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Do Games Know The Secret Of UI?
A reader writes "There is a nice interview at the BBC talking about how computer games are the ones pushing the envelope. Particularly interesting is it doesn't just deal with the tech aspects, but goes into the user interface aspect as well." Having conversed with her on a number of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart. Good interview.
Error parsing story: cyclic redundancy check
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Part of the challenge of the game was figuring out the UI. :)
You know, just about every damn time I try to connect to the BBC site via slashdot (including with this story) it doesn't work. There appears to be something REALLY dicked about a lot of DNS servers. I suggest that from now on, instead of linking to the bbc URL you guys use the IP address, which always works.
MOST of the time the BBC url is broken and gives an IMMEDIATE "unknown host" message. Type in the IP and viola! Instant connection.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Gamers want fancy interfaces. I know someone who's a huge fan of Civ, Alpha Centauri et al., but when I introduced him to FreeCiv his first comment was "the interface sucks". This isn't someone who's computer illiterate, either.
It seems that people want something different when playing a game. They don't want just their standard operating system look, they want fullscreen fancy eyecandy, even when that's not the nicest option.
You can even see this in game editors -- AFAIK, WorldCraft is the only editor even close to the standard OS style...
Whether it's because the whole screen should look SciFi / Fantasy / Whatever, or simply because users want something different, game interfaces have to be different from usual programs.
remember there are other applications (other than just the military and games as she mentioned) that use most of the CPU (RC5, Netscape ;))
this really has little to do w/UI. It has to do w/what she feels is important in the industry at this time (cell phones that are connected).
It's true that games love faster CPUs but it is also true that it is probably possible to make much faster/better games in the standard constraints that we already have but people don't care to do that anymore (remember 64k games that looked cool as hell or even 4mb games?)
Sending your picture in front of the Eiffel tower to your kids on your cell phone is less important than decreasing the bloat!
she looked hot in the picture, and she named her book "Joystick Nation", shemust be a nympho.
Hemos knows Jesus? Maybe he can let us know which distribution The Lord uses, and if he prefers vi or emacs - then we can decide for ourselves if he's smart or not.
... and the answer is, "Yes, she is." :)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
*sigh* This is what I tried to tell my uncle last weekend when he shelled out way too much money for a 1.4 GHz P4 with a Geforce2 and 128 megs of RAM to run Microsoft Windows/Office. He believes buying a top of the line system now will save him from having to buy another one in a couple years. Ha! Good luck. Lusers just won't listen.
Well, I thought it was an OK interview, just a little light. And the main gist of her UI comments were more towards feature presentation and interaction, not graphic design and artwork (as other posters have taken it).
What Hertz SHOULD have said is that games are the only commercial applications used by the masses that maximize CPU useage ...
...
Yes, I'm sure no one has ever maxed a CPU for hours or days on end modelling fluid dynamics, or physical optics, or encoding mpegs, or
-... ---
What a game would do is immediately give you those three features and then as you progressed and became a more powerful character it would give you more features
Mr. Clippy: I'm sorry, you're not experienced enough to change text colors yet. Try underlining it for now!
... I mean, I'm all for faster CPU's, more RAM, better video cards, higher bandwidth, etc.
...
But I don't see games pushing the UI envelope in a way that's useful to most user tasks. Sure, game developers put an enormous amount of effort into creating detailed, realistic virtual environments, and that's great -- for games. But attempts to introduce such elements into OS's in general, and into general-purpose applications like word processors, graphics programs, and browsers, will lead only to clutter and bloatware. You don't need realistic lighting and fog effects when you're writing a letter
Browsers are an area that deserve special mention. I've seen a few attempts to use game-type visual metaphors to turn cyberspace into something Gibsonian (anyone remember Hotsauce?) and the effect is always ugly, pointless, and slow. Make the hardware fast enough, of course, and "slow" will go away, but "ugly" and "pointless" will remain.
When I'm playing a game, I want to be immersed in a virtual world. When I'm writing, or designing graphics for a Web site, or pounding out code, or looking for information on some obscure subject, I want a clean, simple interface that makes it as easy as possible for me to get, create, or manipulate my data. And that's it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think this article is a little unrealistic. I agree that many games have exciting and interesting features which take time to develop and give you a sense of completion and understanding, but I don't believe this applies to other applications. Specifically it is this statement that I don't agree with:
What a game would do is immediately give you those three features and then as you progressed and became a more powerful character it would give you more features.
