An amusing twitter thread caught my eye this week. It’s a picture dump of a 2017 competition to come up with the worst possible volume control interface. The entries - for the most part - fall into one (or more) of a few buckets:
Mini-games: 1, 2, , 9, 11, 12, 175 Presenting every possible option: 3, 21 RNG: 4, 6, 18 Diabolically (perhaps even physically) difficult to adjust: 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22 Pure absurdism: 13, 19
As mini-games go, I’d personally give #5 (the curling one) Best-in-Show, and the award for “made me want to cry the most” might be #22.
The astute reader might have noticed that #8 does not appear in any of the categories above.
I’m actually quite enamored of this one. It’s perhaps a bit situational - if you’re trying to crank your Spinal Tap to 11 then it could be considered “difficult to adjust” - but for common use cases like adjusting the volume for a VC call? What could be more natural than “speak into the mic at the volume you’d like it to be”? It’s brilliant, in an almost Giertzian kind of way.