Some buttons are brilliant. Some buttons are dumb. This one is definitely not brilliant.

What’s a Navi? Any guesses on what type of device this is on? Any guesses on what it does? Go ahead, take a second. Maybe the icon will help you. Looks like a signpost, pointing in three different directions. Maybe you’re lost and you go here. Maybe you push it and get multiple choices for things to do in opposite directions. You know, a Navi.

Give up? It’s on a Canon MP600 multifunction photo printer that also scans and copies.

I’m a mild-mannered guy. I tend to see both sides of things. It takes a lot for me to flat out say something really negative. This calls for an exception.

Navi is really dumb.

One of the key approaches in successful interaction design is creating an experience so familiar that a person doesn’t have to think about how to use it, even if they’ve never encountered the device before (or website, or service, or space). This is why interaction designers tap into common metaphors as often as possible. It gives the person a basis from which to understand something new. Even a bit of artificially-induced familiarity helps to create a more positive experience.

And a simple technique to achieving this is using familiar words and icons.

Back to the Navi. I find this fascinating and worth several paragraphs of ranting because it’s not just a really bad abstraction of the intended function. It’s multiple levels of bad. It’s a bad abstraction of a bad abstraction.

Pushing the Navi button brings up a list of tasks you could do with this photo printer, print from a phone, print thumbnails, and so on. It’s meant to be a handy place to find a bunch of shortcuts. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Creating a task-focused interface instead of a menu-focused interface can help people who think this way, if the product is designed right. I believe that was the intent here.

Navi is clearly a navigation tool. But giving it a name based on “navigation” is a mistake. It’s an internal word used by people who make things, not by people who use things. It’s a web word, which matches the Home button next to it. “Home” is a web word. “Menu” is a device word. The design intent seems to be building off of web concepts. But calling it “Navigation” is the first level of abstraction that the average person will not immediately grasp. (Let’s ignore for now that they didn’t put Home on the left.

But then they shortened it to Navi, abstracting the button a second time. By using a non-existent word, they made this a button that layers two levels of unfamiliarity onto a feature that is intended to help people who are already unfamiliar with this type of device!

If anybody out there worked on this product, I apologize to you for publicly slamming your work, but it’s astounding that this made it through the entire development process and onto the store shelf.