That's really cool in games, I love the accomplishment of attaining the highest level, but when I open MS Access I want to be able to jump right in and program modules rather than be greeted with a form creation wizard or what not. I'm the type of computer user (like most people here probably) who wants all the features I can get my hands on. Throw them all out me, and I'll determine what it is I need.
~ now you know
Incremental disclosure with sticky adaptation, the single UI principle discussed in the interview, has been well known in the design community since the 1980's.
Just because Microsoft doesn't make good use of the principle doesn't mean that it's a gift from gaming to the rest of the world.
In most other ways, games are UI nightmares. They're difficult by design. Applying their principles to other domains would be a giant step backwards. Non-entertainment systems should be easy by design, rather than conjuring obstacles for the thrill of overcoming them.
Fans of UNIX will, of course, disagree. The popularity of archaic command-line interfaces in the UNIX subculture could perhaps be understood as a consequence of gamer-like behavior among hobbyists and tinkerers.
Tim
I'd disagree that games necessarily are better for UI development, it's just that games have a lot more wiggle room in terms of bad user interface. A game like Leisure Suit Larry can get away with not having standard looking buttons, and a game like Myst III: Exile can get away with not having standard looking icons.
It doesn't mean however that games can have bad UIs. The eGames sample I stupidly picked up has one of the worst interfaces possible, and most of the games are individually difficult to manage.
And finally, it's worth pointing out there's no standard UI for a laser blaster. ("The cross-sight must be in red, with a slightly thicker line near the center...")
Beware typoes.
hemos,
do you think you're doing us a favor by attesting to this woman's smartness? or are you just surprised that a woman Could be smart, so you thought you would mention it. Being smart might get you to the head of the class, but it takes more than that to impress me...
this is not flamebait. consider Hemos' words carefully, and why they're out of place...
"Kai's Power Tools" had a game-like interface. Users started out with a few simple tools. After demonstrating competence using the basic tools, users advanced to the next level and more tools became available. This was hated. Rumors that Kai was going to redo the user interface for Photoshop resulted in a sizable protest to Adobe.
Game user interfaces work because you can't do much. Move and shoot works well. Nothing else does.
This is of course the essence of great UI design: it should be quick to learn, fairly obivous (note lack of word 'intuitive'
I think most game builders are too busy trying to be different from their competitors than to confer with each other on standardizing their interfaces. I could be wrong: I don't play a whole lot of video games, but GoldenEye and Perfect Dark had fairly simlar UIs, adjusted of course for different functions withing the game.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
RTFM
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Real slackers never RTFM.
C-X C-S
I wouldn't mind seeing a game-like UI for stuff like Office and crap like that. I would turn the option on for most users. Of course myself, I'd rather have everything there, so it exists when I need it.
Of course I can see people doing stuff along the lines of Final Fantasy.. Click there, open this pop-up box, type that, twist this and belch and volia you have the ultimate resume wizzard. But you can only get this after 90 hours of churing out presentations, databases (wannabe), spreadsheets and documents. I can almost see the spam that would create in an office environment.
I guess what I'm getting at, there are users that know enough to use some of the advanced features, but don't need them for everything. How can you enable these features without running a typical M$ gauntlet. (i.e. trying to update IE2.0 on a fresh NT install, yet the new version of IE requires a new service pack, but you can't get the new service pack 'cause the page to download it won't open in IE2.0)
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Hemos, Don't worry, games don't know the secret of U and I. And I will keep my promise not to say anything. So don't worry my little soldier boy :-).
Kisses
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
The only thing that will push a computer to its limits is a game. No one admits it but no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet programme or Word document.
The problem with the industry is nobody admits jack shit. Marketing folks seem to think everyone wants to buy airline tickets, but we all know pr0n built the Internet.
No one wants to get a trailer on their mobile phone. What people want to do is take a picture of themselves and their spouse in front of the Eiffel Tower and send that image to their teenage daughter back in England
Over in Japan, the most popular thing for 3G phones are entertainment (Pr0n and Instant messaging). One game, you can chat with an IA women and try to see how far you can push it before she gets mad.
For consumers its Entertainment, music, pr0n or video games. Business customers might pay 5x the price for the service, but you have 100x average consumers.
Come to think about it, I bets thats why they sell so many vibrating batteries.
There's a lot to be said for consistancy in UI. While games introduce some daring new metaphors and interaction models, it doesn't do a whole lot of good when each iteration forces you to relearn several of the skills you already learned (this, by the way, is also my beef with Mac OS X. People learn how to use a finder and you make them use a totally new one!)
On the simplest level it's things like the 'inverted mouse' problem in FPS games, but whenever a hot game developer figures out a cool way to convey manipulation of another custom game feature, it detracts from the learning curve.
