The iPod has a great design, and the user interface is genuinely intuitive. So it’s a testament to the iPods’s design that it took six years for a few quibbles to bubble up, Leander Kahney wrote for Wired.

First, onscreen displays slide sideways but the button that takes one "back" one display is the "Menu" button on the top of the scroll wheel. "If the iPod interface wants me to hit the "Menu" key at the top of the wheel, the menus should scroll up and down, not left to right," Mr. Kahney wrote.

Second, menus don’t wrap into a loop. So when searching for, say, a song that starts with a letter near the end of the alphabet, it should be possible to scroll "up." Mr. Kahney mused: "This is my second quibble: Why isn’t it possible to scroll backward through alphabetic listings? In fact, the menus should loop in both directions like they do on competing players -- like the *cough* Zune *cough*."

Last, the author wondered why there’s no autofill for iPods larger than the shuffle. The autofill feature is designed to fill a small iPod with random songs until full. Mr. Kahney would like to see that for larger iPods - even though that might take some time. "You want one button to automatically fill the iPod with zero effort on your part -- you know, auto fill," he concluded.

The iPod got the portable music player design right. Even so, these are fairly interesting and useful suggestions. Just why those screens must slide left to right does seem like a mystery now that someone has thought about it.