so like many young children my daughter tatum age NUMBER months really likes music she also likes to have control over her environment and this means she wants to be the one putting cds into the cd player and getting the music playing by watching tatum i ve discovered that you can learn a lot about ui design from watching NUMBER month olds use technology there is definitely a market niche for a toddler friendly cd mpNUMBER player the cd player we have combines play and pause in a single button but doesn t provide instantaneous feedback that the button was pushed instead requiring you to wait until the music starts NUMBER NUMBER seconds this is a ui disaster since tatum doesn t get feedback right away she presses the button again thereby pausing the cd before it even plays she ll only ever get music if she presses the button an odd number of times this happens a surprising amount of the time since she eventually hits the button again when the music doesn t play for toddlers pressing play must cause the music to start immediately within half a second for the toddler to get the causality and not press the button multiple times as well pressing the button multiple times shouldn t change the semantics like an elevator button no matter how many times you press the elevator still comes to that floor the play button needs to be the same the back hinged door mechanism feeding the cd into the player is also a ui disaster for tatum since the door hinges on the back tatum has to angle cds to put them in and take them out putting cds in isn t much of a problem but taking them out is since tatum grabs cds by the back edge that edge comes out first hitting the lid tatum eventually forces and wiggles the cd out a process that s hard on the cd and the player but which hasn t yet resulted in the cd player being broken surprisingly it hasn t been a problem getting the cd hole onto the spindle tatum seems to understand this concept and the cd load area geometry naturally guides the cd tatum s cd player also plays tapes and has fm radio for a toddler this is a mistake tatum doesn t understand the need to flick a switch to put the player into a specific mode she understands putting a cd in and pressing the play button she sometimes understands the buttons for advancing a song but uses them erratically as well the radio feature has both fm mono and fm stero a distinction totally lost on tatum tatum only understands the binary distinction of music no music what would the ideal toddler cd player be like it would immediately start playing a cd after it was loaded as soon as the cd load door was closed it would give some audible feedback it would have a single large play button the other typical cd controls would be larger than normal but at least half the size of the play button and located far away from the play button so there is no chance of them getting accidentally pressed on the way to play the play button would be a bright color that is different from the color of the player and different from the color of the other cd control keys the device would only play cds no other functions the cd load area would flip open at least NUMBER degrees it should be small approachable for a toddler it should be possible to repeatedly drop the player from a height of NUMBER NUMBER without affecting the player jim 