It's a shame that 'pushing the envelope' and 'consistancy of design' are orthogonal terms. It would be great of the game designers got together and admitted that they're each trying to make the better game, but that establishing consistant design patterns for interactivity can increase the playability of all games, and let the struggle be with the puzzles, and not the interface.
Kevin Fox
...why is my office-issued dell p3-700-128meg-o-ram p.o.s. currently on its knees trying to expand my dataset?
Oh forgot, Winowze 2k is prolly leaving me 400k for actual work.
Nevertheless, my point is, there are tons of non-game applications out there that can use every mflop or mb of ram.....I sure would love a fast athlon box wik 1 gig mem.
The real difference is, how many legit applications need a fast processor, tons of memory AND a blazingly fast 3-d graphics card? Not many---and most of those have to be rendering 3-d graphics.
I guess there are always real-time simulated colonoscopies.
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
I read the article and liked it, but I thought it was more about why technology advances and how it is up to people to indicate to the designers what they want from technology. I think the article focused on games because generally gamers know what they want, i.e. a good game, a pretty game, a game with a good ui. As for technology in general its kind of like lets throw this out there and see how the public reacts, they're just guessing, nothing to really drive technology's future. We have the technology we just have to figure out what we want to do with it. I know I don't need my toaster running Java and hooked up to the internet but that might not stop someone from trying to sell it to me.
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
After reading the review, and seeing her picture, i have to say that this girl is hawt! ;^)
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
of whatever it is you are turning into a game. Flight sims, for instance, have very complex interfaces because of the complexity involved with making a flight sim realistic. Many RPGs have complex interfaces because of the depth the game designers tried to pack into the game. Action games, by nature, are meant to be simplistic and visceral. Hence, the interface for playing Unreal Tournament or Quake III is pretty straightforward and doesn't distract much from the excitement of the game play. So you can't just assume an interface is bad just because it's complex.
But most of all, I think the majority of games are aimed at younger adults and children, so the interfaces must be simple, else the game becomes frustrating and the exact opposite of what is desireable in a game: not fun. And don't forget that a game is usually limited in scope, so the interface is specific to the presentation of that game. Creating a friendly, intuitive UI for a multi-purpose OS is more difficult that it sounds.
Truth be told, though, I think today's desktop environments have pretty good interfaces. It might just be my being used to this style of interface, but I feel like I transition between Windows machines, Macs, X and KDE pretty well. We might not be at the epitome of user-friendly UI yet, but I don't think it's that bad.
My sigs always suck.
The Unreal Tournament UI certainly pushed game UIs to a new level, with easy to access, well organized drop down menus. . If I had more time I would probably hack up enlightenment to make it work like that. Trbies 2 did a great job with taking the UT and Tribes interfaces and merging them in tabbed pages and pulldowns to produce one of the best, albeit somewhat complicated (Due only to all the cool features of the game.) menus anyone has ever made for anything.
EverQuest is another great example of game UI development. Their UI was damned lame at first, but over time has become fully customizable in regards to positioning, size, colors and transparency, all created from the input of hundreds of thousands of users.
What I really would like to see is a merging of the UT/Tribes style interface with EverQuest customizability, along with all of the keyboard manipulation provided in Maya, and of course, easy to design and implement themes.
If anyone wants any help designing a gui, feel free to shoot me a message...
is the forthcoming Master of Orion 3 (moo3). Almost half of the Dev Diaries I've read for this game detail not the game, or it's play, but how to efficiently pack 100 screens into a usable interface that won't confuse newbies.
Gamespy had a diary with screenshots.
The UI for my new webcam looks eerily similar to the side buttons.
Interaction with games or other software has always had fine people like JC trying to figure out how to build a better interface or control, as far back as electronic drafting boards or Sirius Joyport. Weird controls have come and gone to make the game "real" (steering wheels, vibrating chairs, better joy sticks, etc.) and eventually we find ourselves looking at new games or software which still rely on keyboards (one of the most infuriating devices for action games if you type like I do (9 thumbs and one hunt-and-peck finger)) or any of a series of non-standard devices. Probably the closest we came to one standard for input was back in the hay-days of Atari 2600 and C64 computers. (Yet, arcade games had buttons slap dashed around consoles which made Defender nearly impossible for me to pay, yet my hand-to-eye let me rule in Pacman)
The article doesn't delve much into why we keep flopping all over and re-discovering bad interfaces and controls, 20 years after these things became mainstream. Probably has less to do with the designer and consultant than it has with the actual market force of millions of buyers who never gave a thought beyond the package graphics.
