Tech companies are clamoring to re-buttonize their products
Have we reached peak touchscreen?
After years of futilely mashing our fingers onto touch screens, buttons on technology products are making a comeback. I’ve been fascinated by this re-buttonization of tech and once you see it, you’ll notice it everywhere.
There has been a proliferation of tools like the Clicks Keyboard Case, which appends a physical keyboard to your iPhone, BlackBerry style. E-readers like the Nook have started to put page-turning buttons back onto their devices.
Apple even added buttons back to the top of its MacBook Pro keyboards after backlash to the “Touch Bar” that it had it rolled out in 2016. In Apple’s announcement, the company noted, “Physical function keys… replace the Touch Bar, bringing back the familiar, tactile feel of mechanical keys that pro users love.”
Historically, producing custom buttons has been expensive, and as technology advanced in recent decades it became much cheaper for companies to produce touch screen interfaces. Touchscreens also have some benefits: they allow for a more flexible user interface design and make it easy to push updates to products remotely.
But now that touch screens have become ubiquitous, it’s becoming very clear that they suck. Touch screen interfaces can crash, rendering products unusable, they can wear out over time, and poorly designed touch screens often don’t sense a user’s swipes or taps. Not to mention, to navigate a touch screen interface you have to look at it, making things more dangerous when you integrate touchscreens into things like a car or heavy machinery.
The WSJ has been on the button beat for a while. In a 2023 piece titled What Our Phones, Cars and Refrigerators Need: More Buttons, writer Nicole Nguyen detailed the challenges of touch screen interfaces being deployed in kitchen objects. After a pot of water boiled over on her induction stove, she was unable to turn down the burner because the touch screen has gotten wet. “I rage poked,” she wrote, “where a simple knob would have sufficed.”
WSJ’s Christopher Mims noted, “The switch back to physical interfaces is, in many ways, a vibe shift. With touch screens becoming ubiquitous, what was once viewed as luxurious is becoming tacky. Physical controls, done well, now signal the kind of thoughtfulness and exclusivity once attached to the original iPhone.”
Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people use them. She even wrote a whole book on the topic called Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Companies are clamoring to work with her as they seek to phase out touch screens and re-buttonize their products.
IEEE Spectrum has a great interview with Plotnik out. I pulled out some of my favorite quotes:
I saw these persistent anxieties over time about control and who gets to push the button, and also these pleasures around button pushing that we can use for advertising and to make technology simpler.
There was this kind of touchscreen mania, where all of a sudden everything became a touchscreen. Your car was a touchscreen, your refrigerator was a touchscreen. Over time, people became somewhat fatigued with that.
That’s not to say touchscreens aren’t a really useful interface, I think they are. But on the other hand, people seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don’t always have to look at them—you can feel your way around for them when you don’t want to directly pay attention to them—but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback.
If you look at gamers playing video games, they want to push a lot of buttons on those controls. And if you look at DJs and digital musicians, they have endless amounts of buttons and joysticks and dials to make music. There seems to be this kind of richness of the tactile experience that’s afforded by pushing buttons. They’re not perfect for every situation, but I think increasingly, we’re realizing the merit that the interface offers.
At one point in the interview she talks about screen fatigue leading people to crave more tactile experiences, and I think that’s a big part of it. It seems like every device we use today has a screen interface, and it’s exhausting:
Plotnick: We spend all our days and nights on these devices, scrolling or constantly flipping through pages and videos, and there’s something tiring about that. The button may be a way to almost de-technologize our everyday existence, to a certain extent.
There’s often this narrative of progress, that things are only getting better with technology over time. But if we look at these lessons, I think we can see that sometimes things were simpler or better in a past moment
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I would really like to see the retro futurism vibe take hold, tactile buttons mixed with touch tech would be my jam. I want blade runner not startrek.
You’re always exploring these interesting areas that I never would have thought of looking into.