The Mighty Mouse is the first multi-button mouse released by Apple Inc. It has retained a slick and single-button look of the traditional Apple’s one-button mouse, but with added functionality through its five functional buttons: Left click, right click, a 360 degree scroll ball and two squeeze buttons on both sides of the mouse.
User Experience and feelings towards the product
My brother, being a Mac user, tried out the new product as soon as it came into the market in 2005. The slick design was attractive to him, and at that time, the Mighty Mouse seems to be a trendsetter for a new generation of mouse for Mac Books. However, within the early months of usage, the Mighty Mouse started to malfunction.
All that Dust
The scroll wheel has the ability to collect dust which jammed the gear from scrolling upwards. It brought much frustration to my brother as he tried to clean it with procedures suggested by Apple. The casing was not easy to ply open, and in the end, he had to change the mouse twice before giving it up.
Getting the Right and Left Clicks right
With the casing designed with a single-button look, the left and right clicks depend heavily on the detection of the internal sensor in deciding a left or right click. There are occasions when the right click of my brother was detected as a left click.
Squeezable Side Buttons
The side buttons need a rather hard squeeze in order to be detected by the system. This makes the side buttons obsolete after a while. This is yet another frustration for my brother suggesting that slick designs do not necessarily equate to good user experience.
While surfing online to gain more users’ reaction, I came across others who face similar troubles as my brother. One of them posted the following:
Slick designs do not equate to good user experience designs. After the immense efforts put in trying to adapt the mouse with the additional cleaning and exchanging the malfunctioned mouse, my brother has finally gave up on the cutting-edge design and attached a Logitech mouse to his Mac Book.
Impression of Brand
Despite the woes of his experience with its Mighty Mouse, my brother remains a fan of the Mac Books created by Apple Inc. due to their innovations of trying to be different in all their products. Impression of brand is still positive, although he makes it a point to skip their mouse in future purchases of Apple’s products.
My reflection on the product and user reaction
I find the mouse an impractical design that has failed to serve the sole purpose of what a mouse should do - that is, easy navigation on the computer. Although the mouse looks great, its inability to detect clicks, coupled with the difficulty to navigate makes the mouse a bad user experience design. It would have been a good design has the flaws mentioned by my brother been addressed.
My brother remains positive to the Apple brand, and this is not difficult to understand as Apple Inc. has definitely established itself with the various innovative products that has worked and with good designs, such as the Mac Book and the iPods. Failure of a mouse will not taint that brand easily.
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