So call me a skeptic.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What a game would do is immediately give you those three features and then as you progressed and became a more powerful character it would give you more features.
... cram almost all of the info into a screen. Not an easy task. All features are there from the get go, but the most often used, the most basic features are also easier to remember and perform.
I'm not saying that any one game has the perfect UI, just that they are forced to attack the problem from a different angle... the game, Black & White, for example, has a gestural interface... How does this affect the normal graphics paradigm? Which has more importance? Is it easier/faster to remember/perform clicking an onscreen button or draw a circle with the pointer? There a lot that we can learn from.
Being an avid gamer and delving into UI for my work, I'd have to agree with this statement. Games have to offer extremely rich environments
Often, programs try to accomplish basic features by hiding them (Advanced/Beginner menus) or making the program smarter and smarter (thereby more and more useless). These tend to annoy the advanced users because then they have to spend an extra hour to customize it and turn everything off.
Most game UIs are written with custom code, not huge object-oriented libraries. And they tend to be very usable and snappy on what amounts to low-end hardware (thinking of game consoles here). Compare this to any method of creating a UI for your favorite OS, whatever it may be. It is an order of magnitude easier to write a game-like UI from scratch than it is to learn to use any of the various UI toolkits, even if you already know those toolkits.
Along those lines, I am continually amazed when Windows XP (or the even a new KDE or whatever) requires significantly more CPU power than the previous version. Does handling clicks on widgets _really_ take that much processing power? We just blindly assume "oh yeah, context sensitive help, that's _gotta_ be expensive." But c'mon, these things could have been lightning fast on the Commodore 64.
Those guys at LionHead studios once said that they hated to use icons, and thereforce, most of the interactions the user does in the game is thru mouse click, drags and gestures.
:)
Speaking of gestures, it is used in Opera too
You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.
...THAT is something I would like to see more of: A simple mode for Grandma or quick, careless work, and more advanced modes for when you want to do more. It is around, but thinly spread.
Bottom line: why should I have to 'prove' to the computer that I am smart enough to handle the Expert Mode. Let me fire it up and make an ass out of myself if I want!
I just don't see us ever getting enough bandwidth so that the CPU becomes the bottle neck again... The CPU is quite capable of handling the load of graphics display. Once there is enough bandwidth, it probably makes more sense to distribute the graphics engine into a big ass farm of servers and just send the images... How much does it take to send live TV image.. about 6MB/sec max?
...since every iteration of the Microsoft or Apple OS requires more RAM, a faster processor, and more colors on the monitor, I think it's more accurate to say that no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet program or Word document, provided they don't want to use the latest version.
And besides, there's more to a computer than just the processor and graphics card. I've got a three-year-old PowerMac clone sitting at home, and I can't hardly use it for anything new. It does its job fine, but all its hardware is legacy -- DIMMs, SCSI, and serial ports while everything else is moving to SDRAM, FireWire, and USB. This phenomenon exists in the PC world as well, just to a lesser degree. If I want to upgrade my machine, it's ironic that it will cost me more money than if I had a brand-new one with USB and SDRAM on the motherboard.
In other words, then: it also costs me more to make my machine compatible with a Palm handheld, a digital camera, a joystick, or a new printer, I need to spend the money to upgrade it first. If I want to do anything like digital video, I have to upgrade it a lot. Even downloaded Flash multimedia ran slow until I upgraded the processor, and I sure can't add an MP3 jukebox without a substantial hard drive upgrade (2 gigs doesn't go as far as it used to).
Games push the envelope harder than anything else in the consumer industry, true. But it's hardly the only thing. There's more to consumer PCs these days than video games and word processing, and it's all more demanding than it used to be.
The article brings up some good points about making things more real, but personally, it's no more real to me now that it was in the days of Coleco Vision. Final Fantasy X doesn't make me feel any more like I'm "in the game" than Final Fantasy I did. Graphics and presentation have obviously gotten better, but that's only made games nicer to look at, and hasn't made them any more real for me.
I'd like to hear people's comments on whether or not these graphics bring a sense of realism. I equate it to the change from say twm to GNOME/KDE, it's prettier, but it's not any more "real".
captain obvious.
i and everyone i know has always known everything she says. who doesn't realize that games are the bleeding edge of software? hermits who live deep in the yukon nature reserves?
jeebus..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
OK, so some people seem to think adaptive UI is the way to go, and some think it's a bad idea, so let me present this scenario: In one of the newer versions of Microsoft Office they implemented a feature which hides the commands on the drop down menus that you don't use very often. When you click on, say, "Tools" only the first few options are displayed, and the last option is two arrows pointing downward that when selected expand the menu and show everything. What do you all think, is this worthwhile or does it just annoy you? Do you want to see more of it?
