So the past few nights have been filled with 6 and 7am mornings sitting up wondering whether adding a certain feature is too much, and weighing the cost of eliminating that feature against the take of the users using the app.
On hindsight, perhaps this group has too many jack-of-all-trades, with the exception of Khoa! And while that's great for brainstorming, it doesn't help much in the design stage.. :S Or maybe the app's too girly, and we should scrap it and do smth else? (4 guys and a non-so-girly-girl doesn't seem to make for a great app design huh.)
Mainly because i don't want it to turn out like Microsoft/Creative - All programming and absolutely no usability.
Which brings me to today's lecture. To be really honest, i wasn't very impressed with Microsoft/XBox's demo. Microsoft has superior User Experience, but ZERO User Interaction design! It was very flashy, which is nice, but not very easy to use. And i thought i read somewhere that lots of flash is RAM intensive..? Its scrolling interface has soooo many items per level that you practically have to memorise what the Xbox offers in order to breeze through the interface. Xbox has cool concepts and ideas tho.. The avatar creation really caught my attention and made me realise that. But yeah, usability wise, sometimes less is more!
Something that i need to remind myself as i work on this app!
Silverlight was cooool! Lots and lots of potential, and lots of effort spent on really useless things. Like when to refill a glass of water, or having 2 mice running at the same time. That being said, if the same technology was applied to touchscreen, that'd be a whole different ballgame altogether! I really liked the Multitouch surface stuff tho! Not new technology (they've been developing multitouch for years! Remember the movie Minority Report? The technology was being developed even then! Since my mentor pointed it out to me about 2 years back, gestural interfaces has been something that's greatly caught my attention. Lot's and lot's of potential! (Imagine, though, how tired your hands will get from waving them around just to get an operation done :P)
If you guys dont' remember Minority Report, here's the espanol version :P
So, the 2 mice thingy reminded me of yet another video, one that i talked about at Fong Seng last week. Imagine Abel playing an instrument/composing music using smth like this, with a (touchscreen) Silverlight interface!
Something to think about for the WPF app huh?? haha..
Alright! That's all for today! Btw, an apology and a HUGE THANK YOU to Khoa for being so computer illiterate, and for trying to explain stuff to me in PURE ENGLISH, not computing language! :P I'll try to get better yeah - Look! I now can link Youtube videos to my blog! :P
p.s: i tried to pick up a little bit of interface design while interning at Creative (lol, what an oxymoron), from one of the most interesting interaction designers i've ever met. Yigs was my mentor, and a damn good one too! I've much much more to learn on this interface design journey tho. Hopefully, i'll get to pick up much much more!
Its scrolling interface has soooo many items per level that you practically have to memorise what the Xbox offers in order to breeze through the interface .... But yeah, usability wise, sometimes less is more!
ReplyDeleteI would tend to agree with you. UI design is actually quite hard. Apple (under Steve Jobs) is the gold standard. Perhaps check out the book Inside Steve's Brain: http://www.insidestevesbrain.com/
Where's my egg tarts?
ReplyDeleteI'M SORRY JANUS!!!!! >.< my friend sorta messed up the orders!!! Are you having class tmr?? I go deliver to u :P
ReplyDeleteProf Ben! I agree! UI is really challenging, and it's smth i wish i could learn much much more about, cos as the world starts to become more 'paper-less', the UI of things also matter more cos it affects our effeciency and every day life.
Hmm.. Apple has really really good usability, but their iPhone has things that can be improved on too!
Check this out - one of the strategic design and research firms actually went to do a whole usability test on the iPhone! Pretty cool :)
http://www.slideshare.net/createwithcontext/how-people-really-use-the-iphone-presentation
- huihui
I think you're perhaps a little too judgemental just based on first impression about the usability of the UI :p
ReplyDeleteIt isn't really that complicated at all when you're using it.. everything kind of falls into very logical categories and personally I never have had any troubles finding anything.
Evidently neither did the presenter based on how quickly he was scrolling through all the "levels".. but the speed that he was doing it might cause people not used to the interface to be "lost"
p.s. there are alot of other factual errors in your blog spot.. particularly the silverlight/surface part.. they're actually two entirely different things, and the whole multi-touch presentation (aka the piano segment) was using a surface emulator.. that wasn't silverlight!
Wow that video is damn cool la!!!!! I kop for my facebook page.. ^_^
ReplyDeleteHmm but the xbox UI isn't tt bad la... >_<
whoops! Sorry about that! Yeah i went to go look through the silverlight/surface thing and realised it was two separate things altogether. my bad!
ReplyDeleteBut on that note, too much flash really is a problem that many people face when creating an interface. When i was interning at creative, we were testing an interface for one of the media players, and although there were certain things that could be improved, one of the major things was too much flash. It complicated things, made things look snazzy and 'cool', but simply became a nuisance after awhile. And it consumes lots of RAM too, from what i heard.
If you were to judge the XBox UI based on how the presenter took it, then yes, it does seem like a learnable interface, one that is cool. But take a first time user - the learning curve might be pretty steep, and some users might never even find out certain functions/shortcuts to doing certain things, simply because the interface 1)gives the user too much control 2)doesn't give the user and overview of the big picture. The Xbox might catch on for frequent hardcore users, but if they want it to take a place in the living room (where it's available for everyone to use), then they need to start thinking about how to attract the less-then-frequent users who have no reason to start learning such an interface to begin with!
p.s: I'm not saying the xbox UI is really devastatingly bad, i'm just saying that they want too much, and one can't have everything!