I’ve been in Cambodia long enough to miss the iPod revolution which has now taken place in nearly all four corners of the globe and is now starting its Indochina campaign. I have watched them increase in popularity amongst the western populace along the usual channels i.e geeks then trendies then non-trendies then my Mum. When I was back in the UK at Christmas literally everyone and their dog had an iPod.

Uncontrolled consumerism which I call the ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ mentality is one of the aspects of UK living which I despise the most, on every trip, there is always one item which for me symbolizes this mentality, when I went last summer it was thousand dollar baby strollers which looked more like moon buggies than push chairs, which everyone had through fear that using the traditional four wheel type would have you branded as an ‘unfit parent’ resulting in social services confiscating your kids. 

On this last trip back to the UK at Christmas the new item was the iPod. If you didn’t have one you might as well start wearing animal skins and living in a cave. For this very reason I raised my defences and proclaimed to myself that I would not follow the other lemmings into to this new marketing induced hypnosis.

So here I was in 2007 being one of the final percentile on the planet who did not own an iPod and why would I need one? I already had a PDA phone with a 2GB capacity which doubled as a solid MP3 player. Then last week my wife broke the siege by buying me an iPod Nano for my birthday (not at my request I must add). 

I will now come clean, despite my best efforts not to, I fell in love with this thing from the second I switched it on. As a programmer/designer I couldn’t help but marvel at the UI, it seemed to have followed the KISS principle down to the final letter, there was nothing there that didn’t need to be there, everything could be accessed within seconds. When I first opened the box I noticed how minimal the instruction manual was, but as soon as I turned it on I knew why, the UI is just so intuitive even my grandmother could figure it out.

As a designer or programmer it is all too easy to let ‘fluff’ slip into your code or design respectively. Be it one roll-over button too many or god classes being passed around your program. Using the iPod has inspired me, I generally consider myself to be a member of the XP (eXtreme Programming) camp when it comes to my design process. XP is too lengthy to go over in full here (maybe another day), but it boils down to only writing code for what is needed in the here and now rather than what it is perceived may be needed in the future, then if something else is needed in the future adding it at that time and at all times writing code which makes facilitating such future changes simple. The result of this process is usually software which isn’t loaded with unnecessary functionality, features and flashy lights.

The UI of the iPod as well as the physical design and layout of the unit are a testament to the XP process and I can’t imagine it was designed in any other way. Usually items which are extremely simple to use often feel like they were a once complex item which has been stripped down and refined into that state, this process although effective always gives clues to its heritage and often results in an end product which just doesn’t seem natural or fluid. The iPod on the other hand is so perfect in its operation it is more akin to living things created through Darwins evolutionary theory than a man made item spawned on a designers drawing board.