I personally hate it. Give me all the options, give me the power to do many, many things. Sure I may end up using only 10 or so on a regular basis, but the point is that when I do need that rare tool I want to be able to get it without a hassle.
~ now you know
Games barely know the secret og GAMES.
1. Open package
2. Throw manual behind dresser, radiator, coffin, whatever
3. Attempt to install/Play
4. Go on IRC and beg/plead/cry/whine/blame/winge/piss/moan/ask for help
5. Be blessed with the timeless wisdom typed in by sagely hands.
6. RTFM
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't know her personally, but I've never read anyhting from her that indicates intelligence.
Unless stating the obvious is now considered intelligent.
Is it supposed to be profound that she says games push computers? which, by the way, is not true. It may push PC's, but thats another story.
Like trying to quickly move through 5 terrabytes of data doesn't push computers, sheesh.
I can say this about her, she comes off as a competant VB programmer.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Which is why they had similar UI's, and played exactly the same (with a few enhancements in Perfect Dark of course).
I'm sure many of you are aware of the "emacs" and "vi" editing modes of bash (or any readline enabled Unix app). Could not the same thing apply to video games? I think it would be cool to apply "UI skins" on top of games. If you've gotten good with your Quake 3 keysettings, why not apply it to your new whiz-bang FPS? New games could allow you to "import" old configurations and inform you of any unmapped keys or features (with possible suggestions).
Nothing has annoyed me more about a playing new game than having to relearn how to interface with it.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I think the reason is simple though. Since games have such a short lifetime, the designers are always free to try radically new ideas. If it works out, great. If not, oh well, they can try something better the next time.
They also have users who don't mind and actually expect to start from square one, so games don't have as a design goal being as minimally invasive as possible upon the existing instincts of the user.
eof
i came across an elegantly intuitive, yet powerful, extensible UI the other day at the mall. yep, in the Discovery Channel Store, hanging on the rack with all the other knicknacks and doojobbies, there it was.
in essence, it's a PIM for kids in the form factor of a keychain about the size of a stick of gum.
on one end (left) was the keyring, and a small button inset into the front next to the LCD screen - 3 lines by about 24-30 characters.
the other end was a large button that, when twisted one way, functioned to scroll up, the other way to scroll down. when pressed, the button performed an action (enter)
with these three simple functions and the mode switching of the small button at the left, it accomplished every function of a PIM - including giving me my horoscope and telling my fortune. i learned how to use it within the thirty or so seconds i was playing with it before i was distracted by the 76-in-one multitool on the next shelf over.
my point? did i have one?
oh yeah. more than a few developers can take a lesson from a $5 keychain that got it right with just two buttons.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Maybe we should ask the friendly folks at Microsoft what happened to their nice UI experiment: Microsoft BOB
Some games have good UIs. And they all tend to be Full-screen. This is one area that the Amiga illustrated really well - on the Amiga, the OS allowed applications to open their own private screens, which were stacked on top of eachother, and flicked between with alt-m and alt-n keys (and a button in the top right) so an application like a paint package, that was suited to a palette-style UI with a large canvas had a full screen to itself, as did a sound editor, which required a space to drag-n-drop synthesis units together with pipes between them.
The UI was tailored to the application, and usually took over the whole screen. People were welling to pay lots of money just for a carefully thought out, application-specific GUI. Not necessarily a one-size fits all widget set of buttons, listboxes, and text widgets. (although, of course, there was a very good widget set - MUI, which worked admirably for situations where you needed the "normal" UI elements - and a mediocre one "intuition", that was built into the OS.
More advanced users could use the Public Screen functionality of later OSes to assemble a bunch of different applications windows on the one screen.
I guess it was kind of like keeping most of your applications maximimised in a windows style GUI, and flicking rapidly between them as you needed (unlike the windows gui, however, there wasn't a large "switch lag", since the different application UIs were drawn on completely different screens, and different areas of memory - when you flicked, one wasn't overwrting the other, the gfx coprocessor's pointers to the start of the display in memory were being shuffled around)
I personally think that games do really push the envelope on UI design. Take games like Black and White that use gesture based control. This would be a great ability in many pieces of real software. Imagine being able to trigger filters or switch drawing tools in photoshop by simply making quick gestures, the learning curve would be a draw back but it would be the same as hotkeys and key combinations, new users wouldnt be effected but power users would learn to use them and theyd become a natural efficiency booster.
