Clutter and Overload
Send a text message. That’s the sole purpose of this rather large screenshot, taken from o2.ie. The average Nokia phone from 5 years ago does a far cleaner and clearer job in a tiny fraction of the real estate. This is featuritis at it’s worst.
In one of his books, Edward Tufte wrote that “Clutter and overload are not attributes of information, they are a failure of design“. I can think of no better example of this, than what I see above.
A heap of unnecessary features, preceded by 5 tabs of junk. Ridiculous labelling, misleading icons, a dropdown saying “Albania”, and a default action of “Save as draft” rather than, say, Send Message. What were they thinking?
To top it off, an interruption dialogue opens in a new window which simply says “Your message has been sent”.
O2 are the only provider of the iPhone in Ireland at the moment. It’s a shame they didn’t look at that SMS application there before designing the above catastrophe.
