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**Jerod Santo:** Right... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** ...but also, what happens if this button falls into the wrong hand, and now -- whose finger's on the button, and do we need to worry about that? So you have kind of this pleasure and panic at work at the same time. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[20:13\] Yeah. We've experienced some of that with our children. We take for granted some things that adults know, and that need to be taught, like some obvious things... And one thing that I took for granted with kids - not that they wanted to push buttons, because I know that that's like inherent in... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Oh, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** But at least you've done your job. At least you've warned them. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah, it was kind of amazing to me that people were complaining about this even in 1905. You had kids who were running up to people's doorbells and just ringing them when they weren't supposed to, or they'd get behind the wheel of the car and honk the horn... So I guess this has always been a probl... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, man. The button. Who's got the button? Is that from a movie? I don't think I know that phrase. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, there's a book that you should get and read... It's called "The good for nothing button." I won't tell you the story, but it's a good book for kids. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Nice. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The good for nothing button. |
**Jerod Santo:** The good for nothing button. Okay. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's about pushing buttons. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, they've gotta be good for something. So Rachel, when "The button is dead" narrative began to spread, and you got into this, did you believe it at first? Like, were you -- because now we're starting to think, and we're seeing trends the other way, like "Yeah, we overstepped. We need buttons for so... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** I think I must've always been a bit of a skeptic, because I guess I could have gone the other way and research touchscreens, and been like "This is the future. Let's look at this!" But something instinctually, I guess, told me "Hey, let's look at buttons." And I think that certainly bore out. And m... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, "Video killed the radio star", that kind of thing. It's like nah, we just layer on, don't we? We just add more... We don't necessarily kill things. Of course, mediums do come and go in terms of their popularity and usage... |
**Break**: \[23:40\] |
**Jerod Santo:** But the touchscreen has a lot going for it. It also has a lot of drawbacks. However, I would say that over the last -- is it 15? ...almost 20 years since the first iPhone, that the touchscreen, like the software button, that's really just not a real button, it's a touchscreen, but it's mimicking a butt... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** I think that you're right, there are a lot more kind of affordances to what a digital button can do now, and thinking about sound and feel and all of that... But at the end of the day, it's still a visual technology, and that's what I always remind people, is that we call it a touchscreen, but it's... |
And so I think there's a real accessibility issue around there, questions of safety, and the fact that at the end of the day those buttons are really only going to make sense if you're staring at them. And when we think about the various kinds of mechanical buttons that we use in our daily lives, a lot of those can be ... |
The other thing too I think is just the limited sort of tactile experience you have with digital buttons. Like, if I'm looking at clothes, I want to touch them and feel what the fabric feels like. But at the end of the day, you're always just going to be touching glass. Buttons, I think, can give us a little bit more n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm thinking about the tried and true DVD or Blu-ray remote kind of thing. It's not maybe something everybody would push, but I still have a Blu-ray player in my house. I'm that kind of crazy person where I still like physical media; not in all cases, but in some cases. But my Blu-ray remote - I've ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But anyways, but I've got it memorized. And it's got a little -- kind of like a little knob, or a little feeling on it. Like, a little extra piece, a little dimple or something like that, that tells me "This is the Play button" or "This is the Pause button. It's okay to push." So I kind of like that... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think that's the nut of it, is like the physical feedback of it being right or wrong, without your eyes being involved. And the Apple TV remote, by the way, is terrible at this, because Apple decided -- I think Jony Ive decided unilaterally for all of us that we didn't really need any tactile f... |
\[30:23\] Long story short, you almost have to always look at it, or just ruin the movie, or just like take 50/50 chances. Like, "I might be exiting this app, but here we go..." I'm trying to pause it so I go to the bathroom, but I'm going to just crank the volume up on accident. That's a terrible one. And because - pe... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah. It's so situation-specific, I think... If we think about driving and having to keep our eyes on the road, or we think about being in a darkened room, those are times when we just need things at hand, and we don't want to have to be moving back and forth between these different systems. But in... |
Gaming to me is one of the most interesting ones, that despite all the different systems that have come out, it seems like gamers still just really want to push buttons. They want physical controls. And you can see someone who plays with a video game controller how well they know those buttons; and they're not looking ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, for sure. I concur on that one. I feel like the modern game controller has more buttons than obviously like the NES from back in the day, or even the Atari. It began with a joystick, and one button. I couldn't imagine gaming with a joystick and one button right now. I'd just be like "What?! How... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, that goes to the geography as well. I mean, our minds are very good at mapping geographies onto memory... And so we can remember with precision the location of buttons and to differentiate them. This is why a lot of people who are into like memorization and speed reading will talk about their min... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Or you're ubering... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, or you're ubering around. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But if you're liming, you know... |
**Jerod Santo:** True. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A little easier. Does that translate to you, Rachel, liming? |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Oh, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, good. |
**Jerod Santo:** I love those things. There's no better way to get around a downtown of a city that is a nice one than a nice electric scooter, you know? \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We've scooted in some shady spots, I'm sure... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, every once in a while. But they go 15 miles an hour, or 25... You can get out of there quick. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You really do learn the city, though. You're right. This idea of the mapping the geography to your brain... We learned Raleigh pretty quickly even, Jerod. In a matter of a day or two we knew where we were going because we scooted everywhere. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And so I think we have a very good system for memorizing specifically the locations of buttons that we need. This is why when you're driving and you can't look away, and you need to push a button, maybe to turn your hazards on, for instance, most of the time when you turn your hazards on, you're ... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** \[34:24\] I do think something interesting about that too, what you're describing, is this kind of muscle memory. And all of that too just does take time with a system... Because as you were talking, I was thinking of all the places where I feel like an alien, or I feel like a totally incompetent u... |
**Jerod Santo:** So I think cars are an obvious one where we're going to see a reversal... I mean, we've already started to see a reversal and a return to knobs and switches... We're seeing it on phones as well. I mean, Apple -- okay, maybe they've run out of ideas. That's one of my thoughts on Apple, with the iPhone, ... |
But also, now there's a camera button, which is another one where if you want to quickly take a picture, and you're going to hold your phone sideways all of a sudden, having a separate button that controls this particular important sub-function is worth having a piece of hardware there... Versus overloading a button to... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** That's a good question. As you were talking, it was making me think that it's almost like we had to take the buttons away to figure out where we should put them back... I know there were some experiments with elevators, of taking buttons out of elevators, and you just have this kind of central nerv... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Let me out of here...!" Yeah, even if the button doesn't work, give me a button. |
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