This is just one good example of a UI feature used in a game that would be very useful in real software applications. Sure many games have stupid and unnatural interfaces, but many also have strong elements that could prove to be immensely useful in the future
Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind...
How many software applications are refocused and redesigned every iteration? For that matter how many software applications have you see that have been designed to not only not annoy the heck out of the user, but to make the process of learning the application genuinely pleasant? Of course Games are going to lead the pack in "humanized" interfaces, they are the only area of software development whose bread and butter is humanized interfaces. This is why in the late 80's, games had adopted iconized interfaces long before Windows existed. This is why Black and White is using mouse gestures, a feature followed by Opera and hopefully soon everyone else. While clarity of menus is important in, say, Microsoft Word, no medium is as frequently organized, focused, and edited as gaming menus. Unlike in word processors that may continue to support everything from DOS printing to ROT-13 encryption, Game designers know that clarity of interface is more important than the ability to sort a contact list by last letter of their middle name.
Yes, gaming interfaces are specific to game situations. But as they are the only truly experimentive medium in computing specifically designed for human satisfaction and completely re-done every six months (much like in the early days of the web), gaming is quite a learning ground for what works when interacting with human beings and what doesn't.
It's like how soap operas are a form of training for actors. UI developers should be game developers for a year. Maybe then we would never have been given that accursed "windows" key.
-Chris Canfield
The ______ Agenda
Having conversed with her on a number of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart.
Wow! Praise from Caesar! An expert witness! (on the right)
Please, stop being so modest!
AC's cheerfully ignored
Have a look at this Usability study of console games.
of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart.
Well, given your esteemed recommendation, we need no more convincing as to JC (who??)'s intelligence. If a Slashdot editor thinks someone is smart, hell, that should be good enough for all of us, huh ?
Homeworld from Sierra (relic) has a really good 3D manipulation UI.
Ive been reading through a bit of the posts in reply to the main article, and it looks as if most everyone is missing the point here.
For one I dont think she was intending the article to imply that applications and operating systems should be 'game-like', rather, have the intuitiveness and ease of use that the game developing community has developed as their overall interface. Menus are easy to navigate in games, items easy to switch to, everything is right there at your fingertips. When is the last time you were playing a game and had to drop out of the game and into a menu system to switch weapons or turn on your 'walk mode'. It's not about designing an OS to be a FPS. It's about anticipating what the user needs/wants.
Another issue is the learning curve. It was mentioned that the user should start off with a few options. I took that to mean that when a user first begins they can have direct access to the main features, then after some time of getting used to it present them with a 'Maybe you would like to use this tool...' type of dialogue box. Of course with the option of custom layout if your a 'jump-right-in' person.
What I guess I'm getting at is if you think about it in a broader sense she is right on the money. I'de like to read the whole interview or maybe talk to her - shes got alot goin on in her head and as an applications/interface designer myself I understand that people don't normally understand what your trying to convey to them from your immagination.
.ph0x
---
ps -aux | grep mind
From the article - "Unless you are in a military installation, the most demanding application on any computer will be a game."
Naive bastard. On my system, the things that spank my processor aren't the games.
Games only push speed of the processor and the video card. That's it. Most games play off the CD, so they don't push the size of the hard drive. They could care less about your printer, scanner, or anything else like that. Most big software packages require more RAM than any game. I have 512MB at work not because I run games.
So Intel and AMD love games. I imagine RAM manufacturers like bloated office app developers, and bloated OS developers - MS springs to mind. CD player/recorder makers like musicians. Printer makers like business and old people who want a hard copy of everything. Scanner makers love the internet for wanting everyone to share their pictures.
So companies like HP could conceivably help their bottom line by supporting musicians, longevity drugs, and getting more people on the internet. How about that. Someone should tell Bruce Perens.
... doesn't mean it has to be awkward or difficult to learn.
I've been using MetaTools' Bryce (now owned by Corel... official site here.) for a good 5 years now, and I have to say that I consider it to be an excellent example of how a UI can look nice, be immersive, and still be extremely functional. All of the buttons and tools are easily accessible, have fairly self-explanatory icons, and look cool on the side.
Take a look at this tutorial (http://www.petersharpe.com/Tutorial14.htm) to get an idea of what the interface looks like. It's clean, uncluttered, and extremely usable.
By comparison, I've found programs like 3D Studio Max (which use a more traditional interface) to be far less intuitive and easy-to-use. (at least in older versions... I haven't used 3DSMax for a while) Granted, 3DSMax is (was?) notably more powerful than Bryce (Inverse Kinematics, metaballs (which are just now being added to Bryce for the first time in version 5), and other such things), but it's still a lot harder to use.
