Annoying Design: Capacitive touch buttons

At some point in the last half decade, a designer somewhere was first to integrate touch buttons in a computer monitor, cell phone, or camera. Then all hell broke loose.

Even when the PS3 came out, people seemed to marvel at its touch sensitive eject and power buttons, and not even for a second have I understood it. Design for design’s sake, form over function, etc. My current main monitor at home  is a Samsung 2443BW, a 24″ LCD which I preferred over others at the time of purchase because of its particularly narrow bezil. It was also in the same line as, and only somewhat changed aesthetically from my previous monitor – the 225BW, a 22″. One key difference was the move from simple front-mounted, small, circular buttons for power and navigating the screen’s menus to capacitive buttons mounted in the same place. I’m sure that for a moment there when I unboxed the thing that I too was lured in by the cool factor, but this was quickly deflated that very night when I went to calibrate some settings and had to constantly look at the screen and down to the controls to make sure I was touching the correct square centimeter of the bezel, as there’s zero tactile interface.

Also that night, I first tried to turn on my monitor in a dark room, and that was when I decided this interface is a complete useless gimmick. The PS3 has small indented symbols on both of its buttons, and since there are only two on a relatively large surface it’s not hard to feel them out, but does this make any sense?

In short, no, and that’s all I really have to say.

Next up: The blue LED is in almost every single gadget I own that isn’t Apple-designed. #ffffffffuuuuuuuu