I just had the misfortune of experiencing what it’s like to be a little too simple with your designs: I nearly went deaf. No worries–everything is okay, I can hear. But for that half a second that the volume was what appeared to be at the highest, my ears are in pain.

You see, on a Mac, changing the volume level precisely is not afforded in the keyboard. As a baseline, I like for all my applications to be on max volume, and then adjust the system accordingly. But when I use the keyboard to adjust my volume, it adjusts in notches, so often times I want a volume level that exists in between the notches that are offered.

Well, I’ve been teased at work for not using the OS volume control that can be found in the taskbar in the upper right. So, I used it, and guess what?

THERE ARE NO INDICATORS OF WHAT MAX OR MIN IS.

It might be obvious to some people that a knob being at the “lower” end means “lowest,” and a knob at the higher end means “highest,” but it wasn’t obvious to me; after all, direction is relative, and I ALWAYS go from top to bottom as my lowest to highest on controls. I’m not really sure where I got it from, but there ya go.

So imagine the fury I felt when I accidentally damaged my eardrums for that half second, thinking that the top is lowest volume.

For the record, I may have been an idiot to think that the volume would go from lowest to highest (top to bottom); however, there are NO indicators on the volume control to indicate where the volume levels are! The icon for volume is at the top, setting it as (to me, anyway) the baseline for minimum volume. I’m pretty sure that if the volume bar existed above the volume icon instead, I wouldn’t have made the same mistake.

This is when simple can be too simple; if something like volume control doesn’t have the proper indicators to prevent people from second guessing its function, it can cause serious harm, like it just did to me.

EDIT: It was brought to my attention that the soundwaves on the volume icon changes as you go higher, but it takes an extraordinary amount of volume change in order to see one wave added. BAD DESIGN, APPLE. And painful, too :\