Mint Usability

Some comments about the user experience of Life 1.0:

One. Nordic Game 2008 conference came and went, and what a journey it was! Learned a lot, experienced more and met tons of interesting people. And the free bar was a treat, not so much on the next morning though. Even fell somewhat in love with the city of Malmo, though it lies in Sweden and I’m a finn, down to the bone. Just gotta love the parks and the architecture. Come 2009 and I will be there again, if I just can find a way to get the funding and time sorted.

Two. Saw new Indiana Jones (The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and got disappointed. I can’t even remember when was the last time I have felt so let down by a movie. I’m not even a hardcore fan of Indy franchise and I still I felt empty after, even though I wanted to love this one. The beginning was ok but the farther it went the deeper it burrowed itself. All the mystical feeling and smart dialogue just wasn’t there, the plot was hazy, characters insignificant (even down to Indy), too much too over-the-top/plain stupid scenes (like the fridge or “tarzan” scene not to mention the “great twist”)… the list goes on. To make a point, didn’t like it, happy to forget it.

Three. Mars Phoenix lander will make it’s thing tonight. I’m still wondering if I could stay up and watch the live coverage from NASA TV. The landing and live coverage should happen around 0200-0300 GMT +2 (Finnish time) and by 0700 I should be at work, doing my thing, so there would be hardly any time for shut-eye.

The statistics nowadays seems to tell us that the PC gamers are a dying breed. As the next generation consoles takes over, PC just whimpers and dies. Why? And is this the reality we, PC gamers, are facing?

Since this is an usability blog, rather than gaming one, at this point one should have creeping feeling that, in my mind, this has something to do with usability and user interfaces. Well, if you came to that conclusion, I salute thee, thus thy are correct.

Continue reading “The dying breed and how PC gaming needs to adapt”

I stumbled upon this video review of all new mobile touchscreen UI; Smart Touch, by GSmart. Well, ok. It’s just a rework of Windows Mobile “home screen”.

Couple of things what hit me. First of all, the dreadful Windows Mobile basis that lies underneath, and the fact that little, polished, things have huge effect on user experience.

Let’s start from the Windows Mobile. Why in nine hells does it have to have such a small icons if it’s supposed to be used with touchscreen? Well, yeah, it might have been concieved in the dark times when PDA’s were the thing, and accurate stylus was giving the finger for… the finger, but why haven’t it evolved? It still boasts the miniscule X on the top-right corner and tiny icons next to that. So far I have seen only one proper finger based touchscreen phone, that being of course the iPhone. The rumors tell that the next model from our Nokia will have stylus and Sony-Ericson’s EXPERIA X1 will be using Windows Mobile under the hood. Gloomy times. Maybe I eventually have to cave in and buy myself an fruit phone.

Next, let’s move to user experience and the Smart Touch. Take the clock for example, simple and rather meaningless thing and yet it seems to have huge effect on his/hers (can’t actually check this out as the video doesn’t seem to work right now and I can’t recall the voice from the video, sorry) user experience. Same thing with customizable shorcut menu, even though it’s usability is rather horrendous, it still looks and feels like polished product hence it adds in to the common pool we’d like to call user experience. If it’s not well proven fact, then it probably should be, that well polished products make happy customers, in the short run anyways. The devil is in the details, it seems, though I would like to believe that the need for real usability would kick in when the honeymoon is over.

Bonus round.
The voice in the video mentions that (can’t actually check the exact words either) one “you can see missed calls easily” and then proceeds to tell how, “by tapping this tiny icon“. Wait, what? Touchscreen, big-ass finger and tiny icon is good?

It goes only to prove one of my main points that subjective opinion is hardly an measurement of usability, you need either expert evauation or preferrably usability testing.

A fellow blogger, called Contentconsumer, has made nifty little usability test with her girlfriend and with latest Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Test included using disributed software, installing new ones, customizing Ubuntu desktop and such, all in all rather mundane tasks.

When staring down the results one can clearly see the problem, Linux/Ubuntu still has. When arguing of system usability 99 out of 100 would claim that things do not need to be dumbed down, as “Linux users are not Windows users“, or other as creative arguments. Now, test like this clearly shows, even underlines, that for the basic desktop user needs the user interface that is “dumbed down“, the user interface needs to guide the user, not just slap things to hers/his face and just hope for the best.

Windows ain’t the golden system either, I give you that, but at least Vista has less of them everyday usability problems. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Ubuntu, but desktop ready it ain’t.

Read more at
The Content Consumer – Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment

I can almost see Apple enthusiasts rallying up with their pitchforks and torches, but let’s just continue bit further into this, before going all witch-hunt on me.

Well, ok. Multi-touch as a concept isn’t completely useless, I give you that. The simple idea of using multiple input points has so much potential but everyone has been just blindly following Jeff Han, whos initial concept was just that, a concept, not a polished product. The idea has depreciated so much that today, even though there are practically no products around, multi-touch is useless, just a buzzword to sell a product and nothing to do with usability. So far, I haven’t seen single useful commercial end user solution. Why has no-one stopped to rethink the whole idea?

Continue reading “Multi-touch is useless, dead”

The purpose of this blog is just to get my ideas and concepts up somewhere, and perhaps in the process advertise myself, who knows.

I will be concentrating mainly on different usability and user interface issues on different contexts but every now and then, if the situation approves, I might be presenting new concepts, virtual and physical.