The Power of the Click

I’ve been reading The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy, who wrote one of the books that got me interested in interaction design…in the 1980s when I was teenager: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

In The Perfect Thing, I came upon this passage that really stuck in my mind:

“I heard that when the Japanese wanted to create the Lexus, they took three hundred engineers and they told them, ‘Go and see why the Mercedes is cool.’ And they defined all these very implicit, tacit things in the Mercedes, like, for instance, the click of the door. You know, when you close the door of the Mercedes, you have a very distinct noise. And they found that in order to achieve this noise, the entire rim of the door has to touch the chassis of the car at once, along the whole rim. If you have the formation of the door at one point touch before the rest of the rim, you don’t have this click.”

This reminded me of another story I heard about the iPod itself, namely that Steve Jobs insisted that the scroll wheel have an audible click, and not through the headphones.

One could argue, in fact, that at least half of the pleasing feeling we get operating physical controls like pushing a button is the sound it makes. (The other half is overcoming the physical resistance.) And possibly, for its finality and variety, the simple, humble click is the most pleasing of them all. More than all the beeps, boops, and boing! sounds our digital machines come at us with. Announcing in a few milliseconds, yes, I did something.

Never underestimate the power of a good click.

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2008, at 9:17 am. Filed under Industrial Design. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.