realistic:
Since jokes are funnier when someone explains them, I asked Jeffrey Zeldman, UX expert and author of Designing with Web Standards , what we can learn from Reddit’s fake volume controls. “It reminds us that design can surprise and delight even if it doesn’t,” he says. The most “boring” option is the one that users immediately understand:
Design wants to be invisible when serving user-driven video or audio. These alternative controllers, even if presented as a joke, are sometimes innovative and often delightful. But ultimately, their self-awareness reinforces the idea that the best design in this case is largely invisible, and that convention trumps innovation in this case.
A typical volume slider is different from a typical real volume control, which is usually a pair of buttons or a knob. (Note the difference between the physical and on-screen volume controls on your phone.) The main use case for sliders is in the professional world of mixing consoles. Even they are relatively new, Zeldman says: “The Beatles and John Coltrane were mixed with round faders.”
But the best APIs are not tied to physical methods. On-screen, the volume knob “feels like a forced metaphor,” Zeldman says. “We like sliders because we think volume and time are linear.” So while the volume slider doesn’t need to be reinvented, it’s only because it already existed.