The Interaction & Interface Design Car Wreck: Julian Bleecker visits the LA Auto Show.
The Problem With Kinect
When Xbox 360′s controller-free Kinect add-on hits stores later this week it has the potential to redefine gaming in ways even the Nintendo Wii hasn’t yet done. It could just as easily fall flat on its face.
While Nintendo’s motion-sensing Wii changed the way we use controllers, Microsoft’s Kinect completely removes the need to hold a controller for its Xbox 360 games. But with that potential comes some very big problems, according to experts on digital media and user interface.
Well worth a read if you’re interested in the design-side of motion gaming.
Making Sense of Complex Controls
The New York Times on how IDEO supported Ford in creating a new UI design language and framework:
New ideas were tested on drivers. Ideo teams quickly mocked up ideas, often using little more than sticky notes, cardboard and modeling clay.
For this project, a PlayStation 2 game console and a dashboard from an older Ford Edge were pressed into service, Ms. Brace said. For a driving simulator, the group used a projector showing the video game Gran Turismo 3. The controls — pedals and steering wheel — were worked up from controllers intended for racing video games.
In-car user interfaces are a fascinating, yet completely impenetrable topic to me. There seem to be many distinct systems with every manufacturer rolling his own and it’s impossible to buy a new car every six months just to fool around with its gadgetry and associated interfaces like you could with phones. Are there any weblogs specializing on in-car user interfaces? I would totally read those.
Scroll or Flip?
How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps “Card Sharks” and “Holy Scrollers” and they had an epic fight over the following question: Should you scroll or flip pages on the screen? Who won the fight?
So You Want To Be A Designer
Our identity crisis means learning our field is like trying to inhabit the mind of a multiple personality disorder sufferer. For an aspiring interaction designer, figuring it all out is daunting. For anyone, it’s daunting.
This is my top-five list of what I’ve found to be most important to do and master if you want to get into design.
What you should know: Negotiation, cognitive psychology, programming, graphic design. What you should do: Create, create, create. Good advice.
Infinite Scrolling and Scrollbars
The reason that I don’t like infinite scrolling is that I actually use the scrollbar to scroll. That is, I move my cursor over the scrollbar, click and drag. Infinite scrolling makes this unworkable: the scrollbar under my cursor jumps around as new content is loaded.
So infinite scrolling destroys the purpose of scrollbars as visual indicators of page length and it interferes with their utility as an indicator of scrolling position within a page and their usability as navigational tools. Which begs the question, are there any characteristics of scrollbars that infinite scrolling doesn’t negatively impact? Are there any characteristics of scrollbars that it improves? And how would you redesign the scrollbar to properly support infinite scrolling?
Dark Patterns (and an example)
Dark Patterns is a collection of user interface design patterns that trick people into doing things that are contrary to their own interests. A study in black hat interaction design, so to speak. I find it slightly disappointing that there aren’t more examples of well-known, high profile companies engaging in these practices on the site, so here’s my own example of how Apple uses the forced information disclosure pattern to lure people into handing over their credit card details:
When you sign up for an iTunes account using the “Create New Account” button in iTunes you are forced to enter your credit card number (click through for full screenshot):
This really doesn’t make a lot of sense because there are many ways to use the iTunes store without ever paying with your credit card. First, there are a great number of free apps available on the App Store that you don’t need to pay for. Second, you can also use iTunes gift cards if you want to buy something on the iTunes store without handing over your credit card number.
So it’s no big surprise that there is a way to sign up for an iTunes account without a credit card, it’s just cunningly well hidden. There’s even an official knowledge base article by Apple available on the matter, because apparently a lot of people need some help with this convoluted process. When you follow this needlessly complex and completely unintuitive procedure, the sign-up form shown above transforms and it’s no longer necessary to enter a credit card number (again, click through for full screenshot):
Suddenly there’s a new radio button! I wonder how many users wouldn’t have shared their credit card details with Apple if they had made this process more straightforward…
Future of Screen Technology
The Future of Screen Technology, as envisioned by Swedish design company TAT:
Design and Evaluation of Interaction Models for Multi-touch Mice
Interesting research from Microsoft on multi-touch mice. Abstract:
Adding multi-touch sensing to the surface of a mouse has the potential to substantially increase the number of interactions available to the user. However, harnessing this increased bandwidth is challenging, since the user must perform multi-touch interactions while holding the device and using it as a regular mouse. In this paper we describe the design challenges and formalize the design space of multi-touch mice interactions. From our design space categories we synthesize four interaction models which enable the use of both multi-touch and mouse interactions on the same device. We describe the results of a controlled user experiment evaluating the performance of these models in a 2D spatial manipulation task typical of touch-based interfaces and compare them to interacting directly on a multi-touch screen and with a regular mouse. We observed that our multi-touch mouse interactions were overall slower than the chosen baselines; however, techniques providing a single focus of interaction and explicit touch activation yielded better performance and higher preferences from our participants. Our results expose the difficulties in designing multi-touch mice interactions and define the problem space for future research in making these devices effective.
I’m rather sceptical of touch-sensitive mice (like the Apple’s Magic Mouse) – i’m pretty sure they suck for all gaming purposes. (via)
