Sometimes my brain wanders off. I hear an interesting statement and think about that for a minute or so. I learn a lot thinking through problems on my own, but the podcast doesn’t stop when my brain stops listening.

Zone Out Button

I was delighted to find this little interface tidbit on Apple’s iPod Touch:

Tapping this button will rewind the podcast 30 seconds, the usual amount of time for one of my “zone out” sessions. This is a common activity and this button is proving useful time and time again.

Here's the affectionately named zone out button in context of the play controls.

This button made me think about what common action in my interfaces can be contained in one button. One button, one click, one tap of the finger is such a simple activity and will be infinitely usable if the user constantly does this task or set of actions.

You shouldn’t feel the need to quarantine every possible action into a single button, but think of a few task your users perform constantly and ask how you can automate that process.

Capistrano

Another example of this “single button” concept is Capistrano. It is a command line tool (meaning no visual interface at all) that allows you deploy a new version of your site to a web server by entering one command:

$ cap deploy

Without this easy-to-memorize command, I would have to manually copy the latest revision to my site from my source control repository, upload it to my server and run tests to make sure I didn’t break anything. Capistrano does all that for me. Automatically. With one command.

Capistrano and the zone out button allow me to worry less about stuff I do all the time and concentrate on the thing that actually produces value: learning from the podcast and making my sites better.

Ask yourself

• What can I do to make a few really common tasks easier on all of my users?
• How can I take some of the monotonous burden of my interface off of their shoulders and outsource a common set of actions to a single button?