One of my first cellphones was the ericsson t106. To be fair at this time there were no multi-touch iPhones or blackberries. But there were plenty of phones available with a better interface than this one. I really had no pick since my mother bought it for me at the time, so I got stocked with this phone. For beginners it had incredibly small buttons, that furthermore where made out of cheap contacts such that after a couple months of regular use you had to push each button really hard to make it work. The blue-black screen was also small and the audio was not very good. The battery indicator just had 2 levels full or half (instead of low battery flashing it usually just died). But these details were nothing compared to the menu interface. As you can see in the picture it just had two buttons (up/left and down/right) no menu key, instead you had to keep left pressed for 4 seconds to get to the menu. The right button served as a shortcut where the predefined shortcut was wap data in a time where no one used it. After keeping pressed the button for 4 seconds a menu appeared that was completely non-intuitive to navigate and get to the right app. For instance the alarm clock was under like 6 submenus which title had nothing to do with an alarm clock. The central more prominent button was the cancel button so it was frequent for new user to make the mistake of using it to accept just to get frustrated and cancel the whole operation back to the main screen. (4 seconds + many menus to get back). This may not be the worse UI ever, but it is definitively a bad one and came to mind as soon as I began this homework. Several proposals of better phones have been made I would start with changing the big cancel button and rearrange that space to fit a dpad and make on screen instructions for easy use. I think they just made it like that to try to release a different design within a small slim phone, they just were not thinking about CHI then.
