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CALM AND CONSIDERED SOLUTIONS

One of the things I love about the iPhone is that it has a very easy way to switch the phone's ringer from "ring" to "silent".  It achieves this by having a little switch on the top left hand corner of the device which you can flick up, or flick down to select the state of the ringer. 

Below is the ringer set to the "ring" state, which rings the ringer and (if set) vibrates the phone. 

Below is the ringer sent to silent, which no longer rings the ringer and (if set) vibrates the phone. 

It's by far the fastest way I've seen on any phone to change the ringer to "silent".  Even on my beloved 8310 I had to perform the following steps to do this:

1. Hit the Menu button
   
2. Hit star "*" (to unlock the phone)
   
3. Hit the power button (to bring up the ringer profiles menu)
   
4. Hit the arrow key down once (to select the silent ringer profile)
   
5. Hit select
6. Hit the Menu button
   
7. Hit star "*" (to lock again)
   

Because the process for setting the phone to silent was quite long, I didn't find myself using it much, and because I didn't use it much, when it came time to have my phone on silent I never remembered to do so.  

Now I use the feature all the time.  I.e. at work when I'm at my desk, instead of leaving my phone on I now habitually flick the silent switch before I sit down, and as I leave I do the opposite.  I've been also finding myself doing the same thing in meetings and in movies too, almost without thinking.

I watched the Objectified documentary recently and found the following clip very enlightening on how Apple design their products (which I've seen reflected in the feature I highlighted above), especially the following sequence where Jonathan Ive makes the following quote.

It's one of those funny things.  You spend so much more time to make it less conspicuous and less obvious, and when you think about it, so many of the products you're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of just how clever the solution was.

When the indicator comes on [on an Apple notebook], I wouldn't expect anybody to point to that as a feature. But at some level I think you're aware of a calm and considered solution that therefore speaks about how you're going to use it.  Not the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve some of the problems.