Play and Pause icons are virtually universal now. In fact, they’re so universal, they’re migrating to other products outside the audio video world.
I spotted this while walking through a major consumer electronics retailer the other day. Check out the new washing machine from LG.
Look closely in the middle.
Here, let me help.
Traditional media icons have migrated to laundry machines. And really, it’s not too surprising. Washers for years have proudly displayed a big knob that either started or paused the wash cycle with a mechanical push/pull. A big toggle.
As electronics became cheaper, the big washer knob eventually went digital. For example, look at the button on our LG washer, which we bought about three years ago.
Like other Play Pause buttons, this is a digital Push Push instead of a mechanical Push Pull. You simply push this button to toggle between Start and Pause. But at this point in the design evolution, they still labeled it as Start Pause. This is the key. Labeling is often the easiest way to reposition or reframe something, and it costs zero difference to print one word over another. It’s making the right choice.
As a counterexample, look at this new Whirlpool Duet washer, sitting in the store about six feet from the LG shown above.
Start and Pause again, but as separate buttons. This is the more traditional approach, but signifies that Whirlpool is an “old” washer while the LG is a “new” washer.
Isn’t design fun?
Back to the story, making the cognitive leap from Start Pause to Play Pause is completely natural. Due to the widespread prevalence of media players, adopting the Play Pause icon both simplifies the product story and makes a bold “this product is the future” claim, all at the same time.
This further cements a trend where these icons are merging into one. They aren’t separate Play and Pause icons side by side anymore. They are simply now one Play Pause icon.
Make it go. Make it stop. One button. That’s it.
What other non-media devices have you seen that include the Play Pause icon? Will we see a car adopt the Play Pause icon, much like the Prius has proudly adopted the Power icon?
On a side note, let’s look at that Whirlpool Start icon again.
Reflecting back to Tuesday’s post on printer icons, this is fascinating. This icon is either the missing link or love child of the classic Power icon plus the standard printer Start icon. Same gesture as Power (vertical bar leaping up out of a standard shape) but same style as Start (diamond with a vertical bar). Interesting.
Does this mean my iPod can do my laundry as well? That would be nice.
The problem with a combined start/stop button is that many devices fail to provide proper feedback that the keypress has registered.
If there’s significant lag between the keypress and the action it is supposed to initiate, and no immediate feedback, the frustrated user pushes again, thus reverting the state to whatever it was before the interaction began. Discrete start/stop buttons, on the other hand, are idempotent and can afford multiple presses.
Concrete examples (since you asked for some): This happens to me several times a week with my TomTom Go car-mounted GPS and the Motorola RAZR phone. Each of these devices has a single button for on/off, and requires holding it to invert the state of the device, but in both cases, there’s no feedback whatsoever for a few seconds.
I think with devices that also have music players (such as that Prius), the play/pause icon might cause confusion if you had the same icon on two different places on the dashboard.
“can we pause the song? I have to make a call.”
“sure thing.”
*press*
“uh oh.”
there’s also the fact that pausing magnetic media for long damaged it, so the pause was discouraged.
once all content became digital, the differences between stopping or pausing became irrelevant (stop rewinds the content, while pause doesn’t), and pause became proeminent.
I can’t get over the play/pause button on the LG.
It makes you just want to push it. haha
Great post;
I never knew that a button could infer any information about a company. It was a very interesting analysis, and I found myself wondering around my house looking at buttons to see what I could find. Funny how something so simple can infer so much and how all technology carries into itself. It’s amazing how symbols start for one purpose, and then transform to another, and then even more amazing yet, is that these symbols are then spread all over the world and become universal. Another interesting thing to think about is how symbols drop off or become unknown. In art, iconography is often used, yet a modern day person wouldn’t know that a dog symbolizes fertility in 18th century paintings.
I have to agree with the earlier post about Whirlpool’s on switch and off switch as opposed to Lucky Goldstar’s integration of the two into one switch. First of all, as was mentioned, it might not give proper feedback that the machine has, in fact, started. Second, if you develop a problem with the on button, it’s bad that it is also the off button. You want to be able to turn it off if you have to.
The BEST reason I have for liking the Duet better, is, of course, I work for Whirlpool.
I think the reason tape players had a seperate Play and Pause button has a lot to do with the fact that the tape player’s drive was completely mechanical in nature, each button engaged or disengaged a set of gears, and moved the read/write heads to the media or away from it.
[…] History of the Button (blog nerdvana for a designer) has a piece up about the play/pause button’s migration to non-a/v products. […]
AMy new computer just has two buttons in the front and I’m not really sure which is the ON and which is RESTART. I had to look at other items to realize the on is the circle with the line through the top arc of the circle, and the restart is the circle open at the top.
The Whirlpool “Start” button borrows its icon from the SCSI computer bus. You can see the SCSI icon stamped on the back of any older Macintosh computer. Here’s an image:
http://www.hardware-bastelkiste.de/pict/logo/icon_scsi.gif
Mark S: The LG does give feedback that it’s been pressed: it starts making washing noises. If you’re touching it, you get vibrations. Just like the Duet, or any other washing machine you’re standing directly in front of.
The older LG panel with the combined knob/button has a nicer feel, though.
Oh, and a “leading consumer magazine” just rated the new LG #1. Kinda expensive, but so are most front loaders.
Having just bough a new LG combo (Washer: http://urltea.com/20ut Dryer: http://urltea.com/20uo), I have to say the controls were part of my choice criteria (primarily because LG offers the only dryer with reversible panel so you can move the panel from the top to the bottom of the machine so when you stack them both control panels are side by side. it’s genius).
Regardless, now that I have been using both the washer and dryer for over a month, I notice I’m often pausing the cycles. On the dryer, it interrupts the current cycle and the panel displays how much is left (it flashes for a few second when you pause to indicate, I believe, that there is still some time left).
The washer on the other hand, locks its doors during cycles, so when you pause, it also unlocks and provides you that feedback (via display panel - lock/unlock icon flashing), to indicate it’s safe to open.
Both of them have the best audio feedback, which really makes you want to keep pausing and re-starting it over and over. It’s such an elegant control panel that it really doesn’t take much at all to get your cycle started - but it kinda makes you wish it did so you could click some more buttons and listen to all the various feedback sounds and machine noises.
I only have good things to say about that combo. The Whirpool on the other hand, left me very unimpressed. And that feel you describe that differentiates the Whirlpool from the LG is definitely there when it’s time to choose.
[…] along these lines I stumbled across Bill DeRouchey’s History of the Button site, well worth a […]