User Interface Makes the Difference in Digital Music Players Design

What sets apart two different digital MP3 players? Is it their design? Their storage capacity? Their reliability?

Well, all of these are important, but when each manufacturer improves its devices' design, an important differentiating factor turns out to be the user interface.

Joon Yang, CEO of South Korea's Reigncom which manufactures digital players under the IRiver brand name, said that what made his company's devices so successful used to be the original exterior design of each product. But the other manufacturers have managed to reduce the gap in this area, so iRiver had to come up with something new in order to maintain its leading position.

So they've decided to drop the concept of buttons and go for something else, something a bit more spectacular but also easier to use. And the result is the IRiver U10, which was announced on Monday and made its public debut on Wednesday

The U10 has almost none of the typical control buttons found on an MP3 player in favor of a pressure-sensitive front panel. There are four areas which can be pushed, each at the middle of the panel's four sides, in order to control the player. The function performed by depressing each part of the panel changes depending on the menu option and current functions are clearly shown on the display itself.

"This U10 contains the concept of future IRiver products," said Yang, then adding that the key of future success will be the use of clear user interfaces allowing quick access to content.