-Orbix
ratheras@crosswinds.net
The PalmPilot also makes good use of whole-screen applications.
After all the changes they've made, they still can't seem to get the list control correct.
You can click on the arrows at each end to move one line at a time. Or you can click and drag the square piece to move large amounts. But you can't click on the listbar itself to move in chunk increments like every other windowing system on the planet.
Or what about the text colors? There's no facility to change them from within the game. You have to manually edit RGB values into a config file. Yet at the same time, the Velious expansion provides the ability to change the background window color and alpha on the various windows from within the game. Why the difference?
There are plenty more examples as well. Seems like their coders aren't contributing to a common UI library, or they don't communicate very well. Either way, they have a long ways to go.
In a a game UI usuability can, and does dictate what is actually possible and ifa feature makes it into a game.
For example, if you wanted to have a series of special dodges (bad example) in a FPS, but you had to do soemthing obsure, or use distant keys, to do it, then it would probably get taken out before release. Gamer UI's do fit their problem very well, because the problem can change to let it.
It's like coming up with a cool graphical file manager, that doesn't allow moving files because you'd need another mouse button
But more to the point, let me ask how often most of you recall seeing an interview with a dignitary of the male persuasion where, say, two-thirds of the way through, the interviewer asks, "How about you, Rick? What are you 'up to' at the moment?" *wink-wink*
Doesn't this get on your fucking nerves? No, not that hot chicks' opinions are relevant, but rather that at first glance we're likely to agree! Don't agree with her? Hell, chances are she's probably not your type. If she's your type, she could be telling you how much better off we'd be with Leiberman as a VP and you'd fucking agree in a heartbeat.
Then, what do I know. I'm here late in the day on a Friday when I should be at happy hour looking for organic material to attempt gene mutations with. All I'm saying is, you could be half as smart and twice as rich if you were a hot chick. Call me misogynistic, stoned or whatever.
Peter.
is
My favorite UI of all time is Softimage. For being such a massively complex 3D creation environment, they have always cut out the pretty little picture icons and stuck with buttons with actual words on them. Everything is no more than a click or two away, and the learning curve is cut down tremendously when your mind doesn't have to perform some translation of 10 pixel icons into some arbitrary command. Ive never understood the overuse of icons in a UI. If it's a really widely recognized icon or pictogram like tape player play (>) or stop ([]) symbols, that may be faster than "play" and "stop" written out. But little bitty pictures of splines and dots and shapes, dont help you learn a 3D application. We spend hundreds and thousands of years developing an instantly recognizeable library of 26 icons (A,B,C,D,etc) yet we trash them in favor of someones personal idea of what an icon for "bi-rail extrusion" should be. Bad idea. DOWN WITH ICONS, GO TEXT!!!
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Sadly, the company that made the product (ClearSpace) is no longer around. But it was a really well designed grapbics library and included a gesture-based command system - basically the system took some gesture the user performed and converted it into an int. It did a pretty good job of not really having many collisions and being tolerant of errors in the gesture.
For example, drawing a circle around something would zoom in. Drawing a line diagonally outward would zoom out, and "zorro"ing a graphic would remove it. You could tie any command to any gesture you liked though, and even build trainable interfaces that way.
I really liked the system and I'd like to see more things pick up gesture based systems.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While it's arguably impressive what Windows does as an operating system, like effective executive management of a large multi-tasking organization, there can be little doubt that the UI lacks in both aesthetic and utilitarian dimensions.
Windows' code is so bloated and derilect that you still end up waiting for menus to pop despite 7200rpm hard drives, 1ghz+ processors, buckets of RAM and powerhouse video cards. Not only that, their code for drawing to the screen is atrocious as well. Everyone but everyone has noticed that the windows animations, mouse cursor, and contents of dragged windows has terrible flickers and jitters. Commodore 64 indeed.
But the real problem with UI development is trying to please everyone, and inevitably aiming for the lowest common denominator as a result. It's like automobile design. Is an Astin Martin Vanquish or Ferrari Marinello more aesthetically pleasing than a Camero? Of course! Then why not make like Picasso and steal decent designs, you ask? Because there are millions of mayonaise-sandwich eating Jimbobs out there who loooooove Cameros.
Reinventing the wheel is also a big problem for both games and OSs. Look at how much flak Microsoft has taken for copying the good aspects of Mac OS! Yet it's infuriating that every game has to create a custom interface with its own learning curve when others out there function with stark beauty and near perfection (ie: Homeworld). Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And then there's the whole legal issue of 'look and feel'...
