04.17.12 |
Technology |
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Video game consoles are still putting up great numbers seven years into their current generation. But why have their user interfaces remained so bad? I was reminded of this on a popular Giant Bombcast (gaming podcast) from two weeks ago; the hosts talked at length about the sad state of Microsoft’s latest XBox Live UI refresh. Microsoft largely sidelined avatar functionality, one of the rare bits of personalization and whimsy from an otherwise business-like UI. The Netflix interface was overhauled so poorly that the hosts had moved their film streaming needs to other platforms. Common actions now required more taps of the controller than in earlier XBox Live iterations.
Ironically, XBox Live is generally regarded as the premier console gaming network. It costs $50 a year and generates a lot of revenue for Microsoft, a cool billion two years ago. So why isn’t some of that money being plowed back into great UI design?
The XMB, Sony’s navigation interface for the PS3, doesn’t fare well in the UI department either. Among the Roku, Apple TV, Mac, iPhone, and Boxee, all of which I own or have played with heavily, PS3 has the worst user experience. There’s too many actions and layered menus to get more complex actions done. Software updates, large in size and not skippable, pop up frequently before gameplay. (Sony apparently never got the memo on auto background updates.)
Yet UI may be beside the point: clearly the healthy state of console gaming’s market derives from the games themselves. But that market is changing, growing up and moving more mainstream. XBox 360s are being used now more for streaming media than gaming. A “one box media center” for the living room could just as easily be an XBox as a Roku or an Apple TV. Media partners clearly see this; content providers from Amazon to ESPN and HBO are supporting consoles in full, often adding their services to the XBox and PS3 just as fast as other set top devices.
In addition, while a Xbox 360 or PS3 costs $150 more than an Apple TV, that a premium price tag delivers far more capable hardware. It’s hardware that powers more immersive games, along with more responsive and novel interfaces (e.g. the Kinect) than their cheaper counterparts. Beefier hardware also means getting cool tech features (e.g. Dolby Digital 5.1, 1080p) before the competition.
Yet as we’ve seen before, muscular tech, lots of money and media partners will only get you so far without a solid user experience; just ask RIM. Competition is heating up: Apple and the rest of the portable market is on one side, chipping away at consoles’ casual gaming segment. Smaller, cheaper and simpler boxes from the likes of Roku form the other wing, attacking consoles’ non-gaming features. Without a adjustment in UI and other consumer-friendly maneuvers, I fear gaming consoles could be effectively squeezed out in the middle.
04.16.12 |
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An extended interview with Al Lowe, the funny, profane, and quirky creator of the cult 80s adventure game Leisure Suit Larry. Reading it made me nostalgic for Sierra, a powerhouse gaming studio in the late 80s and early 90s best known for the Kings Quest and Space Quest series.
04.16.12 |
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Developer Dan Shipper:
When a non-technical person attempts to estimate software development time they come armed with their two basic heuristics: complexity based on size and complexity based on speed. But what they don’t realize is that software is different. Software is by nature not physical. It exists in the ether. A tiny portion of it shows up on our computer screens from time to time. Because of this when it comes to building web apps (or any type of software for that matter) our basic heuristics break down.
So many tech articles include a throwaway sentence on how developers aren’t good estimators of their work time. Rarely do they go further into the why behind that statement, but Dan’s does, and does so effectively. (via Watts Martin)
04.16.12 |
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Interesting Times article yesterday detailing the two Instagram founders during the initial stages of their startup:
The two men began working out of Dogpatch Labs, housed in an old pier, with fishing nets on the walls and long tables that functioned as shared office space for aspiring tech companies. Julian Green, who briefly worked out of Dogpatch, recalled that the two men were unusually obsessed with design detail. Once, he said, they spent two hours perfecting the rounded corners of the app’s icons.
And two years and a billion dollars later, look where it got them. Engaging your users through great design matters. Small details, like the rounded corners of an icon, are part of this.
04.14.12 |
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Like many other bloggers, I'm wedded to Google for my analytics. That poses a problem on the go; Google Analytics isn't mobile friendly, requiring Flash for their graphs and a lot of extraneous zooming to navigate the core UI.
Enter Analytics, a new app by Wizamin. It gives you just the basics: visitors, page views, average pages viewed per user. Swipe left and right to switch accounts. Swipe up and down to jump to different time periods. Simple, fast, really pretty and colorful for a buck. For at a glance analytics tracking it's great.
04.14.12 |
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I’m not the biggest graphic t-shirt and hoodie fan but these are really cool. The heavy use of typography and abstract graphic art just clicks. (via Tools & Toys)
04.13.12 |
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I'm a big advocate of responsive design, yet it's often hard to convey visuals on multiple devices by just resizing a single browser back and forth. Developer Jaime Reynolds' solution makes a responsive demo a hell of a lot more straightforward: Iframes are dropped in shells of different widths, each of which represents a different device.
04.13.12 |
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Now that I’ve been increasingly using FiftyThree’s Paper app for sketches and UI ideas, investing in a solid stylus is important. The Verge has a really slick roundup here. (Spoiler: The Wacom Bamboo, my current stylus of choice, ends up as one of the finalists.)
04.13.12 |
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If you love films and got a few hours to spare, the latest podcast episode of Battleship Pretension is a must listen. It’s a chronological review of the 90s independent film movement, from Sex, Lies and Videotape to Bottle Rocket and The Virgin Suicides. Hosts Tyler and David discuss each film’s influence, lasting quality, and how many of the movement’s “it” directors (Tarantino, Smith, Rodriguez, Anderson) evolved in later years.
04.13.12 |
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David Hansson, 37signals:
Every line of code you write has a cost. It takes time to write it, it takes time to update it, and it takes time to read and understand it. Thus it follows that the benefit derived must be greater than the cost to make it. In the case of over-testing, that’s by definition not the case.
Think of it like this: What’s the cost to prevent a bug? If it takes you 1,000 lines of validation testing to catch the one time Bob accidentally removed the validates_presence_of :name declaration, was it worth it? Of course not.
I see a huge amount of admonishments online for developers who don’t test enough. David approaches the problem from the other side; when does testing get out of control?