Lastly, there's the dispute between GUI and CLI. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, as each is useful for different tasks. But as someone rightfully pointed out, the real trick is to integrate the two seemlessly. The reason is simple: both aim to minimize the time, energy, and number of actions necessary to complete a given task. Time and energy are in limited supply, and it is therefore fundamental human nature to seek the easiest way from A to B. We love shortcuts. Depending on the task, those shortcuts can take different forms, so what we really need in the UI world is an interface that evolves along with the user, watching actions, monitoring tasks, and both offering to automatic frequently used functions and anticipate the use of a function so that its shortcut (or the opportunity to create one for future use) can be presented to the user.
Sadly, the last would require _intelligent_ UIs, which neither windows nor CLI are... Oh well. One can hope.
I don't think games necessarily *push* the envelope for UI development, but they probably are the first industry to publicly implement new ideas. There have to be UI labs somewhere that actually do research and create these interfaces, and game developers just make use of them.
On a side note, does anyone remember Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2)? It had that command ring interface, which I have yet to see duplicated even today. Does that exist elsewhere?
which is just short of the worst CRAP you can get on the market today. DELL/COMPAQ for examples use the lowest end equipment and OLDEST parts they can possibly get away with. We regularly have to bring the BIOS into this century, and often they will send special ordered SCSI3 drives with sub-par SCSI2 controllers, like you wont notice.
Win2k runs like a champ with Debian on my p2 450 with 196 mb.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Sims, from a UI standpoint, is very well designed. The buttons are nice and big, which means they're fast to access via Fitts law. The buttons appear in a pie-shaped fashion around the mouse pointer, which further increases access time (you don't have to go down a list of buttons button by button. The pie shape means that each button is adjacent to the mouse pointer).
;) ) Usability problems are not technology problems, they are people problems. The silicon based computer is not speaking the same protocol as the carbon-based one. The solution is not to add RAM and CPU cycles to the silicon computer, but get the silicon computer to speak the same protocol the carbon-based computer speaks.
A lot of idiots throw high-technology at usability problems. Especially all those people touting web based interfaces (and of course, we've never, ever seen a confusing, difficult-to-navigate web page, have we? None of those exist
GUI Bloopers author Jeff Johnson refers to this type of interface (or blooper, as he calls it) as a "TTY GUI". I think that description adequately fits the bill.
By the way, Tim. You are one of the smartest people who posts Slashdot. And I don't give props too often.
I wanted to use Bryce because the USGS had a plug-in for their satellite maps that only works with Bryce, but I got so fed up with the interface I decided to wait till they get around to putting them into .dxf like they should have from the beginning so I can use whatever 3D environment I prefer.
Just goes to show you, you can't please all the people. Same goes for Poser. The presmise is cool, but the interface just seems to make work and get in the way. I'll take power users.
Half life is the best game (to me anyway) but it has the worst possible pre-game interface. It's buggy, slow, even stupid. The in game interface is ok, but not earthshattering or original. It is hard to think of a game that had a good interface. Age of Empires was somewhat decent, but in earlier versions of directX it is a little buggy.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
While Hemos attests to the fact that JC is "smart," smart does not equal "insightful."
It seems JC's position as the Game Theory columnist over at the New York Times gave her a platform that instantly set her up as an authority, whether she deserved it or not.
While the point she made about games driving the technology (presumably in the consumer PC?) have some merit to them it is hardly original. Her comments about game UIs being ahead of the curve isn't quite accurate. Game developers may think about UI much more than the average application developer who has to deal with an average user but that doesn't make them better UI researchers and designers.
The private sector has incredibly powerful machines at its disposal that are pushed to their limits, especially in biological sciences. The media production industry also has powerful machines at its disposal that are stressed to the breaking point. Those are but two examples. Sure it's no ASCI White but you get the idea.
As someone who has spent a great deal of time researching, examining and trying to improve the problems surrounding UIs JC's role is unclear to me.
I am curious to know what company JC is working for (a private consultancy? Hertz and Assoc.?) and exactly what expertise she is bringing to projects.
In spite of everything said, including the subtle dig at Micro$oft, there is serious research going on in the UI field by big companies. Both IBM and Micro$oft have commited substantial resources to studying UI. I'm no great fan but I have to applaud them for investing in this research. Now only if they would apply the research to their products!
There are lots of UI gurus out there. Unfortuantely JC Hertz is not one of them.
You're not trying to start a religious war are you?
:-P
If you spend too much time trolling, your karma will run out, and you will end up with a permanent -1 status.